Equipped for Impact
A podcast designed to equip parents to disciple the next generation to stand firm in their faith and influence the world for Christ. Each episode explores practical questions and cultural issues through a Biblical worldview, providing the wisdom and tools needed to guide children toward a Christ-centered life.
Presented by: Wayne Christian School- A Christ-centered community school whose mission is to assist parents and churches in the education of their children from a biblical worldview to impact their world for Christ.
Equipped for Impact
Biq Questions- "Why Do People Do Bad Things if God Made the World Good?"
We tackle one of the toughest questions kids ask: why do people do bad things if God made the world good? This profound question often emerges when children experience meanness or witness tragedy. (NOTE: This episode was recorded hours before the Charlie Kurt Assassination, therefore it does not address that tragedy directly. However, the answers in here are highly applicable to current events.)
• God created everything "very good" (Genesis 1:31) and made humans in His image
• Sin entered when Adam and Eve chose to define good and evil for themselves
• People do bad things because of our sin nature, spiritual warfare, and broken world systems
• The human heart is "deceitful above all things and desperately sick" (Jeremiah 17:9)
• Jesus stepped into our broken world to undo the curse of sin through His death and resurrection
• Use age-appropriate word pictures like broken toys or dark rooms to explain sin to children
• Discipline moments are discipleship opportunities to point children to deeper spiritual realities
• Model trust in God's goodness when life doesn't go as planned
Email us at podcast@waynechristian.org to receive our free PDF of "Five Questions to Transform Conflict with Your Child" and share your questions about faith and parenting.
Send any questions you want answered to podcast@waynechristian.org
This podcast is presented by Wayne Christian School- A Christ-centered community school whose mission is to assist parents and churches in the education of their children from a biblical worldview to impact their world for Christ. You can learn more at waynechristian.org
Welcome to Equipped for Impact, the podcast designed to assist Christian parents, leaders and educators to raise up the next generation to stand firm in their faith and influence the world. For Christ. We're your hosts. I'm Nate and I'm Lewis, and we're glad you're here with us today.
Speaker 1:We're in the middle of our Big Questions miniseries and this is just helping parents walk through some of those tough questions that kids ask about God, faith, the world around us, many different questions that way, and y'all. Sometimes these come from our little kids that have some of those big, deep questions that we're like hmm, I wish I thought that deeply about the world around me. And sometimes they come from inquisitive teenagers that are truly struggling with certain things and really developing their own faith in that foundation. So last week we asked how do I know Christianity is true and not just one religion among many? So today we're taking that another big question and it's why do people do bad things if God made the world good? Why do people do bad things if God made the world good? I think, lewis, have you heard other versions of this question?
Speaker 2:Like you know, why do bad things happen if God's loving, or something like that, and that's probably one of the most profound questions when it comes to the faith, right, it's the problem of evil. How do you explain evil in a world if God is good? I had somebody, a friend, probably about 15 years ago, say to me is, as he was kind of wrestling with this question, he said either God is not good and that's why he allows evil, or either God is not all powerful and that's why evil exists. And so, as he was wrestling with it, and so it's a question that I think has been wrestled with for centuries and parents you might be listening to this question and be like wow, like I don't know how to answer that question.
Speaker 1:Narnia. But he actually wrote one of his nonfiction works, the Problem of Pain and I think it was that was about like after his wife passed away, I think is the history behind that. So, yeah, this is not just a kid's question, but if you're a parent, you're listening to this, you know. You know if your child asks this question, it's not coming from philosophy class, right, it shows. You know, something happened at school, somebody said something mean on the playground or whatever. And so in a moment of quiet, of vulnerability, you know your child asks you know, if God made everything good, why do people hurt each other? So this question gets posed to us, lewis, as parents. How do you respond in a moment like that?
Speaker 2:as parents. How do you respond in a moment like that? I think that we have to start at the beginning, right Genesis 1.31 says that God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good. Not just good, it was very good right, and so it's clear that God did not create a broken world. God created a world that was good, it was beautiful, it was full of potential. It was what he wanted for his creation. And then it tells us that he created people in his image.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, right.
Speaker 1:We're created. We as humans are created in the image of God. So we have inside of us, you know, we were created to reflect that goodness, Right, and I think it's really important to start there. Like too often we jump in at the you know, supposed problem of so-and-so, did something mean such and such happened, whatever it is right. But if we go through, if y'all go all the way back to I think it was episode two, maybe, of why a biblical worldview matters, or maybe it was four or five, Anyway, it was one of our early episodes and we walked through this whole idea of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, Like that's a great framework to work through so many issues.
