Why Bad Things Happen to Good People
A blind man is run over by a truck. An earthquake hits Haiti and Chile. A young man with a promising career is shot dead in cold blood. Children are abused, kidnapped and raped. Indeed bad things happen all the time and that none of us is immune from bad things (Spinney, 2006). The people mentioned above are what we would call good people who we believe do not deserve to die. We then hear ourselves asking why them and we begin an endless tirade of complaints to God and accusing Him of injustice. Yet deep inside, each one of us longs for an explanation. What then does religion have to say about the problem of why bad things happen to good people The Christian theological tradition provides some clear-cut explanations that shed light on this seeming injustice and enlightens the layman on his ignorance in this aspect of religion. The explanations of Christian theology are logical and above all, enlightening and humbling.
The Lesson from the Book of Job
The Book of Job is one of the books of the Hebrew Bible which relates the story of a man named Job and his trials, his discussions with his friends as to the nature of his suffering, his challenges to God, and finally Gods response to him and his friends. The lesson in the Book of Job provides insight as to why bad things happen to good people.
Gods Will Transcends Innocence. First of all, the story of Job is a proof that sometimes God allows Satan to do his own tests on people. The Lord said to Satan, All right, everything Job has is in your power, but you must not hurt Job himself (NIV Holy Bible, Job 1.12).
Another insight from the story of Job is that despite ones supposed goodness and obedience to the moral and religious laws, bad things may still happen to someone. Johns oath of innocence in Job 311-40 states that he has not committed all the sins like lust, lies, adultery, and idolatry. He also contended that he has not failed to help his slaves, the poor, the needy and even not treated his enemies unfairly. Yet bad things happened to him because God willed it that Satan test him. This implies the omnipotence of Gods Will over mans innocence.
Gods Power Transcends Human Logic. Jobs friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zohar declared to Job their thoughts on the nature of his suffering. Long (2008) states that Eliphaz lists a catalogue of Jobs missteps and maintains that God punished Job for the wickedness he did not admit (Job 15.17-35 22.5-20). Bildad, on the other hand, reinforced the theology of retribution (Long, 2008) in chapters 8 and 18. The third friend, Zophar, is figuratively speaking, apoplectic (Long, 2008), and speaks of a wisdom in chapters 11 and 20 that he believed Job himself fails to understand. However, all their logical constructs and self-satisfied theology are no match for Gods Will and shocking amorality (Long, 2008) in chapters 38-41. The Lord God says, Who are you to question my wisdom with your ignorant empty words (Job 38.2), and spends the next three chapters giving Job an account of His Power until Job finally concedes in Job 42.2 admitting that the Lord is all-powerful and that He can do everything He wants. This implies that Gods power is morally indifferent to the problem of why bad things happen to good people.
Somehow the Book of Job also echoes Isaiah 55.8 in which the Lord says, My thoughtsare not like yours, and my ways are different from yours. God therefore is beyond the human notion of good and bad, of good people and the bad things that we believe are happening to them.
Trial and Temptation
The idea that bad things happen to good people may be anchored upon the idea that bad things may be in the form of trials, which are actually good things, and temptations, or the truly bad things.
A lot of the bad things happening to good people are actually mere trials, or tests, and such are from God. The purpose of trials is implied in Romans 5.3-4 which states that weboast of our troubles or trials, because we know that trouble produces endurance, endurance brings Gods approval, and his approval creates hope. And the next verse says that this hope does not disappoint us. Trials are therefore good and always possess the hidden purpose of making us better people. It should also be noted that God frequently sends trials to the just who, through their patienceincrease in virtue (Aquinas, 1939).
Furthermore, God has already anticipated the events that will follow the beginning of the trial and His good purpose is revealed only after a certain amount of suffering. In Genesis 45.5-8, we hear Joseph telling his brothers do not be upset or blame yourselves because you sold me here. It was really God who sent me ahead of you to save peoples livesGod sent me ahead of youto make sure that you and your descendants survive so it was not really you who sent me here, but God. The aforementioned verse clearly implies that even though suffering may have taken place, that even though bad things may happen to good people, these bad things are actually preordained trials with a spiritual purpose, hence actually not intrinsically bad.
On the other hand, the truly bad things that may happen to good people are sins caused by temptations, but these temptations do not come from God but from the devil, and that they are not brought upon by God but rather by mans volitions.
Temptations. St. Thomas Aquinas classified temptations into three.
Temptations of the Flesh. Man is tempted by the flesh in two ways.
First, the flesh incites man to evil. The flesh seeks its own pleasures, specifically called carnal pleasures, in which man indulges himself and consequently neglects spiritual things (Aquinas, 1939). This is confirmed by the apostle James when he said, Every man is tempted by his own concupiscence (1 James 1.13).
Secondly, man is tempted by the flesh by enticing him away from good (Aquinas, 1939). This presupposes the instances where the flesh puts obstacles in the way of the spirit. The corruptible body is a load upon the soul (Wis. 9.15). Indeed, the temptations of the flesh prove to be most severe to man as the flesh is something united to him.
The sufferings of good people due to the consequences of lust, gluttony, pride and sloth are actually works of the devil and since they happen due to the volitions of man, they are actually brought upon by man on himself.
