When something terrible happens to you or to someone you love, your faith in the following four Biblical claims can waver.
If these four statements are all true, then what is the answer to the age-old question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” I want to assure you that there are several reasons why God may cause or allow your personal tragedy to occur, and I shall list some of them here. However, I discourage you from hoping that these purely rational arguments will have any impact on your emotions. There is nothing I can say or do to diminish your pain. The only purpose of this web page is to show you that giving up your faith in God is not necessary to explain what has happened.
God can see into the future, so He knows what will happen as a result of your tragedy. He can also determine what would have happened if your tragedy didn’t occur. If He determines that the end result of what happened to you is better for you than if it didn't happen, He may bestow grace upon you by making sure that it happens. There is a song that says, “Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers… Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”
God assures us in Revelation 21 that, although there will be ups and downs along the way, He will make sure that there will be a happy ending that will bring Him great glory. God is committed to His plan, and He won’t allow anything to derail it. You may believe that what happened to you is terrible, but if you saw the whole picture, you would understand. God can see our entire universe across all time, so He is qualified to determine whether His plan would not succeed if He prevented your tragedy. In fact, that bad thing that happened to you might help to bring the kingdom of Heaven. Are you sure it won’t?
So you think that thing that happened to you is bad. But are you absolutely sure? You don’t know everything. If you knew all the relevant facts, you might realize that the thing that looks bad to you is actually good.
Suppose someone cuts you off on the highway. That seems like a bad thing, right? But what if you find out that the driver’s wife is lying on the back seat bleeding to death, and he is rushing her to the hospital? Now are you so sure that it was truly bad for him to cut you off?
God is omniscient. He can see the entire space-time of our universe. He knows better than you do whether that thing is really bad.
Even if you did know everything, who made you the judge of what is bad? Are you always right? Do you never make mistakes? Don’t be so sure that the thing you think is bad is really bad. God is the only judge in the highest supreme court.
Because it could have been worse.
Maybe that bad thing is the lesser of two evils. You have no way of knowing what would have happened otherwise.
Because what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
Just as fire refines silver, pain can make you a better person. It can strengthen you, humble you, give you wisdom, etc.
Because He is teaching you.
Like a good parent, God disciplines His children to let them know when they have done something wrong. Perhaps, if you didn’t learn this lesson now, you would make a much bigger mistake later with far more painful consequences.
Because people have free will.
If the bad thing was caused by somebody else, remember that God refuses to overrule the free will of His people. If they choose to do terrible things, He will not change their minds. He certainly has the power to brainwash all of us in order to turn us into perfectly obedient robots, but He will get so much more glory from your praise if good things happen despite the wicked hearts of humans.
Because God wants you to depend on Him.
If bad things never happened, you might think that you have everything under control, and you don’t need God at all. But God wants you to depend on Him.
Because you are worshiping idols.
God has made it abundantly clear that the second commandment is very important to Him, and He exiled the Judahites to Babylon when they violated it. So, when you love something or someone more than Him, when you spend more of your time focusing on your idol, when you put your trust in that thing or person instead of God, when you depend on anything other than God, He often ends your disobedience by taking your idol away from you.
Because He wants us to learn from our mistakes.
We think that World War II was a terribly bad thing, because millions of people died. But consider the fact that fewer people would have died if America had entered the war earlier. If we learn from history, then the next time a dictator starts to gain too much power, America will act quickly. If not for the lesson of World War II, America might stay out of the war for years. And that future dictator will have far more devastating weapons, so this mistake could result in the extinction of the human race.
Because you are not really good.
Are you really a good person? What is the definition of a good person? Is it someone who does good things more often than they do bad things? No, that is a partially good person. But a truly good person always does good things and never does bad things. So bad things cannot happen to good people, because no person is good, not one. Every one of us has committed at least one sin, and the just penalty for one little sin is death. (Romans 6:23)
You see, God is good. God is perfectly good. God is like a beautiful wedding dress that is perfectly white. You want that dress more than you have ever wanted anything before, but it costs a fortune. Still, if you wore any other dress at your wedding, you would know that there is another one that is more beautiful. So, you buy that perfect dress, planning to return it for a refund after your wedding.
