Why bad things happen ............. Parables 758

July 23, 2002

When the popcorn bowl runs out, I like to suck the butter and salt out of those partly popped kernels in the bottom. Sometimes I gnaw on them, despite a little voice that tells me to stop it. Once I cracked a filling in a back tooth. My dentist added insult to injury by reminding me I’d made a foolish decision.

This incident reminds me of that huge question: Why does God allow suffering? People in every corner of the world ask it. While the biblical answers may not satisfy everyone, over the next few weeks I’ll offer a few that immensely help me.

First, three foundations. One, suffering does not always imply God’s punishment. Sometimes it does, but not every time.

Two, while God can bring good out of anything, that is not always the reason He allows bad things to happen. Sometimes they are just bad.

Third, God does take responsibility for everything. Job said, “Shall we accept good from God, and not evil.” The very next line reads, “In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.”

Jeremiah repeated the thought: “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that both calamities and good things come?” While the mind of God does not make sense to our limited perspective, yet the Bible affirms we can trust Him anyway. It also reveals a few why’s concerning evil and suffering.

One reason we suffer is that we bring it on ourselves. We make foolish choices, and our actions have consequences. Without them, we would never regret foolishness, or change. Ecclesiastes puts it in the negative: “When the sentence for a crime is not quickly carried out, the hearts of the people are filled with schemes to do wrong.”

Cause and effect are important to our stability. Water should satisfy our thirst. Flipping a switch should turn the lights on or off. We expect results from what we do and if they do not happen, we are perplexed, even thrown off balance.

This applies to both good and foolish choices. When I bite a hard popcorn kernel, my less-strong fillings are apt to take a beating. When I ignore God’s moral warnings, my life will fall apart. When I behave and obey Him, I experience not only His blessing but His pleasure.

The foolish choices of others can cause us suffering too. Children suffer in war. People die at the hands of reckless drivers. A construction worker neglects a safety check. Airline mechanics do too. Innocent people suffer consequences.

Consequences should change our choices but what about drivers who run stop signs, make illegal turns, drive too fast, and cut in too quick, who never get a traffic ticket or ever have an accident? Or consider an elderly couple, normally careful drivers, yet one day he failed to stop at a stop sign. They were hit by a truck and both died. Does this make “cause and effect,” and God, capriciousness?

Christians know God takes responsibility for everything. In the case of the elderly couple, He had reasons for allowing their suffering and death. They were people of faith and belonged to Him, so they were not being punished — Jesus already took their punishment for sin.

Neither did they die so ultimate good would happen. It did not, at least for them here on earth. Their death was a tragic event, even though God could have stopped it. For the most part, it happened as a result of a wrong choice.

But God also has reasons for not applying that rule of cause and effect to others who seem to deserve it. Maybe He is giving them a second chance. Maybe He has a greater plan for their lives.

Sometimes people blame God when trouble strikes, but I would not want God to change the rule of cause and effect. When I do something dumb, I do not like the consequences, yet without their predictability (in general), the world would make even less sense than it does.