(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?”, originally shared on March 14, 2022. It was the 198th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
Why do bad things happen to good people? Why
do bad things happen to bad people? Why to good things happen to bad people?
Why do good things happen to good people? They’re all really the same question.
Today, we’re going to find out what that
question is, and how Jesus gives us the answer.
The question that all the others point to
is, “Why is the world the way it is?” And, more specifically, “Why is the world
the way it is toward me?”
Sometimes people ask why do the innocent
suffer, or why do children get cancer, or why don’t the good people always get
rewarded and the bad people always get punished?
When people ask these questions, it’s
usually to express their frustration at what they see as an injustice in the
world, particularly when they believe it is an injustice against them.
Part of the problem with this frustration is,
as one of my philosophy professors once observed, that most of the world’s evil
and probably all of its worst evil, is done by people who sincerely believe in
their heart of hearts that they are doing good. I’ve never heard someone ask,
“Why is someone bad like me always having good things happening to them?”
There are two Biblical answers. The first is
that the world isn’t the way its’s supposed to be. The second is that God is
God and you’re not. And Jesus offers them by giving two examples from what many
scholars believe were real events.
We see them in Luke 13:1-5,
13 At that very time there were some
present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with
their sacrifices. 2 He asked them, “Do you think
that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than
all other Galileans? 3 No, I tell you; but unless
you repent, you will all perish as they did. 4 Or
those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you
think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in
Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent,
you will all perish just as they did.”
Jesus begins with an outrage. Galileans,
people from Jesus’ home region, had come to Jerusalem to do the right thing, to
offer their animal sacrifices at the Temple and Pilate’s forces, possibly thinking
them to be freedom fighters, or terrorists, had them slaughtered in the Temple,
mingling their blood with the blood of their sacrifices, a sacrilege and an
outrage.
How could such a thing happen? Especially in
the Temple!
The tower of Siloam, near the pool where
Jesus did healing, was under construction. There was an accident and eighteen
people were killed.
How could such a thing happen to them?
People believed that if you were good, you
would be blessed in this life, and that if bad things happened to you, you were
being punished for your sins, or maybe for the sins of your ancestors.
Did these things happen because the people
they happened to were worse sinners and offenders than other people? No, Jesus
said.
So why do things like this happen.
First let’s look at the problem. Then let’s
look at what God has done and finally will do to fix the problem.
To do that, we have to go back. All the way
back to the beginning, where we learn that things are not the way they are
supposed to be.
In the beginning, God created everything out
of nothing. And when I say “nothing” I mean nothing. I think that, when most
people imagine nothing, they imagine empty space. Try imagining no space! No
matter, no time, no space. It’s impossible to wrap our heads around that. It’s
mind-blowing. Human beings only encounter nature, the natural world, in time
and space. Things have substance. Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an
end. But God started from nothing. Nothing. God created everything that exists
as an act of God’s will. God spoke and it came to be.
There’s an old story about the devil
challenging God to a test of power. The devil says, “The Bible says that you
created humans from the dust of the earth. So what? I can do that, too!” And as
he leans down to scoop up some dust God says, “Woah! Make your own dust.”
If the universe was created with the Big
Bang, where did that exploding mass come from? Can something come from nothing?
For God, all things are possible.
God made us. God made us for a living
relationship with God, unlike anything else in Creation. And God made us to be
good managers and caretakers of everything else. But, for our “Yes” to that
living relationship to be real, we had to have the real ability to say “No”.
And we did. And evil entered the world.
We are the rebellious children of God. We
belong to God, and God loves us, even when our deeds are evil. God’s desire,
and God’s will, is that we the children of God, return to that living
relationship with the one true living God, the relationship for which we were
created and live in-accord with that relationship. When everybody but Noah and
his family forgot about God, God destroyed humanity, but saved Noah and his
family, and started over. When people built a tower to reach into heaven as a
monument to their greatness and to overcome God, God destroyed their tower and
confused their languages.
When the world, except for one couple,
Abraham and Sarah, whose names were Abram and Sari at the time, forgot about
God, God did not destroy it but built a great nation from their faith so that
that nation, the nation of Israel, might proclaim God and be a blessing to the
nations. God liberated that nation from its slavery in Egypt. People still did
not return to God.
God gave them the Law in order that they
might know what a relationship with God looked like and they mostly ignored it.
God sent prophets, priests and kings to the people of God. They, like the law,
had virtually no effect, at least not for long. But God gave them the promise
that a great messiah, a liberator, a redeemer would arise as a suffering
servant. Then God went silent for 300 years.
And then the Messiah appeared in Jesus
Christ. But the people expected someone to liberate them from the Roman Empire
that had, like many empires before them, occupied the land that God had given
to Israel. So, when Jesus announced that he had instead come to liberate them
from the effects of everything that separated them from God and to restore them
to the living relationship with God for which they had been created, their
leaders balked. And when the Romans saw him as a threat to public order, they
conspired to crucify him.
But Jesus was fully God and fully human.
They didn’t take his life. He gave it and his death was the means by which the
forgiveness of our sin, what separated us from God, was accomplished and the
relationship was restored not because human beings restored it, but because God
took our punishment and restored that relationship at the cross.
Our acceptance of that gift and our baptism
means that we are now all adopted. We are now children of God. We are
connected, and we belong not by our actions, but by God’s.
But evil still enters the world. It continues
to enter when we say “no” to God. And that brings us to the second answer: God
is God and you’re not. This is the message to those who judge God, who believe
that they are more compassionate than God, who by their beliefs say that if
they were God they would do a much better job. Whose lives are defined by sin, separation
from God.
Sin is like the guy who owns a factory that
produces toxic waste. He has a problem. If he fixes it by building a facility,
or sending it to one, that can neutralize the toxic waste, his bottom line will
be negatively affected. His compensation, his workers’ compensation, and his
shareholders’ compensation will all be negatively affected.
But, if he dumps it in the river behind his
factory at night and no one finds out, his bottom line will be positively
affected. His compensation, his workers’ compensation, and his shareholders’
compensation will all be positively affected. Everyone is happy and he sleeps
well at night.
But, downstream, people drink that water, or
cook with it, or water their crops with it and its poisons are absorbed into
food and people eat that food. Eventually, people die. They don’t know why.
Sin is like that.
Paul says, in his letter to the church at
Rome, in Romans 6:23,
3 For the wages of
sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our
Lord.
The world is not the way it’s supposed to
be. God is God and we’re not. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does
anything happen to anybody?
Jesus’ answer is that we also must repent,
or we will die like those in the Temple and at the construction site.
Unprepared.
Repentance isn’t just saying we’re sorry.
Repentance is to stop dumping our toxic waste. It means a change of heart, of
going in the other direction, toward God instead of away from God.
What about the sins that we justify, or the
ones of which we are not aware?
Ultimately, we are saved by grace. It is, as
Paul says, “the free gift of God.”
This does not mean we are off the hook. We
seek to serve others, to love them, and to build people up, particularly any that
we have harmed, because we love them, because we want to. We do what we do in
response to what we have been given. Not to get it.
Therefore, fix the problem, not the blame.
That is God’s answer to our sin, the way that evil enters the world. God’s
answer is the Cross.
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