In 1981 a book was published which asked a hard question. "When Bad Things Happen To Good People", by Harold Kushner, addressed the question implicit in the title and was on the New York Times Bestsellers list for quite some time. Rabbi Kushner touched on an issue that everyone asks sometime during their life. Events of the last few months caused people to ask this very question once again...the school shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Hurricane Sandy and several smaller shootings have once again shaken people. In my personal and church ministry I have faced that same question from people who have been diagnosed with various diseases, people who have dealt with accidents resulting in death and serious injury and people grieving a loss. Why do bad things happen to good people?
There is a tendency for us, as Christians, to come up with a pat answer for this hard question. Recently a song was published by Sanctus Real whose lyrics say, in part, "Sometimes it's hard to keep believing / In what you can't see / That everything happens for a reason / Even the worst life brings / If you're reaching for an answer / And you don't know what to pray / Just open up the pages /
Let His word be your strength".
Let His word be your strength".
We say we believe in a God who is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, so of course it seems the logical thing to tell someone who asks this question is "We may not know why this happened, but God is still in control and He must have had a reason." The disconnect should be obvious here...when the parent of a small child who was killed in a school shooting says, "What possible reason could a good and loving God have for taking my child in a such a horrific way? If that is what God is like, I don't want to have anything to do with Him!" Then we wonder why the person blames God for the event. Of course they would blame Him, after what we just told them!
The real answer lies in where we put ultimate responsibility. First of all, God is the epitome of love. He cares for us more than we will ever know. He sent His own Son to die on a cross for us. Second, God has by His sovereign choice given us free will. Along with free will, though, comes responsibility and consequences for those choices we make. That is how and why sin entered the world. With choice came the ability to choose to NOT follow God's will. Sin entered the picture and we became morally corrupt, physically dying and spiritually dead.
To make matters worse, sometimes we reap the consequences not of our own sin, but that of other people. This is where I believe the words of that song by Sanctus Real go wrong. Everything does NOT happen to us for a reason. God does not bring bad things down on our heads. He does not cloak His goodness and love in events that are dark and terrible. He did not send that shooter into the school and place our five year old in the line of fire to teach us something, at the cost of that young and innocent life. That act was the overflow of sin and madness from a tortured person, not God.
Sometimes the bad things which happen are the results of accident, the nature of the fallen world or sometimes just negligence, rather than through either our sin or the sin of another person. Regardless of the reason behind the scenes, we cannot put the blame at God's feet unless it is to say that we wish we did not have free will which is even worse than the former prospect.
Let's take it one step further, though. Our God is a God of redemption. We know this through the sacrificial redemption of Jesus Christ for our lives. But by the power of the Blood, He also redeems 'situations'. Romans 8:28 says that "...in all things God works for the good of those who love him", and that we are referred to as "more than conquerors". If we turn the bad things that happen to us over to Him, He can bring good out of something that seems as if it has no good. He is the God of the impossible, after all.
In practical terms, what that means is the worst possible situations we face, if we turn them over to God, He can and WILL bring good out of them. We may not know what that good is, and it may take years to work it out, but he will take the broken shards of our tragedies and reshape them into something beautiful.
"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose." Romans 8:28 (NIV)
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