People say: How can there be a God when there is so much suffering in the world? How can there be a God when good and innocent people are brutalized and murdered?

I say: There is indeed God, he is indeed just, and he is indeed merciful. People can only get back what they put out. They put out crap, they get crap back.

I also say, being murdered is not necessarily a punishment when you consider the state of the world and of humanity in general.  We all must die; and as far as I’m concerned, the sooner the better, but in God’s timing, not mine.

And being poor is not necessarily a punishment. Better to have just enough (and a bit to spare) than so much that it causes you grief and you lose your way.

Jesus said no-one is good but God, and Paul said no-one is innocent. I would add to Paul’s statement “except Jesus”. And yet Jesus died horrendously. Tellingly, his hope was not to be rescued from that horrendous death: He wanted to go through it in order to finish his mission and get out of here. His hope was to “go to the Father”, not to be saved by some last-minute Earthly reprieve.

I side with Jesus in this regard. If your soul is right with God, you’re better off brutally murdered and out of here than living to see the carnage and the spirit of anti-christ being increasingly unleashed around the world as God reluctantly withdraws from those who reject him.

None of us comes to this Earth innocent. We all arrive stained with guilt, some more than others. We were created in Paradise, but between there and here, we turned from God and made some major boo-boos. God’s given us a chance to make up for those by giving us space and time here and now.

You ask why things are so horrible for some people, why their condition is so poor, and I say: No-one suffers anything that they haven’t brought on themselves one way or another. There is no such thing as an “innocent child”; we all come to this world sin-burdened.

As our punishment, we are confined by the chains of flesh and blood and time and space, and we can choose to use those chains either as adorning jewels or as painful weapons that gouge and tear into us and weigh us down. I have chosen the former; I have chosen to bear my chains as jewels and to thank God for his grace and mercy, his infamous mercy. Since being born again, I can see no other way forward that makes sense to me than to hold God’s hand and walk with him like a little child.

I see none as innocent (except Jesus), but I also see none as fully condemned, not yet. While there is still time, there is hope for all to take a place back in Heaven. Even those who commit the most heinous of crimes still have hope of redemption in God’s eyes, and so they should in ours.

But some day, perhaps sooner than we realize, time will be up, sides will again be chosen, and like the fallen angels, those who choose against God will do so for all eternity. They won’t get another chance after that.

Do not find yourselves among those fallen and eternally condemned people. Make a choice for God now, and keep renewing that choice day by day.