Steve Cornell
Imagine God appearing to you on New Year's Eve to tell you that nothing bad will happen to you in the coming year. A great sense of relief would come over you. Each time you felt the pull of anxiety, you could dismiss it because of God's announcement. You could count on a year free of all saddness, disappointment, failure, pain, or any other bad thing. It would be a great year! But how much would God have to rearrange to make this happen?
Frankly, I would like to live in a world where nothing bad happens to anyone. But, as we all know, this is not the way things go in this life. Bad things happen to all of us. Sometimes bad things happen to people we might consider good and undeserving. Suffering and evil are harsh realities in this world. 
Does God care about this? Many feel, as one has written, that "…there has been just too much suffering and cruelty for the idea of a powerful and caring God to make sense. Under the sheer weight of human tragedy the providence of God buckled and was crushed into implausibility." How could a loving, all-powerful God exist when His world is so full of evil? Why doesn't he put an end to the bad things that happen?
To be honest, I highly doubt that skeptics would become believers if nothing bad happened to anyone. Perhaps they would accept God's existence if bad things only happened to bad people. Yet, if this were the case, how should "goodness" and "badness" be judged? Who should be "spared" and who should be "judged"?
Here is a sobering thought: "To demand from God a world where nothing bad happens, is to risk eliminating ourselves." Why is this true? Because we all do bad things. If, as Scripture reveals, "all have sinned and fallen short of God's glory" (Romans 3:23), and "the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23), then the fact that we sinners are still alive is evidence of God's mercy. Remember, we are the ones who rebelled against a good Creator.
D.A. Carson wrote, "The sovereign and utterly good God created a good universe. We human beings rebelled; rebellion is now so much a part of our make-up that we are all enmeshed in it. Every scrap of suffering we face turns on this fact. The Bible itself centers on how God takes action to reverse these dreadful effects and their root cause, sin itself, and the believer's hope is the new heaven and earth where neither sin nor sorrow will ever be experienced again." (How Long, O Lord?)
God's willingness to allow a world where bad things continue to happen is instead an amazing demonstration of his mercy. I recognize that this is easier to believe when bad things are not happening to you. Yet this is what Scripture teaches (see Romans 9:22-23), and Scripture is not judged by our experiences.
Carson writes, "If in fact we believe that our sin properly deserves the wrath of God, then when we experience the sufferings of this world, all of them the consequences of human rebellion, we will be less quick to blame God and a lot quicker to recognize that we have no fundamental right to expect a life of unbroken ease and comfort. From the Biblical perspective, it is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed" (Ibid).
The fact that God would show kindness to anyone is sheer mercy. But the truth of Scripture offers far more. In flesh and blood, God entered this bad world in the person of Jesus and allowed bad people to commit evil acts against himself. Did he have power to stop those who opposed him? Yes. Why didn't he use his power? Why didn't he protect himself? Because, in love, he willingly chose to provide us with salvation by bearing the punishment our sin deserved. Those who receive this salvation will one day be delivered from all evil.
Our desire for nothing bad to happen must be placed beside this acknowledgment of God's mercy. Salvation is still offered to sinful humanity. We also have a great promise to which we may anchor our troubled bodies and souls in turbulent times. The apostle Paul wrote, "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28).
In his book, The Invisible Hand, R.C. Sproul comments on this promise: "We note that Paul does not say here that all things that happen to us are good things. In fact, bad things happen to us. Painful things. Things that crush our spirits. Things that leave wounds and scars. Things that evoke grief and lead us into the house of mourning. Yet all of these bad things that happen to us are working together for our good."
In his helpful book, Seeing Through Cynicism, Dick Keyes admits that, "The Bible does not give us a quick and easy answer to why God allows evil to continue in his world. But if we think back about how God involved himself in such a costly way in the ultimate defeat of sin and death (crucifixion), then whatever reason he may have, it is not that he is indifferent to the human race."   
Steve Cornell