On your wedding day, you look in the mirror, and you are ecstatic! There has never been a more beautiful bride. As you walk to the sanctuary, you feel like you are floating. But unfortunately, you aren’t floating, and you carelessly trip on something and fall forward onto the floor. And as bad luck would have it, there happens to be a push pin sticking straight up. It pierces your breast and a drop of blood emerges.
Now there is a tiny red spot on your dress. The dress is completely ruined. It’s no longer perfect, and you dread being seen in it. There’s no way you can return it, because, with that one tiny flaw, the dress is now completely worthless.
Like the dress, God is perfectly good, and the smallest sin would ruin His perfection. So if you think you’re a good person, you are sadly mistaken.
Because happiness exists.
Everything is generated from its opposite. If we were always happy, we wouldn’t know what happiness is. The word “happy” wouldn’t even be part of the language, because it would be meaningless without the word “unhappy”.
Because the end justifies the means.
God believes that the end justifies the means. What looks like a bad thing to us can prove to be very good in the end. There are many examples of this in the Bible. Here are a few:
-
God decided that Jesus should suffer a horrible death on the cross, and all of his disciples thought that was a bad thing. But in the end, all of the followers of Jesus were forgiven for their sins, saving them from the punishment of God’s wrath that they deserved.
-
God caused Joseph to be sold into slavery and spend years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Joseph thought bad things were happening to him. But as a result of all this, Joseph became very powerful, so he was able to save his family, God’s chosen people, from a famine.
-
God led the Israelites into Egypt, where they were enslaved for 400 years. That surely seemed like a very bad thing to them. But it enabled God to rescue them and earn their love, trust, worship, and glory.
-
God permitted Satan to ruin Job’s life, which seemed very bad to Job. But in the end, Job maintained his faith despite his suffering, which resulted in great glory for God.
Unfortunately, you might not learn what the good consequences of that bad thing are while you are here on Earth. For example, imagine that two young people got married in ancient Israel. Their entire family and all their friends surrounded them to celebrate. And everything seemed so good to them.
But then, the Roman empire, which controlled Israel at the time, conquered a new province. They wanted to populate it, so they randomly chose people from throughout the empire and forcibly moved them to the new province. The young couple were two of the unfortunate people who were chosen. They were absolutely devastated. They had lived in Israel all their lives. Their entire family and all of their friends lived there. They were losing the life they knew and loved so much to go to a strange place where they knew nobody. They couldn’t understand why God would allow such a terribly bad thing to happen to them.
In the new province, they had children, and their children had children. Meanwhile, in Rome, Julius Caeser was murdered by Marcus Brutus and Gaius Longinus, and all of his people were forced to flee for their lives. They arrived in that province, where the people welcomed them and protected them from their enemies. After some time, they returned to Rome and regained control. With their revived power, they decided to reward those people who supported them, so they declared all of the people in that province to be Roman citizens.
Well, one of the great grandchildren of the two people who were exiled was a man named Paul. He moved to Jerusalem, and then he become a follower of Jesus Christ. He proceeded to bring God to the Gentiles. But he got arrested and sentenced to flogging.
But as he was about to flogged, he reported that he was a Roman citizen. That meant that he could not be flogged, so he was released. And he went on to save many many people. So that bad thing that happened to the young couple resulted in a very good thing happening to a great number of people. Although the couple died without ever knowing why that terribly bad thing happened to them, it worked out for good in the end.
(By the way, I don’t know if this story is really true. But it might be…)
Because Satan rules the Earth.
In the current age, Satan is the prince of this world. God is letting him run rampant, causing people to do terrible things. But the time will come when Satan gets what he deserves.
Because it will motivate you to improve.
When everything is going well, we tend to become complacent. We don’t have any incentive to change anything, so we stagnate. But God wants us to continually grow and mature. In His mercy, He determines what we are doing wrong, and He shows us why we should change. This motivates us to learn and improve to bring Him glory.
Because natural disasters are necessary.
Natural disasters, such as earthquakes, tornadoes, and tsunamis, can kill and wound great numbers of people. But without them, we might be much worse off. Natural disasters might be a necessary consequence of features of a planet that are required to sustain life. For example, we need an atmosphere to protect us from meteors, but that comes with a variety of weather conditions, including tornadoes.