Guidelines For Living

Guest (Male): Take a break from your busy schedule and join Harold Sala for Guidelines for Living.

Harold Sala: We live in a broken imperfect world, and one of the results is that bad things do happen to good people. But when we are confronted with that stark reality, almost always our hearts cry out, “Why, God? Why did this happen to me?”

Now please understand, I am not an armchair authority, an expert who has all the answers, but believe me, friend, I have done some hard searching with a Bible in one hand and a handkerchief in the other to keep the tears from blotting the words on the page. I have sat at the bedsides of literally dozens of people and I have asked silently many, many times, “God, why did this have to happen to this person?”

Together let's examine some of the reasons that people kick around answering the question, “Why bad things happen to good people?” One of the most common answers that you will hear is that someone really isn't so good, that the bad thing happened as the result of personal failure or wrongdoing. While this may be true in some cases, that doesn't really satisfy me. Do you know why? God knows the heart; we don't. That answer almost always seems to come from self-righteous individuals who point at the person who's down and say, “It must be because you're not as good as I am.”

You first read about this in the book of Job. When covered with boils and robbed of his family and possessions by one tragedy after another, Job was alone and grief-stricken. That's when his friends came to comfort him. But their comfort turned to bitter accusations as they said, “Job, why don't you confess your fault and perhaps God will have mercy?” Even his wife counseled, “Curse God and die.” But he did not die, and he struggled with the very issue for days and months.

In the New Testament, we find this same suggestion when Jesus was confronted with a man who had been born blind. The disciples ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents?” You can read about it in the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John. If it is true that tragedy is punishment, it would also be true that God is unjust and cruel because a lot of innocent individuals suffer.

Have you ever walked through the pediatrics department of a hospital and viewed some of the tiny babies with their bodies racked by pain? Are we to think that these innocent individuals are being punished for something they have done or their parents did? As I mentioned earlier, it is because of this that some reject God, attempting to define God in terms of tragedy rather than define the tragedy in terms of God.

When bad things happen to good people, our conscience always cries out and we think, “Well, perhaps it's because of my personal failure this happened.” Nobody's perfect. Even the best of us are sinners, and when we begin to think like that, we have forgotten some important biblical truths. Christians are not perfect, just forgiven. We have lost sight that when Christ died for the sins of the world, he also died for my sins and my failures.

We have lost sight of the fact that because God loves me, he sent his Son to bring me back into his family, adopted as his own child. When we try to explain why bad things happen to good people in terms of our personal failure, we lose sight of the fact that God does not love me or punish me in terms of my essential goodness, but because of the very nature of his goodness and his love.

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