If Jesus has all power, then why does he allow __________ to happen? I know the reason some of you joined our nation’s military is because of the terrorist attacks on 9/11.

It was a question people asked on that day, and it’s a question that people continue to ask, especially when missions go wrong, when someone is injured, when someone is killed in action or in training, or when trauma is experienced and continues to be relived.

If Jesus has all power, then why does he allow this to happen? I don’t know. He doesn’t always give us an answer.

In Mark chapter seven, we read about a man who is deaf and mute, and we could ask the same question about that man. Why did Jesus allow that to happen to him? In this case, we do have an answer: so that Jesus could display his power and show us who he is—that he is the Almighty God. He used his power to do something about it. He opened that man’s ears and loosened his tongue, and immediately the man began to speak plainly and intelligently and hear with crystal clarity.

The question we ask then is this: Why doesn’t God always show that power in our lives, with our tragedies and hardships and diseases and sicknesses and trauma? I don’t know. But what I do know is that he allowed tragedy and trauma and death and hell to come to him as he hung on the cross so that we might be set free from all of that. Sometimes he allows suffering as a witness to everyone around us to show them that God displays his power through our weakness, so others might know where the power in their weakness comes from—from God and his promises. Sometimes God allows suffering in our lives so that we are forced to go back to his promises and cling to him and him alone.

There are other times God uses his almighty power to stop tragedy, remove hardship, heal sickness, and heal minds, and when he does, we exclaim with the crowds who witnessed this deaf-mute man speaking and hearing, “He has done all things well.” (Mark 7:37).

Whatever Jesus chooses to do with his almighty power, he does it well. And he always has us in mind. He always has our benefit and our good in mind. And that is enough for us. So we will trust him. We will trust that he will do what is best for us.

Prayer:
Lord Jesus, when we ask you questions and don’t always hear answers from you, or when we hear answers that we don’t like, move us to humbly return to your words in the Scriptures and to search them and to open our eyes and ears to see and hear them and to trust those promises. Point our eyes to that day when you will use your power to transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like your glorious body, free from trauma and disaster and disease, free to live with you forever in heaven.

Continue to comfort those who have lost family or friend in the events of 9/11. Comfort those who have lost family or friend or those who have lost limb or the stability of mind in many years of war following 9/11. Comfort them with assurance that you are much more powerful than death, more powerful than grief, more powerful than suffering. That there is our hope, our sure certainty of the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen.