23 September 2010
In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will. Ephesians 1:11
Have you ever struggled with the issue of why bad things happen to good people? Sooner or later you are bound to face the issue. In a file I have are a half-dozen articles telling of tragedies, to say nothing of ones that I have known of personally, all of which raise a serious question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" Possibly you've never been directly confronted with the issue. You have never had a tiny baby snatched from your wife's arms in death, or you have never stood broken-hearted in front of a four foot casket, staring with unbelief at the still body of a four-year-old whose laughter filled your house only three days ago. With tear-filled eyes you've never had to suffer the heart-breaking experience of saying "goodbye" to your child as he clutched a teddy bear in one arm, his ragged blanket in his other arm.
Or perhaps it was your godly gray-haired mother, who never hurt anyone in her life, who was struck by the car as a drunk driver failed to notice the frail woman who dropped her package and tried to lunge out of the path of the automobile as it veered crazily back and forth...but tragedy still struck. You struggled with the situation, you cried out, "God, why my mother? She never hurt anyone in her life."
"You really had a streak of bad luck," one of the guys at work told you as he tried to comfort you. You didn't say anything, but down in your heart you struggled with the idea of bad luck. You are a Christian. You memorized Romans 8:28 years ago. Forgetting the rest, the part that you remember are the words, "All things work together for good..." "This didn't work for good," your heart cries out, "not mother's good nor our good."
Is God a loving Father who has a plan and a purpose for His children? Or is He a loving Father who, at times, cannot control the circumstances of tragedy which strike at His children? If He is in control, how do you explain tragedy? Now, very clearly both cannot be true. One of the reasons that we Christians struggle with the issue is that our concept of God is much like a photograph that is out of focus. We have never really gotten a clear image of God stamped on our hearts, and there are some reasons for this. Often we can't think much about God other than in terms of what we need or want.
When we pray we think little about the nature and character of Him to whom we address our requests; we are overwhelmed with our immediate needs and problems. Our knowledge of God is often second-hand. Our image of Him--rather than being formed by the study of God's Word--is fragmented, sutured from other people's ideas and thoughts. Then when tragedy strikes, we try to comprehend the situation and don't have the resources to handle it.
In the event you are among the growing number of people in the world who are trying to understand computers, it is like trying to run a program without the software to support it, and quickly errors flash on the screen that tell you something is wrong. What is wrong, your heart cries out, is that God let you down. But is it really true?
There is another reason that we Christians struggle with the issue of why bad things happen to good people, and it is that we often attempt to define God in terms of tragedy rather than to define God in terms of a proper understanding of God through the Bible. In light of wars and murders, rapes and violence, tragedy and heartache, we try to reconcile God and evil, and the results are not very satisfactory. More on our next edition of Guidelines.
Resource reading: Psalm 37:1-11