God Works in Mysterious Ways... heh...

So... Were was I? ...

Um... Right, so here we come to one of the most complicated, convoluted and confusing parts of dealing with an all-knowing eternal God. He has a very different way of looking at the world. If you want to serve Him you have to understand that His plans don't make sense. They aren't clear. They're disjointed and indirect.
At least, they are to us. He sees things we don't, and He knows more then you can dream.
On top of that He is a poet. He believes in symbols. He loves to play out things sweet, bitter sweet and sometimes just bitter. It seems to me that few people, if any, ever understand the full significance of their life. For those of us who are servants of the Lord, we're not supposed to understand. We are only supposed to obey. More of that in the Jeremiah post though.

As for the wider issue of God's will, we soon hit contentious ground. Remember it's not our place to understand what it is God is doing. So this is honest to goodness unclear.
Is everything that happens the will of God?
My answer is simple.
No. Very little that happens is according to God's will. But you can be sure of this. Though as individuals, as families and as nations we defy God's will, His plan for the world is unavoidable. God can use bad things. Things He never wanted to happen to His advantage.
But then you'd be right in asking why an all-powerful God, an all-good God would let bad things happen at all. The answer is one that is distasteful to most; we asked for it.

The human race decided to seek a life away from God. Most of what we see today is God letting us explore that option.

What you need to keep in perspective is that this life, and everything that ever happens here is very small in the eyes of eternity. A person can suffer unimaginably in even the opening years of their lives, but God offers an eternity of something unbelievably good. And that offer will be made to everyone.

I've often heard non-Christians point out the amount of people who never hear about the Gospel, and the seeming inequity that raises. My reply to that is in two parts.

First, we know that Judgement of the soul does not happen at the moment of death (Revelation (the whole book)), and that we are capable of consciousness apart from our bodies (1 Samuel 28). I don't doubt that many a revelation and conversation has gone on in that in between place.

Second is that God takes a persons upbringing and environment into account when he judges a person, as large portions of Romans indicates. God judges people by their hearts. A person who says they follow Christ and even look like it, but have no evidence of it in their heart, will be far worse off then a person who grew up in the Amazon and never even knew about aeroplanes let alone Jesus, but committed themselves to conducting themselves in a right way, and longed for the true, the pure and the just. Jesus is the only way to eternal life, I'm just trying to say that even someone who doesn't know about God can commune with Him, and follow Him.

Then there is the greatest bogyman of all. Hell. How does a good God send people to a place were they suffer for eternity?

First I need you to take everything you know about hell and dispose of it unceremoniously. The Catholic Church once had a love affair with a particular poet. Who liked to write about things like hell, which, ironically he didn't believe in, because he was a pagan. But the Catholics liked it anyway, and essentially adopted it as cannon. So pretty much every image of hell we have is based on this.

At best the typical picture of hell can be called culturally irrelevant, at worst blasphemous. Again it's a case of baby Christian syndrome. Most Christians haven't even read the Bible, let alone understand it. Instead they take on centuries old folk lore and call it truth.

The culturally relevant and theologically sound view of hell can probably be best explained like this. In hell a person's soul is separated from God. Then they are destroyed. It is an eternal punishment. The person will not be recreated. They are gone forever. Something lives on in that place. But that thing is not the person.

You see in the beginning we were created perfect. In the image of God. Beings of pure good. At the fall "sin" was introduced. Best think of sin here as new elements, ideas, all of them bad by nature. Greed, mistrust, pride, envy, the list goes on. The people we are today, you and me, are people caught in between. In between the perfect person God intends us to be and the ugly, selfish thing that the forces of evil want us to be. If we choose God we get Heaven, the place where He will restore us to what we were meant to be, and all the bad, the sin, is destroyed. Otherwise we choose hell, were the perfect image will be destroyed and the bad will live on separated from God.

That thing that lives on in Hell, in torment, it's not a person. It's not any of the things you loved about them. It's their sickness. It's their pain. It's the demons inside them that tortured the real person all their life. The real person is gone. Destroyed.