Speaker 1:But you've got to start at the beginning, right, Creation. We're made to reflect his character, his goodness to the world around us as his representatives. But you can't just stop there and be like, well, yeah, the world is good, because clearly it's not right, and so that's where you got to keep going and not just stop in Genesis 1 and 2, but you've got Genesis 3, you've got to deal with 2.
Speaker 2:And really, that brings us to the next question, right? What has happened from Genesis to today? Yeah, because when we look at the world around us today, it's clear that there's good, but there's also evil. Right, I mean, as we're recording this podcast, one of the main stories on the news is of a young girl in Charlotte that was killed on a train or a subway, or whatever they call it, the metro, whatever it's called yeah, the metro.
Speaker 2:And you watch that and you're like, how can somebody do something so evil in today's world? And so, when we consider Genesis 3, we're introduced to the topic of where things go wrong, right, the topic of where things go wrong, right, adam and Eve. They chose to disobey God and they chose to define good and evil for themselves, and so they didn't trust God. When God said, this is good and this is my plan for you, they said well, we're going to go and we're going to figure this out on ourselves. And then that one decision, that one moment in time, opened the door for sin and because of that, sin has been affecting every human since. That's what Paul says in Romans 5, 12. He says, therefore just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all have sinned, and so that one decision, that one moment in time, continues to have effects for us today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I love that you brought out the fact that in that you know, taking of the tree the knowledge of good and evil, you know they were essentially trying to put themselves in that place of God. They were trying to define good and evil for themselves. Something else I found to get nerdy for a minute. Can we get nerdy for a second? I love to get nerdy. Okay, we'll get nerdy. So I heard recently it was another podcast that they were talking about that whole phrase of the knowledge of good and evil. And when you go forward in the Old Testament to the story of Solomon, and when God asked him, hey, ask anything you want. And he didn't ask for gold or power or a big kingdom or anything he asked, and actually the Hebrew there is he asked for the knowledge to discern good and evil.
Speaker 1:And it's not an identical quote, but it is a very similar phrase to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Right, you come forward to the New Testament and in the book of James, james says if any of you lacks wisdom, right. Like Solomon had asked for they should ask God, right. And so it's this idea that God wanted to be the one to give Adam and Eve this knowledge of good and evil. He wanted to give them wisdom to define what's right and what's wrong. And instead we overstepped those boundaries and took that for ourselves, putting us ourselves in that place of God, right? So we messed all of that up, even though he was offering that gift freely. He was going to give them that knowledge of good and evil. All they had to do was ask.
Speaker 2:That's actually really good. It reminds me of a sermon I probably heard a few years ago where the preacher was describing sin as us trying to hurry God along. Like you know, god was going to give Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil right, like that was the intention. Right, they were going to unpack it, but they didn't want to wait for God, they wanted to go ahead and take it upon themselves, right and so, and a lot of times when you think about the sin in our lives today, it's us hurrying God along, right, like you think about just kind of the sexual revolution in our culture right, and just kind of how that's taken off.
Speaker 2:And you've got people that are engaging in inappropriate behavior out of marriage or before marriage and they're doing something that God created to be good Right, but they're hurrying God along. Like God, I want this now. I don't want to wait for you to give it to me when I get married. I want it now, right, or even like stealing, right, you know I want this now. So I'm not going to wait for God to make the provision for me to get it or work to earn the money I'm going to go ahead and take it now.
Speaker 2:And so that's what we see, and so that moment, that decision, it's repeated itself over and over and over again. And so that's true for us today, just like it was true for people 50 years ago, just like it was true for people 100 years ago, and just like it'll be true for people 100 years from now, right, right.
Speaker 1:And so God did not create evil. Right. That's a whole debate that we could go off on. We're not going to right but God. But god did not create evil, he defines it. But you can define something that doesn't exist, right. So he defined the evil and adam and eve crossed that line. And since then, right, we all in our ability to choose and in our then sinful human nature, right, we're choosing to rebel against god. And so the world, right was originally created, good. But we have broken God's good creation. It's fractured, it's broken, it's messed up. Everything from internally right, my human heart, to just natural disasters, right, everything. There you see the goodness of the creation, but marred by the way that sin has broken it.
Speaker 2:And I love that idea of the fracture right, because it runs through every human heart. And then scripture is very clear that all have sinned and all fall short of the glory of God Jeremiah. In Jeremiah 17, 9, he says that the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. So that cliche saying of follow your heart, no, don't follow your heart, because your heart is deceptively wicked and it's desperately sick.
