Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

A man reveals to me that his father died too soon, while the son was yet a young elementary student.

That absence, that pain, it is still felt after forty plus years.

If God is so good, why would he take his father away? His father was a good man; he was loved, he was needed.

Why would God take him and not someone doing wicked evil things in the world?

The common question is: why does God let bad things happen to good people.

If God is so good, why would he let something bad happen to someone, something bad that he could prevent.

Since God is all-powerful and only good, you would think that God would intervene more often, keeping really bad things from happening to undeserving people.

Do children ever deserve to be assaulted or forced into horrid slave labor? You get the point.

So why does God let bad things happen to good people?

When I try to articulate an answer to that question, there is not an easy, simple response.

Should God intervene every-time somebody does something bad to an undeserving person?

If not every time, how often?

Which conditions should be automatic-interventions?

God can’t intervene every time, and even if he could, he wouldn’t; a miracle by definition makes it a rarity.

That God does intervene at times is something to be thankful for, though often it prompts resentment by those who wish it for themselves in their own plight and not for another.

So God can’t win.

If he lets people abide by the free-will he grants them, then he gets blamed for not over-riding free-will more often when it is abused.

If God has not granted man free-will, then we can fairly blame God for letting bad things happen to good people, because God is directing all of our thoughts and actions, since we have no free-will.

So: does God “let” bad things happen to good people?

Is it as if God is standing by a river watching a child fall in, doing nothing when he could do something to save the drowning, screaming boy?

Is that the implication?

That God watches atrocities happen, letting them happen when he could flick his finger and kill the perpetrators and save the innocent victims?

Is God able but not willing?

This is all very philosophical and at this point not very Christian.

A Christian reflection on this topic must include the story of Jesus Christ.

It doesn’t do us much good to ask hypothetical questions about what God can and cannot do if we do not focus on what Jesus Christ does and says.

Scripture teaches us that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh; when we see Jesus we see the Father.

Jesus Christ is the one who creates, sustains, redeems and restores Creation and all within it.

Thus, the real question: Does Jesus Christ let bad things happen to good people?

Well, what do the Gospels tell us about Jesus responding to the bad things that happen to good people?

Take for example, Jesus Christ himself.

Could we agree that he is the ideal “good person”?

If anyone was undeserving of an unjust “bad thing”, Jesus is the guy.

And how did Jesus respond to the bad things that happened to him?

Did he shake his fist at God? Did he wonder why God was letting this happen?

No and No.

Jesus seems to assume that this world we abide in is bent, broken, corrupted, infected with evil.

Bad things happen to people in this world.

That’s just the way the world has become.

Jesus doesn’t ask God why he lets bad things happen to innocent people.

Jesus seeks to use the bad things that have happened to him as a platform to save the very ones who do the bad things to him.

In Jesus Christ, we don’t see him questioning God, but rather our assumptions about God.

Jesus tells us little about why bad things happen to specific people.

He implies that if something bad happened to you, and you didn’t deserve it, don’t shake your fist at God, but rather seek to forgive the perpetrator, bring about justice if possible, establish peace, and overcome evil with good.

But still I wonder: Why do bad things happen to good people?

There are many theories; but the lived experience of humanity reveals that we live in a world where evil has reached a vast complexity.

Bad people do bad things on purpose; good people do bad things on purpose; bad and good people do bad things by accident.

You get billions of people doing bad things even just once in a while, and you have a recipe for evil on a grandiose, horrific, painful level.

Does God afflict people with diseases and cancers randomly or out of his divine plan?

Jesus says little about the source of the diseases, he points out through his words and actions that God is primarily focused on healing people from their afflictions.

Jesus demonstrated again and again that God has come as a man to bring good things upon us.

God is good, all that he creates is inherently good, he can only do what is good.

He doesn’t afflict us, he comes to restore us; we are already afflicted, he has come to heal us.

Diseases, cancer, health related problems are not doled out by Jesus to people, they are a result of being human in our world.

Everybody has to die of something.

It’s how we live and die that Jesus is most concerned about.

Jesus grieves when people die horrible deaths, he knows what it is like.

He grieves when people live and then die horrible deaths all alone, abandoned, tortured, mocked, and desecrated.

He is opposed to it: the problem is that many of us are not.

Jesus is the head, Christians are supposed to be his body.

Jesus is supposed to be able to get more done in this world by having millions and millions of adherents continuing his work of good news: forgiveness of sins, restoration of the whole person, alignment with the goodwill of God, etc.

Jesus could probably stop more bad things happening to innocent people if more people were committed to the same cause.

The real question is not: why does God/Jesus let bad things happen to good people.

The real question is: why do we let bad things happen to good people?

People suffer and die on this earth. That’s the way of this world.

But it doesn’t have to be the only part of the story we fixate on.

My mother, while a young teenager, lost her mother to cancer. Then in college she lost her father to a heart attack. Then when I was in college she was diagnosed with cancer. And then diabetes. And then one of her sons died of a brain tumor. And then another one of her sons was killed by a drunk driver. Then her husband of 39 years died unexpectedly of brain cancer.

Why do some people have bad things happen to them, things they don’t deserve, and yet they emerge from those experiences still trusting God, even if just by a thread?

The world is so complex, we can’t full know why things happen.

It’s not that God made those things happen.

But God is willing to help bring good out of those bad things.

If God could do something good, he would do it.

So all the bad things that happen, if God could stop each one of them, he would.

But he doesn’t. Because he can’t.

He can’t override our free-will; if he did, we wouldn’t have free-will.

This doesn’t “limit” God, it just states the obvious: you can’t have a square triangle, you can’t have two plus two equalling five: it is not within the realm of reality.

What Jesus has proven God to be is the One committed to the Reconciliation of all things, the Restoration of Creation, the Ground of our Being, the Source of Reality, the Renewal of Humanity, the Rescue of Sinners, the Renovation of our Hearts.

This is what God can do, and in doing so, he is overcoming evil with good.

More could be said on what is the most existential, most complex, most personal experiences of all humanity.

But this post is personal for me, not abstract; it’s a way for me to work out in my heart how to find meaning with Christ in the suffering.

This encouragement from Saint Paul to the Christians going through painful trials in Corinth was read at the funeral for my brother Matt; he was my second brother to die. This text always stuck with me and is a guide for me in striving to have good come out of my suffering:

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who consoles us in all our grief and suffering; with the comfort we ourselves receive from God, we can compassionately care for those in any kind of hardship and tragedy. 

For just as we are in solidarity with Christ Jesus who suffered, so also Christ’s consolation abides and abounds through us.

[St. Paul to the Christians in Corinth, 2/1.2-5, adapted from the NIV]

May you find comfort and consolation, redemption and healing amidst the suffering of your life and those you love, through Christ who suffers with us.

(this post adapted from one originally authored by me in March, 2008)