HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, October 10, 2026 – It wasn’t God’s will; it was God’s permission. God permitted it to happen; he never wanted it to happen. It was never his will. You can never convince me that what happened to all those people all those years ago was God’s will.

But they do that, those people; they mix up God’s will and God’s permission. They’re always mixing it up, muddying the waters (some of them on purpose). They point to people in pain and say: “See that? That’s God’s will”, but they’re wrong. God is good and only good. In the Gospels, Jesus tells a man: “Don’t call me good. Only God is good.” He could just as well have said: “God is only good.” It means the same thing.

I remember, as a newbornagain, being attacked by one of the mixed-up people who tried to convince me that God was evil. I can still see her standing there at the party, a drink in one hand and a “Gotcha!” sneer across her face. “It’s in your Bible”, she said with barely contained glee. “God made evil. That means he is evil. Look it up.” I was too young then spiritually to know how to refute her. I could only stand there in silence, repulsed by her sly smile and the obvious pleasure she took in shocking me. Mixed-up people can be like that sometimes. Not all of them, but some. They take particular pleasure in bullying Christians, not seeming to know that the evil they wrongly attribute to God is working through them instead.

And yet those same bullies will then turn around and lament: “Look at our suffering!”, so over-the-top dramatic they become caricatures. Decades pass, and still the lament. “Look at our suffering – JUST LOOK AT IT!” But we have looked, all of us, looked and looked – in plays, in books, in movies; in painstakingly accurate museum exhibits, in annual solemnities. We’ve looked and looked until we could look no more and then were threatened if we dared look away. Yet not once in all the drama did I hear the lament: “We had it coming. We deserved it. It was our fault.” Not once did I hear a call to repentance. Only blame and self-pity, and again self-pity, and a constant worrying of the open running wound so that it never heals.

You cannot lead a soul to repentance. If God is good and only good (which we know from scripture that he is), then any punishment he permits cannot be evil. They mix up God’s will and God’s permission just as surely as they mix up good and evil, and they do so because they won’t accept punishment. They refuse to suffer.

I would rather suffer the world’s injustice than reject God’s justice. I would rather be falsely accused by the world and suffer for it than to attribute to God anything but good. How can anyone who knows God attribute to him anything but good? You can’t know God and attribute to him anything but good.

In the end, they’ve become a cautionary tale, the mixed-up people. We’re to suffer them and learn from their mistakes. And what are we to learn? To accept our suffering. Accept it and endure it, not try to avoid it and/or blame it on others or on God. There is no peace in refusing to accept what you’ve earned.

We are purified in the fires of affliction if we allow ourselves to be. We’ve stoked the flames with our sin. Better to go through those fires now and be healed than to wait for the flames that never go out.