Speaker 1:But the reason we get into the messes we're in is because we're following our heart. I had a theology professor. This was in my undergrad and he had a lot of quirky sayings. Dr Wicks was his name, so we had Wicks-isms and he would say all these things, but one of them that has stuck with me is your heart wants to kill you.
Speaker 2:That's really good and your heart wants to kill you and it's straight from this verse, right?
Speaker 1:If you follow your heart well, your heart wants to kill you. And it's straight from this verse, right? Yeah, If you follow your heart well, your heart wants to kill you, so don't follow your heart. That's why people do bad things is because they have a bad heart.
Speaker 2:And so what these two verses are saying right Romans 3.23 and Jeremiah 17.9 is that our default, our human nature, is not goodness, our default is selfishness. We are going to do things to benefit ourselves, right Like, think about but my kids, they're good kids, right. Deceitful above all things and desperately sick.
Speaker 1:Oh okay, so my kids are sinners, just like I'm a sinner, that's right.
Speaker 2:Okay, but if you think about it like, nobody taught us to lie, right? I mean, I couldn't even tell you the first lie I ever told, but I know it was probably before I even had the concept of what lying was. I just did it because it was self-preservation, right, you lie out of being selfish, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and really, this plays out in a couple of different ways. Right, you know, first, we've already talked about this, so we won't spend a lot of time. But right, it's our sin nature. Right, it's going to play out in how we want our way, instead of God's way, we're going to go our own way. Right, like sheep without a shepherd, like you know. Just, there's lots of different analogies you can use here. But we're, we're astray, we're lost and we need to be be found. Right, and so our sin nature had takes us that way, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Another way we see it play out is just the in general, there's all these verses about the, the spiritual battle that is going on. Yeah, in the world today. Right, the serpent was there, he was crafty above all the other beasts of the field. Right, that's what Genesis 3 says. And he, satan, is the deceiver. He tempts us, he's accusing us before the throne of God, and so Satan and his demons are going to do whatever they can to disrupt. And so our sinful heart takes the bait. Yeah, right, and it's our sinful heart, james tells us that will lead us astray. But that doesn't mean there's not somebody out there that's also taking advantage of how we're broken.
Speaker 2:One way that I like to think about this truism here really is that he doesn't have to work really hard in a lot of cases, right. Like you know, I remember being a little boy and I would hear people say you know, and I get it. I mean, it was, it was their theology, it was the way that they were trying to interpret a difficult concept, right, but like the devil made me do it, Right.
Speaker 2:The truth is that the devil probably didn't make you do it. It's your sinful nature. You know the devil may have created the mechanisms that got you to do that, but he probably didn't care about what you were doing, like I mean, you just did it because it's your sinful nature. But you need to understand that there is a spiritual enemy. There are spiritual forces. Paul describes them right as being in the air, as being around us, as being present in our reality.
Speaker 2:And so there are things that are happening that we may not see that lead us, and so, yeah, it's our sinful nature, but it's also a spiritual enemy who Peter describes like a roaring lion seeking to devour.
Speaker 1:Have you ever read the Screwtape Letters? I have not. No, I have not. I've read excerpts of it, but I've never read the whole thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, have you ever read the Screwtape Letters? I have not. By CS Lewis. No, I have not. I've read excerpts of it, but I've never read the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think I've read it cover to cover either, but that's an interesting thing. So for those of you that don't know, screwtape Letters, it's again another CS Lewis I looked it up fictional account of one like senior ranked demon giving advice to a younger demon. Right Again, it's fictional, but kind of there's some truisms in there and he's like giving him these ideas of like how can you best, like, trip up the Christian that he's kind of been assigned to? Again, there's no like scriptural basis necessarily, but general ideas and truths coming out of that. And so it's interesting because he goes through all of these different strategies that the enemy can use to make a Christian fall.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and as you read through that, again written in 1942. Yeah, it's still very applicable to 2025 when we're recording this, and whatever year you're listening to this like that is like it's the same strategies he doesn't have. He's not actually that creative. Yeah, you know it's the same strategies because we have the same sinful heart that he's taken advantage of to continue to lead us down the way we're kind of bent towards right now in our sin nature.
Speaker 2:I preached a sermon on this. It's been a while, but it's the idea of the question that was asked in Genesis 3, right, did God? Really say and so that was the question, and I think it's still the same question that get asked today, right? Did God really say you shouldn't do this? Did God really say this?
