Why Isn't God Intervening Right Now?
If God is all powerful, why does it feel like he isn't showing up?
Public Theology is based on the work of Zach W. Lambert, Pastor of Restore, an inclusive church in Austin, Texas. Zach’s first book, Better Ways to Read the Bible, will release on August 12, 2025 and is available to preorder today. All of the content available at Public Theology is for those who identify as Christian, as well as those who might be interested in learning about a more inclusive, kind, thoughtful Christianity. We’re glad you’re here.
“God is all powerful.”
If you grew up in church, or even adjacent to folks who did, chances are that you’ve heard that statement more than a few times. But as we watch horrors unfold around the world, scrolling through an endless sea of bad news, we may begin to wonder the following:
If God has the power to stop bad things from happening, why doesn’t he?
If God has the power to bring equality to all people, why doesn’t he?
If God has the power to cure all disease, why doesn’t he?
If God has the power to stop war, why doesn’t he?
If God is truly good and really has the power to do anything he wants, then why doesn’t he rid the world of evil and bring perfect love and peace to humanity? Especially at a moment like this, why isn’t God intervening?
As with most big questions, we’re tempted to oversimplify. But as I see it, there are three possible options to answer these questions and two of them aren’t very helpful:
Option 1: God isn’t actually powerful.
This option teaches that God would like to stop all the bad stuff, but he just can’t. He’s just not that powerful. Or maybe, God simply isn’t real at all.
This is the dominant view of most atheists and agnostics. I’ll be honest with you: I understand why people believe this. I look at all of the brokenness and devastation in our world and I understand why people have a hard time believing in an all-powerful and good God.
But that is simply not the God who Christians have found their hope in for thousands of years. It’s not the God revealed to us in Scripture, most prominently through Jesus Christ.
Often, when people of faith hear and oppose option one, their pendulum swings all the way to the other side, coming to God’s defense through option two.
Option 2: Everything that happens is God’s will.
This option teaches that because God is all-powerful and he is all-good, so everything that happens is exactly what God wants to happen. The things we think are evil are actually a result of God’s direct action.
This particular view is fairly prominent in Christian circles. Sometimes it hides behinds Christian cliches like, “Don’t worry, God is on his throne and causes everything to happen according to his perfect will,” or “God works everything out for good,” or even, “When God closes a door, he opens a window.”
The problem is simply that these things can’t be true. A God who not only allows but causes things like slavery, murder, human trafficking, and oppression is not a god consistent with Scripture. God abhors these things: he always has, and he always will.
When my atheist friends tell me that they can’t believe in a god who does evil, I reply that I don’t believe in that god either. My God doesn’t perpetrate evil, he defeats it.
If you are talking about a god who kills, steals, hates, and destroys, then I’m an atheist, too. In fact, the Bible gives that description to Satan, not to God.
Are we only left with these two options? Because I believe both of these approaches are inconsistent with reality and incongruent with the God revealed to us in Scripture.
Do I believe God is all-powerful? Absolutely.
Do I believe God can do whatever He wants? You bet.
But do I believe that this broken world we are living in right now is the result of God exerting that power and making everything happen exactly the way He wants it to? Absolutely not.
God is not omnicausal, meaning that he does not orchestrate every earthly event. Claiming that God causes all human actions, including evil, is a perversion of God’s character and incompatible with his core characteristic of love.
Look around. Turn on the news. Scroll through social media. What do you see? Does the world we’re living in sound like the perfection of the Garden of Eden as described in Genesis? Not even close.
So what is the third option here? If God truly is all-powerful but our current world is not representative of his perfection enacted through his power, where does that leave us?
To answer that question, we have to go all the way back to the Garden of Eden. The opening chapters of the Old Testament tell us about God’s creation of his perfect world, a place defined by the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom is loosely translated as “peace,” but it’s so much more than the absence of conflict. Shalom is abundant goodness in all things and between all things.
In the Garden of Eden, God, humanity, and creation are all living in perfect shalom. But there is something else in the garden with them, something called, “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.” You may know it better as the tree with the forbidden fruit.
As the story goes, God tells the first humans, Adam and Eve, that they can eat from any tree in the garden except that one. Whether you have a ton of church background or none at all, you probably know what happened. Adam and Eve are lied to by a talking serpent, they choose to eat the forbidden fruit, turn their backs on God, and God’s perfect world breaks.
Was this God’s plan? Did he secretly want Adam and Eve to disobey him so his perfect world would crumble? Was he using reverse psychology when he told them not to do it?
Of course not. When we hear it that way, it’s obviously ridiculous.
Could our all-powerful God have stopped Adam and Eve before they ate the fruit? Could he have killed the serpent? Could he have just not put the tree there to begin with? Absolutely yes.
But he didn’t, and we find ourselves back where we started. God doesn’t want the bad things to happen, and he is powerful enough to stop all the bad things from happening, but bad things keep happening. Why is that? Because of option three.
Option 3: God Lets Us Choose
Just like the story of Adam and Eve, we have the power to exert our own will. Day after day and time after time, God lets us choose our own way.
This does not mean that God is not powerful. He speaks and the world is formed. He breathes and life enters our lungs. He overcomes evil and death by rising from the grave. There is nothing God cannot do.
But God has chosen to place some of this power in the hands of humanity. God has chosen to let us choose.
If you don’t believe me, just take a look around. Does God force people to lie, steal, enslave, or murder? Certainly not. This wasn’t true in biblical times, and it isn’t true today. God urges us, guides us, and instructs us, but he does not force us. God lets us choose and we often choose to hurt ourselves, our neighbors, and God’s creation. This has led to brokenness permeating so much our world. We are far from God’s shalom-filled garden.
