If There Is A God Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People

Life happens. This bumper sticker slogan is an appropriate answer to this age old question. I could stop there, but that leaves open the question as to why God allows it to happen to good people. Jesus addressed this as part of His sermon on the mount in Matthew 5: 45. In this verse Jesus says “He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (KJV). That is a statement of fact from the mouth of Jesus. That is a sufficient answer concerning good and bad happening to both good and bad people. Wrap it up and move one, right? Well, I could but I will offer just a little more insight than that.

Root Cause Analysis

Root cause analysis is used every day in the business world. It simply means to dig down into a problem until you reach the original issue that created the final unsatisfactory result. Let’s take a moment and perform a root cause analysis on our topic question. To do that, let’s accept there is a God and approach from that view point. If there is not a God, then there is no governing body controlling life. We are just the summation of inputs and outputs with a factor of randomness thrown in. Therefore, the viewpoint that there is no God is not pertinent to our analysis of this question. We can now move forward with our examination.

We Chose This

In Deuteronomy 30, Moses laid out options before the Jewish people. In verse 19-20, he put a bow on the options my stating, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to Him, for He is your life and length of days” (ESV). The people chose to not to obey which means they chose the curse. They curse was applied in a blanket fashion and affected both good and bad people. But hold on a second! This was a conversation to the Jews not to the Gentiles. Why should this apply to Gentiles, too? Good question, and we could continue down that route and talk about Galatians 3: 28-29. This states there is neither Jew nor Greek and we are all one people in Christ. However, in the spirit of root cause analysis, it is more appropriate to dig deeper to find the root cause.

The Choice Was Made In the Garden

God created a perfect world centered in the Garden of Eden. There He placed Adam and Eve along with all the necessities of life. He also placed one tree that he told Adam and Eve not to eat from or they would surely die. You may wonder why He even gave them the opportunity to disobey by placing that tree there. I’m not God, but I think He had no choice but to do so. He had to put something in place to give humanity a chance to exercise our free will. Otherwise, his creation would be incomplete. Most all of us know that Eve was tricked by the devil in the form of a serpent into eating from that tree. Many of us overlook that Adam was right there with her when this happened. At that moment, death entered the world along with all the bad things that comes with it. The Biblical story of Adam and Eve places the blame of all of the problems in the world clearly on their shoulders. We have found our true root cause! Disobeying God, also know as sin, is the reason bad things happen. Much like the curse in Deuteronomy, the negative results of sin lay like a blanket across all of humanity.

Its Not What Happens, But It Is How You Handle It

Don’t be surprised when bad things happen. Please, don’t blame God for them either. It is our fault as humans that we have to deal with the curse of sin and all it brings. God did provide a way for us to escape the ultimate final cost of sin through His son Jesus. By His death and resurrection the price for sin has been paid. All we have to do is believe and accept the gift. Yes, we can get through life being a good person by today’s standards without Jesus, but He is the only one that can also get us through death. That great hope makes it so much easier to handle the bad things that happen to us as we complete our time on this earth.