When bad things happen, it's common for us to look for a fall guy...someone to blame.
Scapegoats are not hard to find.
Dwight Eisenhower once said, “the search for a scapegoat is the easiest of all hunting expeditions."
Many times, it's God who is on the receiving end.
It's easy to blame God when adversity strikes.
For one, He's not physically present to defend Himself for the many things He's falsely accused of, so He makes an easy target and secondly, the typical thought is that God instigated or allowed a particular outcome or could have done something to prevent it or could do something to mitigate or stop it, being Sovereign and all.
However, being Sovereign does not mean that God has a hand in everything that happens in our lives, good or bad.
This fatalistic view of God's sovereignty is where the bulk of our problems lie because it wrongly absolves us from wrongdoing and prevents us from taking responsibility for our own actions/inactions.
If we take the case of world starvation for example, it's not God's fault, believe it or not.
If you read the story of Noah and the ark, after Noah, his family and the animals came out of the ark after the flood, the Bible says in Genesis 8:20-22:
"Then Noah built an altar to the Lord, and took of every clean animal and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a soothing aroma. Then the Lord said in His heart, “I will never again curse the ground for man’s sake, although the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done.“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.”
God made a promise to keep the world going and to sustain the human race regardless of how large or how bad it got.
Jesus reiterated the same in Matthew 5:45 when He said God makes the sun shine and the rain fall both on the just and the unjust just like He promised.
Interestingly, these are the two basic things the world needs to sustain life and food production — light and water.
So God has kept His promise to this day and will keep it to the very end.
Infact according to the United Nations, enough food is produced every year to feed the entire human population without exception.
So the problem of starvation we face today is not due to a shortage or lack of food, but simply because, sadly, we won't share it.
One part of the world has too much while the other has too little.
One part of the world is obese and fighting to get thinner while the other part of the world is starving and fighting to put food on the table.
It might strike you to know that given the large number of hungry people in the world, a third of the food produced each year is lost or wasted. This amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year, worth approximately $1 trillion.
In many rich countries, the bulk of this food wastage happens in the kitchen when prepared foods goes uneaten or is left to spoil in fridges and kitchen cabinets.
Rich countries waste almost as much food as the entire sub-Saharan Africa produces each year which begs the question...
How is this God's fault?
Blaming God for starvation is like a parent who locks the fridge blaming God that their child is starving. It's ridiculous.
How foolish of us to blame God for starvation when we waste and won't share the food He's given.
In truth, God is not to blame, we are.
Starvation is not a God-made problem but a man-made problem and it's time we start owning our mistakes.
God has done His part in faithfully keeping all the seasons going and ensuring there is enough food in the world for everyone to go to sleep fed and satisfied, it's time for us to do ours and share it.
God bless you.
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