We’ve chosen poorly many, many times, so much so that it sometimes seems like choosing brokenness is all we’re capable of. But that’s not true. We have the power to choose good, not because of our own strength, but because of our all-powerful God living in and through us. Through his power, we have the power to bring shalom into the world around us.
God’s Power, Our Choice
This is the exact message a pastor named Paul wrote to a church he helped start in the city of Ephesus in modern-day Turkey. It’s recorded in our Bibles in the New Testament book called Ephesians.
Paul started a number of churches all across the Near East after the resurrection of Jesus, but the church in Ephesus was one of the more difficult situations he faced. The book of Acts tells us that Paul was forced to leave Ephesus after a riot broke out and people were trying to kill him for sharing the story of Jesus.
It wasn’t easy to be a Christian anywhere in the first century, but that was especially true in Ephesus. A few years after he is forced to leave the city, Paul writes a letter back to the Ephesian church. In the opening paragraphs, Paul encourages the Ephesian Christians with these words:
Ever since I first heard of your strong faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for God’s people everywhere, I have not stopped thanking God for you. I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance.
Ephesians 1:15-18
He first reminds them of who they are:
They are deeply loved by God and a part of his family.
They are rich in Christ even if they are not rich in wealth.
They have been given hope that can carry them through whatever brokenness befalls them.
He goes on to say:
I also pray that you will understand the incredible greatness of God’s power for us who believe him. This is the same mighty power that raised Christ from the dead and seated him in the place of honor at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms.
Ephesians 1:19-20
This is not power as the world thinks of it: power that rules over people harshly or oppresses the powerless. God’s power actually subverts worldly power. God’s power is the kind that:
Gives sight to the blind
Gives food to the hungry and water to the thirsty
Welcomes immigrants and houses homeless
Visits those in prison
Cares for the widows and orphans
Sets captives free
Seeks justice for the oppressed
God’s power is the kind of power that literally raises the dead.
Paul tells these first century Christians, and every follower of Jesus to come after them, that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead is within them, within us.
But we still have a choice. We can choose to live life in our own power and continue to feed the brokenness around us. Or, by faith, we can choose to trust the power of God who lives in us through his Holy Spirit.
And if we choose that power— God’s power— then we are able to be a part of fixing the brokenness instead of feeding it. We are able to bring shalom— abundant goodness in all things and between all things— into this hurting world.
This is our choice and our legacy.
For 2000 years, when we’ve been at our best, Christians have chosen to trust the power of God in them and the results have been miraculous. God has moved in power through his church to bring hope and healing over and over again.
Pastor Brian Zahnd wrote a book that was pretty life-changing for me back in 2014 called A Farewell to Mars. It’s all about Jesus’ heart for shalom in our world and how he desires to use Christians to see it come about.
In his book, Zahnd talks about this legacy we have as Christians: how societies have been reshaped for good through Jesus-followers choosing to trust God’s power at work.
Jesus establishes compassion as the way we are to relate to the weak and suffering when he makes our treatment of them the criterion for the final judgment in the parable of the sheep and goats. In that parable Jesus famously said, “As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).
Jesus has taught us to see the sick, the poor, the prisoner, and the stranger as his brothers … as our brothers … as Jesus himself! In the Genesis story, before he moved east of Eden to found human civilization, Cain cynically asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9). This is how Cain justified himself before God. Cain obviously didn’t think he was his brother’s caregiver. And neither did Pharaoh or Caesar—the heirs of Cain’s city. But in reconfiguring the world around love instead of competition, Jesus answered Cain’s question with a resounding yes … and then said to us, “And here are your brothers; take care of them.”*
Brian Zahnd
This is the best of our legacy:
Entering into the broken parts of our world and fixing them.
Finding the broken people our world has cast aside and loving them.
Leading the way on bringing equality and abundant life to all people.
This is who we we’ve been and who we must be again.
Lately it feels like Christians have done a lot more to add to the problem than help solve it. When it comes to fixing some of the major issues we are facing today, it seems like Christians are not just lagging behind, we are going in the wrong direction. Some Christians even seem to stand for the exact opposite of what Jesus stood for.
Why is that? I think it’s because we (and I mean all of us, to some degree) have become so obsessed with our own power that we’ve forsaken the power of God. We’ve forgotten that our power only leads to pain and sin and brokenness. We’ve forgotten that only God’s power, not ours, is the great hope of our world.
I truly believe that Christians have something unique to offer our hurting, chaotic world in this moment. We have the power God working through us, the kind of power that subverts worldly power through love and resurrection, the kind that brings hope and healing.
But God has allowed us to choose and there are only two choices:
Trust in our own power that feeds the brokenness.
OR
Trust in God’s power that fixes the brokenness.
If Christians began choosing God’s power instead of our own, the world would see radical change. We would see a revolution of love that leads us to treat everyone as God’s image-bearer and worthy of experiencing abundant shalom.
Whose power will you choose?
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*This quote has been shortened from a previous version in this essay which, without the context of the entire chapter excerpt, came across in a way that reinforced an ahistorical picture of Christian supremacy. We must be people committed to pushing back against supremacy of all kinds, including Christian supremacy, anytime we can.
I believe that God respects peoples decision. Second Kings dhows us that the king violated the laws of God, the people suffered; when the king obeyed God’s laws, the people prospered. The Lord gives us clear guidance, but if we choose to ignore or disobey it, He allows the consequence of our decision to correct us. Consequences are great teachers.
I believe this is the correct answer, but I’ve never heard it satisfyingly extended to non-human-caused suffering. The most I hear is “viruses and cancer and hurricanes and dementia exist because adam and eve ate the apple”, and I really feel like a reasonable response to that is: why were those things a consequence? They don’t follow causally, which to me means it was a choice made by God. Why did he make viruses? Why do our minds break? Why do our pets get sick?