Why a Good God Allows Bad Things

Why a Good God Allows Bad Things to Happen

My grandfather said something profound to me the other day…

“I am sure glad God sent us some rain, the crops really needed it and the grass was dying.”

The God-given rain in Ohio was sent our way as an effect from Hurricane Beryl which killed dozens and left millions without power.

He certainly didn’t mean offense, but the truth is that what is seen by some as a blessing is just as often seen by someone else as a curse. The rain that benefited us completely upturned another’s life.

The same can be said about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

Many are saying it was “God’s divine intervention” that saved Trump’s life.

How does the family of the gentleman who was killed instantly by the missing bullet feel about that statement? Did God have enough power to bend the bullet from Trump but not enough power to save this other man?

The power of life and death is in the tongue. We need to be thoughtful about what we say especially concerning tragedy.

The following is my thoughts on this topic, guided by the book Why Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold Kushner. I pray it is as beneficial to you as it has been for me.

The crisis this book is trying to solve is twofold: first that the world has a lot of unexplained hurting going on, and secondly that religion is doing a poor job of bringing forward solutions to mend the broken and heal the wounded.

Why should we give it credit?

The author himself, Harold Kushner, has gone through much suffering himself. His son, Aaron, died at age thirteen from a disease that was with him his whole life. This forced Kushner to wrestle with God and come to conclusions about God’s character and to answer the cliches we hear at most places of suffering.

Dismantling the Maxims of the Day

Many of us have been there. Sitting outside of a loved ones hospital room, getting off the phone after receiving awful news, or standing at the foot of a friends coffin, and someone approaches to share words with you. Though appreciated, because we love the person saying it, the words nearly always fall flat. No bandaid of a statement is able to plunge the depths of hurt experienced in the moments life provides us. Kushner surveys some of the common phrases shared in times of suffering and explains why we are falling short. In understanding our shortcomings and misgivings, we may be enlightened with a new way of approaching and discussing pain. The following are some of the phrases used in the midst of suffering that we tell ourselves or someone else that, if followed to its logical conclusion, may be doing more harm than good.

Because of sin, you deserve the suffering you get.

This is inherently true from a biblical perspective. If we are to believe that sin brings about death, then surely suffering must too be related to our sins. Kushner agrees with this line of logic and concedes that this may be part of the issue, but is this the endpoint of a larger experience that is pain and suffering? To quote him more directly, Kushner says, “Given the reality of human nature, given the fact that none of us is perfect and that each of us can, without too much difficulty, think of things he has done which he should not have done, we can always find grounds for justifying what happens to us. But how comforting, how religiously adequate, is such an answer?” (9-10)

Surely it is not adequate or comforting to argue that each gets what they deserve. Because the reality is, not everyone gets what they deserve. Some people are truly awful and live long lives full of good things, meanwhile a couple working hard to get by but living a good life may lose their first child to miscarriage. No one could honestly look at the parent of a sick and dying child and say it is what they deserve.

It was their time.

Kushner responds to this line of thinking with a story from Thornton Wilder called The Bridge of Saint Luis Ray. In it, five men are crossing a rope bridge when the bridge collapses and the men die. An onlooker tries to understand how God could have allowed something so tragic to occur.

In investigating the lives of the men, he was able to find that all five men had moments in which they had moved from one phase in life into a more beautiful, resolving a sin or issue and now could be at peace.

Maybe this can be concluded about a group of five, but what about the thousands killed in wars? Or senseless bombings that kill civilians? Or, the example Kushner uses, a plane crashes killing all onboard?

God certainly could bring each to a place of peace with Him before their death, but isn’t it more realistic to think that these are simply tragedies? That it was not simply their time, but actually was an individual robbed of life by the reality of life.

When Cain killed his brother Abel, was it Abel’s time? Or was it murder.

I think we can actually find more comfort in believing the latter.

Suffering is for your own good, to educate and correct you.

Kushner shares a powerful thought in connection to this: for the child of young age who slips undetected into the back yard and drowns in the pool.

Was this a lesson for the child on being safe or the parents to be more attentive (24)?

Surely, after the lesson is over there is so much pain it has caused other issues.

Everything happens for a reason

Yes, maybe everything happens for a reason, but not a God-driven reason.

Your friend may be killed in a drive-by shooting, though they were not the intended target but just a person in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Did God place your friend there for a reason?

Certainly, we can reason with the criminals. That they did it to protect their own, to find justice for a wrong done to them, etc.

God gives His toughest battles to His toughest warriors

This is a nice go get ‘em slogan, but in practice the one suffering is not feeling up to being a warrior.

And do we really want to accuse God of giving a child cancer? I know God works things out for good for those who believe in Him, but is it good to give the child cancer to begin with?

People get what they deserve

Job would certainly disagree.

By saying people get what they deserve you condemn the hurting even if there is no real reason behind their pain.

