Why does God allow innocent to die?

God does not cause the suffering to His own, but He allows it to happen, so that His servants can benefit from the experience (e.g. increase their faith), and also for His own glory. Two examples are: Job, whom Satan tested to the uttermost, see Job 1 & 2, and Peter, whom Satan desired to sift as wheat, Luke 22:31.

God no doubt allowed those to be slain upon whom the tower of Siloam fell (Luke 13:4), and it was a warning for others to be ready when death came, a readiness that comes with repentance towards God, and faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ. Many innocent women and children have perished in the wars of mankind, and many questions regarding this may rise in the mind, but the Christian knows that all God’s ways are perfect, and that the judge of all the earth is righteous in all His acts and ways.

Men are apt to dwell on shocking events, and to measure the guilt of the victims accordingly. So it was when the Lord warned of the crisis for the Jewish people which His presence could not but bring about. For He was there in the testimony of the truth and in the humiliation of grace, not yet in the power and glory of the Kingdom; He was there for faith to receive, but for unbelief to refuse or despise. If rejection unto death was before Him, they were on the way to the sure dealings of God in judgment. Then it was that some reported to Him the tragic end of the Galileans whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices. But our Lord in answer corrects their own thought of exceptional guilt in that case, and solemnly warns them that, except they repented, they should all perish in the same way. Nay more, He points to the eighteen men, not slain by an unfeeling and truculent Roman, on whom the tower of Siloam fell. Yet were they debtors beyond all the men in Jerusalem? On the contrary He repeats, "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." This is God's voice to sinful man in the present disorder of the world. Man is no competent judge of the tangled scene; but he is loudly called through such events to judge himself before God, in short to repent. And the Lord gives the call divine force: "except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish."

A Common Mistake. — In connection with this line of instruction we next learn of two events which had taken place in Jerusalem, neither of which has found a place, it seems, in profane history. Pilate, the Roman governor, had killed some Galileans, engaged in the act, apparently, of sacrificing. God, whom they were outwardly worshipping in the appointed way, had not protected them. God's altar was no refuge for them (Ex. 21:14). Their blood had been mingled with their sacrifices. Then, too, the tower in Siloam had fallen upon eighteen men, and had crushed them to death. Were these special marks of Divine displeasure? Some, perhaps, thought so. But they were wrong. Those Galileans, and those inhabitants of Jerusalem, who met with an untimely death, were not worse than others. Sinners they were, but not worse than others in the metropolis of Judaism. Men might draw their conclusions, and often, as in these cases, erroneous ones. The Lord would impress on all the true lesson, "Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish" (Luke 13:1-5). Those events had a voice for the living, and concerned not only the dead.

John 9 opens with the case of a man that gives rise to a question from the disciples, in relation to the government of God in Israel. Was it his parents' sin that brought this visitation on their child, according to the principles God had given them in Exodus? Or was it his own sin, known to God though not manifested to men, that had procured him this judgment? The Lord replies, that the man's condition did not depend on the government of God with respect to the sin either of himself or of his parents. His case was but the misery which gave room for the mighty operation of God in grace. It is the contrast that we have continually seen; but here it is in order to set forth the works of God.

The question which the disciples raised may seem curious to us, but it expressed thoughts which were common among the Jews, finding their basis in Exodus 20:5, which speaks of the iniquity of the fathers being visited upon the children. The Lord's reply shows that affliction may come without there being any element of retribution in it, but simply in order that God's work may be manifested. It was manifested here in working a complete deliverance from the affliction. It may just as strikingly be manifested by complete deliverance from the depression and weight of the affliction, while the affliction itself still persists; and so it is often seen today. It was then the "day," marked by the presence on earth of "the Light of the world." Jesus knew that the "night" of His rejection and death was approaching, but until that time He was here to do the Father's works, and this blind man was a fit subject for the work of God, though he had made no appeal for it, as far as the record goes.

We understand it. The greatest calamity might come, and God send it, and a number of people perfectly innocent might perish just as much as the wicked people — say the sack of a city, or a pestilence sent by God in His moral government. Well, I say, these things are there undoubtedly, and Job stuck to that. All their talk did not at all drive him from the plain fact which they shirked and shut their eyes to. "The earth," he says, "is given into the hand of the wicked." And is not that true? Is not Satan the god, and the prince, of this world? That is wicked enough. And further, "He covers the faces of the judges thereof," i.e., he allows the judges to pronounce altogether wrongly and unjustly. That is, somehow or other their faces are veiled from the light, and they judge according to appearance. It is very certain that that is not a way to judge soundly. "If not, where, and who is he?" Who is he that does that? These things happen; innocent people suffer; guilty people escape; all these things are coming every day — are coming in England. It is not merely in Turkey, or Russia, or Tartary, or China; no, it is in England, in London; and nobody can hinder it. Things are out of course, and will be till the Lord takes the reins.

How natural it is, especially for those who believe in a present moral government of God, to look for a perfect manifestation of His mind in the maintenance of right and the judgment of wrong in the world as it is! No doubt this was strongest among the Jews, who might have expected it justly under the theocracy Jehovah was pleased to establish in their midst. But in truth it is a truth indigenous to every land, and common to all ages, and found in every circumstance and grade of life. Here the three friends of Job more and more yield to it, and Job, who suffered from his allowance of it, was kept from it mainly by the unswerving consciousness of his own integrity, but none the less writhing under the inexplicable web of inflicted misery, the more poignantly felt because he never doubted that God somehow had to do with it all, and righteousness pleads that evil should be punished and good dwell in peace and honour. Who ever learns till he is taught of God that His children must wait in faith, and suffer patiently in the exercise and trial of their faith, till God has His rights in the return and reign of His Anointed? Then, and not before, shall we reign with Him.

In all these sufferings of God's people throughout the ages, let us remember, that, though there was no direct intervention on the part of God to stop the stones being flung at His witnesses, and no miraculous power put forth to deliver from the agonies of the rack, or quench the flames at the stake, yet it will be made manifest in the coming day that God was not an indifferent spectator to the sufferings of His people nor deaf to their prayers and cries. When God avenges "the blood of prophets, and of saints, and of all that were slain upon earth," the wickedness of men will meet with righteous judgment, and His suffering people will have their bright reward.

Down the ages, God has often allowed His own to be evilly entreated, and it is not always possible for us to understand why He should allow wicked men to persecute and slay His saints and His servants. We do know that God allows these things for the purifying of His people, and that all His actions towards His own are in the perfection of His love and wisdom; and even if wicked men seem to prosper, and the righteous are put to grief, yet the day is surely coming when, at the judgment seat of Christ, we shall understand as we cannot now, the ways of God, which are past finding out.