Does God Make Bad Things Happen?

We live in a world that is full of tragedy and suffering.  It’s a world of earthquakes, tidal waves and hurricanes.  It’s world where people get cancer and a host of other hideous diseases.  It’s a world where terrible accidents happen and people lose life and limb.  It’s a world that resorts to conflict and war to solve its problems.  It’s a world of injustice where bad things not only happen to good people, but where good things happen to bad people.  It’s a world of sin where humans have found a million different ways to inflict pain upon each other.  It’s an ambiguous world, where beautiful sunrises are offset by destructive tornados; healthy children are offset by children dying from disease, malnutrition and violence.  

 Much of the world’s pain is caused by human sin and disobedience.  God has given humankind freedom to do whatever evil we choose – even nail the Son of God to a cross.

 Some of the pain of the world is caused by living in a finite world that is governed by laws of a natural world. 

 Some of the world’s pain is inexplicable and cannot be traced to any explanation. 

 Does God make bad things happen, or why does God allow bad things to happen? Until something happens to you personally, these questions can remain mostly intellectual.  But then something strikes your life or the life of someone close, and suddenly it is no longer intellectual, but personal. 

 When it’s your cancer that is being talked about or the illness of a family member or friend, it’s a whole different deal.  Then the issue takes on a real face, real feelings, and real pathos. 

 When something horrible happens, a common human response is a strong desire to make sense of it; to make it fit into a larger purpose or scheme of things.  And, we sometimes desire to make sense of things so intensely we are willing to settle for “pop theology”, or explanations not well grounded in New Testament Faith.     

 In order to make sense of the nonsensical we may conclude, “It was his time to go,” or “God took her from us,” or “God is testing,” or “God has a bigger plan that we cannot understand,” or “It is just God’s will. We must accept it;” all statements that strongly imply that God is somehow behind whatever the bad thing is.  Some people seem to derive a peculiar sense of comfort from such statements, but if we stretch those statements very far they begin to sound absurd and extraordinarily troublesome.  If it is true that God is behind the bad things that happen in this world, when we stretch that thinking out, the bottom line is that God is sadistic and cruel, a God who derives perverse pleasure from inflicting hideous pain and grief upon the human race.  That is not a very comforting to me. In that way of thinking God is a monster.  A part of what is behind these explanations is the idea of God the “Big O”, and I am not talking about the tire store.  We speak of God as being omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent – all-knowing, ever-present and all-powerful.  I affirm God the Big O, but I do not think the God the Big O automatically means God is behind everything that happens.

 So where do we go for help?  A child’s game and Martin Luther can enlighten us on this issue.  Our favorite game as children was “hide-and-seek.” We played it with very specific rules.    First, we found a place to hide.   Second, someone was “it,” and their job was to find us.  Third, there was a time limit, like fifteen minutes.  Fourth, at the end of the fifteen minutes someone would blow a whistle ending the game, and everybody was to immediately go to a “revealing place.”   If you had not been found you did not have to say were you had been hiding.  You could keep it a secret and save that hiding place for the next game.    

 In our little game we hid in order not to be found in our “hiding place.”  We only were found at the end of the game at the “revealing place” where we came out in plain sight.

 Martin Luther talked about a “hidden God.”  He said that God actually and actively hides from humanity so as not to be found where human beings desire to find God. 

 Luther would tell us that much of our thinking about God’s relationship to the occurrence of bad things belong to the realm of the hidden God.  We can focus our search around aforementioned questions and keep looking and looking for answers, but the bottom line is that the answers will remain hidden.   All of our explanations, theologies and belief systems about God’s role in the bad things belong in the realm of the hidden God.  There are no definitive answers provided, and we could spend the rest of our lives looking for definitive answers and we never find any that are truly comforting and empowering.

 But Luther did not stop with the hidden God any more than our child’s game did.  Luther said that God hides in order to be found where God wants to be found, not where we want to find him.  The whole idea in our child’s game was not to be found, so we could ultimately go to the revealing place and say “here I am!”

 So where does God reveal himself?  The place to turn to experience God in the midst of bad stuff and the suffering it causes is to Jesus Christ.  It’s in Jesus Christ that God is revealed.  God is not hidden and cloaked in Jesus Christ.  God takes on a real face; a real life.  In John’s gospel we read, “No one has ever seen God. (hidden)  It is God the only Son who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” (revealed) (John 1:18)

 If we are to find answers we must go to the “revealing place,” or should I say “revealing person,” that being, the person of Jesus Christ, God’s own Son, who reveals the heart of God.  Anywhere else is futile. 

 I will read five short passages:

Isaiah says,   “He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity… he was despised, and we held him of no account. Surely he has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases…” (53:2-4)

 In Matthew Jesus says, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”  (25:40)

 From Mark, while dying on the cross Jesus cried, “My God, My God why have you forsaken me?” (15:34)

 From John 11, when Jesus arrived at the house of Mary, Martha and Lazarus after Lazarus had died and saw Mary weeping.  It’s the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.”  (11:35)

 As Jesus was about to ride his donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, from the Mt of Olives he looked over the Kidron Valley at the great city of Jerusalem and Luke tells us that “he wept over it”  for they did not know “the things that make for peace.” (19:41-42)

 What we see in passages like these is Jesus revealing the heart of God.  God is no longer hidden.  These are not pictures of a harsh, cruel and sadistic God who enjoys inflicting pain and grief upon the human race.  What we see in Jesus is a God who so totally enters the human condition that he takes human pain into his own soul.  Our pain is his pain.  Our grief is his grief.  Our suffering is his suffering.  Our illnesses become his.   Our despair is his despair. 

 Does God make bad things happen?   Does God allow bad things to happen?  When bad things happen are they a part of a greater plan we cannot see?   Are all things God’s will that we must just reluctantly accept?

 My dear friends, these are hidden God questions, and we can discuss them ad nauseam and never really get the answers we want because they are part of the realm of the hidden God.  God hides himself on these issues.  We must look to the place and person where he reveals himself. 

 The questions we need to ask are the revealed God questions like:  “When bad things happen whether it is due to our own sin, someone else’s sin, or a form of innocent and undeserved suffering, what is God’s heart toward me and toward the world?”

 The Christian Faith declares that Jesus died on the cross.  This was God’s supreme act of solidarity with the human race.  On the cross he took into himself everything that would separate us from God. On the third day God raised him from death to new life. 

 You see, the Christian Faith is not an insurance policy that prevents bad things from happening.  Rather, the Christian Faith is more like a blanket of assurance that envelopes at all times in life, even when bad things do happen – and they will.    

 God shares in the pain of the world and takes it into himself through Jesus Christ.  The promise is that no matter what happens we are not forsaken by God, but God is with us; and through faith we can be given what we need to cope, to endure, to reach out to others in love, to not lose hope. 

 I conclude with one of the supreme statements of faith and assurance in the New Testament from Romans 8 that for me is a frequently a verse that I turn in the midst of bad things. 

“For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, not angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.”  (8:38-39)