Speaker 2:is wrong and did god really say yes, he did right, and so the answer is yes. Um, and one of the cool things about you mentioning the screw tape letters is I stumbled across something on the internet the other day, and you know what they say about the internet right, everything on there's true. I think it was abraham lincoln that said absolutely abraham lincoln said that everything you read on the internet is true, and so-.
Speaker 1:Four score and 30 years ago, everything on the internet is true.
Speaker 2:Pretty sure that's how that phrase goes, Maybe yeah, and I read that on the internet, so obviously it has to be true, right, absolutely.
Speaker 2:But somebody shared it looked like a screen capture of the screw tape letters and it was just talking about how, like causing people to be distracted, causing people to become angry, causing people to to hate their, their neighbor over disagreements and over noise and over things, and they were just relating that to how, as cs lewis wrote that almost what 80 years ago, yep, but it's what we see today in like with social media, and like the noise, the distraction, the performative life and how and how those concepts are referenced in CS Lewis before social media became a thing.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah, that's a whole whole line we could go down, but so I said three things, so there's a third way this plays out, and it's just our broken world right.
Speaker 1:The systems we live in are broken, our cultures are broken, society just carries that sin forward from generation to generation, just because we're broken people and we live in a broken world, and so the systems we set up, while good, right, god ordained government right, but because our governments are full of broken people, the cultures, the systems, they're going to be broken too. And you see bits of goodness, right, but you also see those fractures that run through everything in our world, and that's why we see everything from playground fights to wars. Sin bends and twists everything really inward towards ourselves and away from God and away from the others he's called us to love.
Speaker 2:Here's the good news right, there is good news. So, as you're dealing with the problem of evil, right, as you're answering the question of why are there bad things that happen? If God created the world, good, god didn't leave us in our brokenness. Right, romans 5.8 says and this is one of my favorite verses in all the Bible, specifically because of the way it starts right, but God right. So sin is real, we have a sinful nature, we have a spiritual enemy, we live in a broken world, but God right. Romans 5, 8,. But God shows his love for us in that, while we were still sinners, christ died for us, and so the idea here is that Jesus stepped into our world to undo the curse of sin. Right, we talked about being bent right.
Speaker 1:The pole is bent right, and Christ stepped in to bend that pole back, yeah, and through Jesus' death and resurrection right, it's not just that we're forgiven, we're transformed, right, we're redeemed, but he also is in the process of restoring his fallen creation, and we're looking forward to an ultimate day, right, when all of creation will be restored. And so, you know, we do the creation fall redemption right, there's the personal redemption, the work he's going to do in my heart, but then we're also looking forward to that restoration where, eventually, those fractures will be fixed, everything will be brought back to completion. Right now, though, romans 8.22 says that creation itself, right, even creation, the natural world we see around us, is groaning, waiting for that day when everything broken will be made new, and that's an exciting day to work towards, and in the moment, we can just see that groaning in pain of the bad things that happened because of our sin, that made the fractures.
Speaker 2:And I think about this quote that I read from Corrie ten Boom. If you're not familiar with Corrie ten Boom, she survived a Nazi concentration camp but she said there is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still. And I did a little bit of research on that quote. And what's really cool is it comes from her memoir, the Hiding Place, and it's words that were first spoken to her by her sister. And so her sister, betsy, there in this concentration camp, and Betsy has been suffering greatly, she's near dying, and she whispers to Corey. She says we must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that he is not deeper still. And then Corrie ten Boom dedicated the rest of her life to to sharing this message and confirming it as a central, just as a central tenant of her testimony. And and when I read that and just understand, like what was happening, the fact that she could speak those words, right, there is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's really, really good example right Of in the midst of a really dark situation, like probably one of the darkest in all of human history, and you still see God's love at work. So, parents, you know how do we help our kids wrestle through this and we, you know, always want to leave you with some practical tools. So here they are. As we wrap this up here, I would say start with, like we've said before, use those everyday moments right. Child asks you know something happened. Friend hit him, said something mean to him, called him a poopy head, whatever it is, you know, hopefully that's all you're dealing with.
Speaker 1:No, I'd say you know middle school and high school too. But you know, those moments are a chance for you to say you know that our hearts, right, are broken right, and sometimes our hearts want to say you know things and do things our own way instead of God's way. And so we can connect that to this bigger picture of sin and how our sin affects everybody around us. And so sometimes our kids are going to be affected by the sin of others. Sometimes our kids are going to be affected by our own sin and so pointing it there and then bringing it back to the gospel of God wants to fix us because we're broken right, we're part of that broken creation.