God is looking out for me

The problem with this line of thinking is that, if God saves you from cancer or a car crash, why did he not save the others who also were being prayed over and were loved?

Don’t feel bad, they are in a better place

Again, maybe it is true from a theological perspective that to be present with the Lord is in fact a better place, but it is nearly impossible to be in a place of pain and to conceive life is better apart from one another.

In the midst of suffering there really is not much room for the saying “don’t feel bad”. The individual has every reason to feel bad. They need the comfort of your presence not the motivation of your push.

God needed them more

God needed them more than a young child needs their parent? Statistics would suggest that having that parent very much could dictate their future outcome. I believe God can work in the child’s situation and can make a way, but there are more stories than not that losing a parent does not work out for the best.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

It has to come down to the hard-wired nature of having free will. If God were to take away our ability to choose, he also would be taking our ability to be human.

The reality is, when humans choose, sometimes they choose terribly wrong.

The pain caused by human-to-human infraction is caused by human nature, not God.

As far as natural events, such as hurricanes or bodily disease, these are caused by nature.

Both of these are laws, set up to be a certain way. To respond in predictable patterns. If you smoke chances are you’ll get cancer or give it second-hand to a bystander. That is law, how the body reacts to the chemicals being inhaled. In the same way, God allows human struggles to play out as well.

Why does God save some and not others?

You may have read the last section and certain bible stories were brought to mind where God does intervene over human nature and the laws of nature. So why did God do it for them but not for us?

Well, I believe God can still do it for us.

But, in those passages, we have to understand that the Bible plays out the way it does so that the seed who is Jesus might come into the world.

How we ought to respond to trials.

One of the many powerful lines in this book is shared in discussion about God’s grand plan for humanity and a woman named Helen grappling with the idea. Helen had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and could no longer come to terms with the fact that there was a good God that could have this as part of His grand plan for her. “If there really is a God, says Helen, she hates Him, and hates whatever ‘grand design’ caused Him to inflict such misery on her” (19).

I think the first thing that needs to be corrected in this line of thinking is that God sent this to Helen and inflicted her with the disease. While there are cases of God sending out pestilence and disease (think the plagues in the exodus from Egypt), God is not seen afflicting people with diseases as His normal mode of bringing forth justice.

But, more than the work on God inflicting or not, is the response to the diagnosis. Does Helen have to resort to being miserable because of her diagnosis?

Just because it was not her original plan or expectation it does not mean that her life cannot be more meaningful or beautiful than someone without the diagnosis.

Jesus is asked in John 9 concerning a blind man, “who sinned, the man or his parents that this man be born blind?” Jesus says you are looking for the wrong things. Instead of blaming or explaining, we must come to know that God is working in and through our unfortunate diagnosis. He responds, “neither, but rather that the glory of God might be shown in the life of this man.”

All things, healthy or unhealthy, life or death, can be used to direct people into the kingdom of God.

Rather than allowing a diagnosis to cause us to curl up and die, we ought to have us to spur on and truly live.

It seems as though when we experience pain we often follow the experience with choosing the wrong response leading to things like “guilt, anger, jealousy, and self-imposed loneliness” making things worse (87). How we respond to pain makes all the difference in the path of our life following an event.

How should we respond to others?

People do not need a theology lesson. They need a friend. Someone to bear witness to the pain and bring about the healing balm of encouragement through the ministry of presence.

The real tragedy of loss

When describing a plane crash killing two hundred plus individuals, Kushner describes the tragedy of unfinished “important work… and unfulfilled plans” (17).

Surely, this is a tragedy, and one I do not aim to lessen.

For me, though, the tragedy is less in them dying but how they were living. For the most part, those unfinished work plans had little significance in the grand scheme of life and certainly had little impact of the eternity they should be living into. Their unfulfilled plans for the mot part had little or nothing to do with God.

The tragedy is that they were able to live and suddenly die all without living for God, which is to live to the full.

Many were unsatisfied with life, and so of course they would be unsatisfied with death.

Yet for the believer, I pray this is true, we may live such satisfactory lives that whether we live out today or die by this evening it makes little difference. There is a fullness, a thirst that has been quenched, a belly filled.

If the plane goes down I lose nothing, but gain everything.

What good is God in suffering?

Certainly I think we can conclude that God is able to give us “strength and patience and hope, renewing our spiritual resources when we run dry” (128).

I think it is also safe to say that the God of the Bible is in the business of redeeming brokenness, and so by staying close to God we are able to create a meaningful story coming out of suffering. We do not have to remain stuck in the sorrow, but can come to a place where we add the pain to the story being written. “The facts of life and death are neutral. We, by our responses, give suffering either a positive or a negative meaning” (138).

Lastly, God is able to inspire us, through our religious system and sacred text, to help others. This is where people draw perhaps the greatest comfort. When hugging a loved one amidst suffering it may feel as it were truly the arms of God wrapped around you.