Why do bad things happen to good people?

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Accepted Answer

You probably aren't asking this as a theory. Something has happened — to you, or to someone you love — and the question underneath it is more personal: Why this? Why us? Did we do something wrong? The Bible doesn't scold you for asking. It puts the question in the mouth of Job, a man it introduces as "perfect and upright" — and then it lets him lose everything in a single day: his wealth, his servants, and all ten of his children. If goodness were a shield against trouble, Job's story could not exist. Scripture never promises that the righteous get skipped. It promises something else, and it's worth hearing in full. First, notice what Job said when his own wife, watching him sit in ashes scraping his sores, told him to curse God and die: "What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" — Job 2:10 (KJV) Job wasn't being punished, and that's the first thing to settle, because it's the thing you'll wonder at 2 a.m.: Is God against me? Is this payback? The book of Job opens in heaven, where God is not angry with Job — He is confident in him. Dennis Carden, teaching on the cup of testing, puts it this way: "the only thing that matters in all of your testing is that you retain your faith." The test, in his words, reveals faith; it doesn't exist because God found a fault He had to burn out. And consider whose life that pattern follows. In Gethsemane, Jesus Himself prayed over a cup He did not want, and then said: "The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" — John 18:11 (KJV) God did not spare His own Son the bitter cup. Whatever your trouble means, it cannot mean that God has singled you out for rejection — He did not exempt the best man who ever lived. But that raises the next question, and it's a fair one: Then is it just meaningless? Does the pain accomplish anything at all? Kyle Thayer preaches on this under an unlikely title — pain as "the unwanted gift." His words: "There's a gift in this world that we all need… and that unwanted gift today is pain." He tells of the scientists who built a perfect sealed environment — perfect sunlight, perfect air, perfect soil — and watched their trees grow tall and fast, and then begin to fall. They had left out one ingredient: wind. Without resistance, the trees never grew strong enough to stand. That is not a claim that your pain is good — a diagnosis, a grave, a betrayal are not good, and this answer won't call them good. It is a claim that God does not waste pain, and that Paul, beaten and shipwrecked and stoned, could weigh his own and say: "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us." — Romans 8:18 (KJV) Which brings you to the verse you may have been quoted already, possibly by someone who meant well and landed it badly: "All things work together for good." Hear the whole promise, the way Kenneth Carpenter preaches it — with its condition attached, because the condition is where the comfort actually is: "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." — Romans 8:28 (KJV) The verse doesn't say all things are good. Joseph's brothers sold him, and years later he told them, "Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good" (Genesis 50:20). The evil stayed evil; God meant it unto good — He worked in it, over years, toward an end nobody could see from inside the pit. Your place in the story may be the pit chapter. The promise is about the Author, not about the chapter. So what do you do while you're in it? Two things, both from people who have been where you are. Thayer's challenge, out of his own story — a heart failing in a hospital room, doctors preparing a transplant that, in the end, he never needed — is to move the opposite direction from the one pain suggests: "When you experience pain in your life, that's when you need to get closer to God." Not away from Him, not away from His people. And bring the questions with you. "God is not confused with your questions," Thayer says. "He is not scared with your questions." And Carpenter points to the end of Job's story: the turning came when Job prayed — not when he got explanations, because he never did get those, but when he prayed for the friends who had failed him, "the Lord turned the captivity of Job." You may not get your why. What Scripture keeps putting in front of you is a God who receives good and evil at the same hand without flinching, who drank the cup before He asked you to, and who is working in the thing you would never have chosen toward a good you cannot see yet. Hold on to Him in it. That is not a small thing — in the testing, Carden would tell you, it is the whole thing.