Speaker 2:And I think that you can think of it from just using simple pictures, like depending on your child's age right you could use the picture of a broken toy, right when you bought the toy.
Speaker 2:It wasn't broken, it was good, it was Hopefully, otherwise you'd return it. Hopefully, right. And so you get a toy, but then your child comes to you and says my toy is broken, right, in that same word picture, god made our world good, but sin broke it. And because sin broke it, we deal with the effects of that brokenness, or even just the image of a dark room. Right, sin, what we've described as sin, that's the darkness, but Jesus is the light that pours into that darkness. It took an external light source to come into the room, to make it light up. And these word pictures will hopefully help your children grasp the truth at their level right, like if you're having this conversation with your five-year-old, you may not want to pull out the Corrie Ten Boom quote.
Speaker 2:Right, that one may not work. But if you're having a conversation with your senior in high school who's breastfeeding with this question, yeah, that one may work. And so find Give them the screw tape letters to read Absolutely yeah. Find the way to make it simple for your child the things of God. They're not complicated. God doesn't intend for them to be complicated.
Speaker 1:Right, right. And so that's like when they're struggling with other people's sin, right, when we talk about them struggling with their own sin and their own brokenness, right, discipline moments are discipleship moments, yeah yeah. You know, we don't just correct behavior, but we want to point them to a deeper reality and we had a whole episode on that.
Speaker 2:We did, yeah, just three or four episodes ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was a couple episodes ago, before we started this mini-series. Three or four episodes ago yeah, it was a couple episodes ago before we started this mini series. I think it was the last one, and so you know that one's out and you can go back and read it. It would be five questions. To transform conflict with your child, I think, is what it was. But you know, there we gave you five questions to walk through from Paul Tripp of. You know what were you doing or what was going on? You, what were you doing or what was going on. You know what were you thinking and feeling and what were you trying to accomplish and how did that work out for you no-transcript just dropped a week ago now like while we're recording this.
Speaker 2:So, like, while we're like, we're like we're recording episodes ahead, but I think that episode just launched because one of my good friends, rick he actually called me and was like man, like that was the best episode ever, yep. So, rick, in Washington, shout out to you Hopefully you're listening to this with your family and now you're like a huge celebrity and if you want, to, and if you want to shout out, you can email us at podcast at WayneChristianorg.
Speaker 1:Let us know what you're thinking and even maybe some questions. We're still in the middle of recording these big questions, episodes, and so if you've got a question that you want help answering, send it our way. We'll look at it, we'll think about it ourselves because we may not have an answer, but we'll get back to you and if you email podcast atristianorg, you can also get those five questions in a PDF printable. It'll be right there on an autoresponder is how that works, so just email us, it'll send that to you.
Speaker 2:We need to get some swag, so that way we can encourage people to email us and then we'll send them swag. Okay, like a shirt? Ooh, a shirt.
Speaker 1:Or a hat. Everybody loves stickers.
Speaker 2:Okay, like a shirt Ooh, a shirt. Or stickers Everybody loves stickers, let's do it. And, parents, if you want a sticker, email us and we'll see if we can make wrong. And so, if you model trust in God's goodness even when life is hard, you're teaching them more than a hundred lessons, could my youngest daughter and I. We were watching the news about this young lady that was just killed in Charlotte and I could tell that she was processing it and we were having a conversation about what happened and why these things happen, and so how you react to those situations, or how you react to even personal situations. It's going to teach your kid about how to trust in God's goodness in the illustrations, like the broken toy.
Speaker 1:Older, you know, model that daily trust in God when life doesn't go your way. Right, James, the book of James, chapter one. It says you know, count it all, joy when you fall into trials of various kinds. And so just model that for your, your kids. They see you do that and they'll be able to do that as well. So any last thoughts for Lewis, encouragement for our parents as they're listening to the end of this episode.
Speaker 2:Yeah, parents, just remember, god made the world good. People do bad things because of sin, and Jesus is God's answer that brings hope and restoration. And so, parents, you may not have every answer, but you can give your kids confidence in God's goodness by always pointing them back to Jesus, and by pointing them back to what Jesus has done for them and what that means for them in their life.
Speaker 1:That's right. So thank you all for listening to Equipped for Impact and if this episode encouraged you, please share it with another parent who could use this resource. We're 25 episodes in and so you know this is just to help us reach more people and just we want to help whoever we can. So share this with them and be sure to subscribe so you don't miss our next episode. But until then, keep leading the next generation to stand firm in their faith and influence the world for Christ.