Temptations of the Devil. Even when the flesh is subdued, man may still be tempted by the devil with extreme force (Aquinas, 1939). The Apostle Paul says in his Epistle to the Ephesians that mans struggle is not against flesh and blood, but againstthe rules of the world ofdarkness, against the spirits of wickedness (Eph. 6.12).
The devil does two things when he tempts man. First, he deceives a man first. Paul himself, in his Epistle to the Corinthians, says, Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light (2 Cor. 11.14). Secondly, after Satan betrays man, he leads him to sin (Aquinas, 1939).
The good that suffer from the sins of adultery, deception, lies and stealing are actually suffering these out of their own volitions.
Temptations of the World. The world has two ways of tempting man. First, the world tempts man through excessive and intemperate desire for the goods of this life (Aquinas, 1939).
The second way that man is subdued by the temptations of the world is through fears engendered by tyrants and persecutors (Aquinas, 1939). This is further supported by Paul in saying that all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution (2 Tim. 3.12).
The aforementioned statements imply that good people whose sufferings are due to the lust of money and material things as well as fear are actually also suffering out of their own free wills, which they could have controlled in the first place.
The Role of Satan
Another reason why bad things happen to good people is that Satan is trying to neutralize and destroy human history and that this very act is to be used as Gods evidence in Satans appeal to his sentence to the Lake of Fire (Ellis).
It is said that when mankind was enticed to sin in the Garden of Eden, Satan gained dominion over this earth and human history (Ellis) and that he does this in an attempt to neutralize and destroy the evidence in his trial (Ellis), and this evidence is mankind and history. Satan is actually one incredibly powerful creature against whom we would not be able to stand but with the intervention of God, Satan cannot exercise his full power and destroy humans directly en masse (Ellis).
The suffering around us is the result of living in a world that is under the dominion of Satan (Ellis). However, the fact that mankind has volition and that this volition is an integral component of the evidence to be used against Satan in his appeal trial (Ellis) means that good people will continually experience bad things, as when certain men use their volition to make bad choices (Ellis). The aforementioned statements clearly imply that since mans volition and the bad choices that arise from its use are somehow being used as evidence against Satan in his trial, then it simply follows that these bad choices are allowed by God to happen. Therefore God allows bad things to happen to good people for two reasons the given fact that God may choose not to interfere with mans volition out of love, and the fact that bad choices caused by mans volition would anyway be used against Satan during his trial.
The Role of Sin
Another attempt of the Christian theological tradition to solve the problem of why bad things happen to good people is by looking into the role that sin plays in suffering. First of all, if one looks into the Bible for reference, technically speaking there are no good people (Slick). The Bible says that All have turned aside. Together they have become useless. There is none who does good. There is not even one (NIV Holy Bible, Rom. 3.12). Moreover, in Luke 18.18, Jesus says, Why do you call Me good...No one is good except God alone. Still, Romans 3.23 states that For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Based on the aforementioned verses in the Bible, one can therefore conclude that there really arent good people and bad things happen to them. (Slick)
However, even though there are no good people according to the Bible, there are decent people who are very nicehonest, dont lie, dont steal, and treat people very well (Slick). Nevertheless, despite such decency, God still allows bad things to happen to them because of the effect of sin (Slick). Based on Romans 3.23, which states that For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, one can see that even the most decent people are not spared from sin and its deadly effects. Sin has five emotional effects and separates a person fromGod. Sin may also sadden the sinner or may scar him and that he may continue to carry the burden of sin (Halliburton). Even after his conversion, the apostle Paul still called himself chief of sinners (1 Timothy 1.15). Furthermore, sin may cause a person to become negative and overly critical of others and produce heart problems, ulcers, and emotional difficulties. Lastly, sin allows the heart to become hardened (Halliburton). In Ephesians 4.19, Paul describes the Ephesians that they have lost all feeling of shameand that they give themselves over to vice and do all sorts of indecent things. Sin may also weaken someone spiritually, making him prone to committing more sins (Aquinas, 1939). These statements all point out to the fact that sin is destructive and that since no one is spared from sin, then no one is spared from its effects.
The problem is that most people gauge their goodness not vertically but horizontally. People typically measure horizontally to determine if someone is a good person (Spinney, 2006). This means that we measure goodness based on accepted community ethical guidelines. We, however, must measure goodness vertically, which means that we must measure ourselvesagainst Gods from-Heaven-down-to-earth instructions. (Spinney, 2006).
Another thing is that sin affects people differently as in when someone throws a grenade into a crowd, one person gets hit but another does not (Slick). Such differences may therefore spare the bad but not the good and so we think that bad things happen to good people and good things to the bad ones. But it is clear that sometimes good and bad things happen to both good and bad people.
Even though there is actually a good person, we are still faced with one question that challenges the very logic of our claim that bad things should not happen to good people, and that is How good must a person be in order to be spared from bad things (Slick)
Conclusion
Bad things happen to good people because of Gods will and power, trials and temptations, Satan, and sin. First of all, in the Book of Job, God shows Job that His will and His power are above mans notion of good and bad. Moreover, bad things may only seem to happen when one undergoes trials but it is only actually a test of ones spiritual resilience. Temptations, on the other hand, may cause real suffering on the individual yet he can subdue this through control of his volition. On the subject of Satans role, bad things happen for they will be used as proof in Satans trial someday. Lastly on the role of sin, it is concluded that since All have sinned (Rom. 3.23), then there are actually no good people according to the Bible, hence no one is spared from the destructive effects of sin.
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