Why Bad Things Happen
I’ve been reading Job lately for my devotions, and I have to confess this is a chore for me. I’ve never liked Job. It is too redundant for me. Job professes his innocence, his friends call him a liar and tell him to confess so the troubles will be over, Job professes his innocence, his friends call him a liar…
One verse jumped out at me, though: Job 13.12 “Your maxims are proverbs of ashes; your defenses are defenses of clay.” Job tells his friends this as they are trying to defend God from any wrongdoing in the trials and tribulations Job is enduring. They came to Job with the understanding that God is completely just and that the wicked receive the due rewards for their sins. With that firmly in place, they confront Job and (repeatedly) encourage him to confess his sins that have brought upon him such horrible judgments (losing his wealth, his kids, his health).
The problem with this defense, as Job and the reader know, is that there is no sin for which Job is suffering. He is a righteous man (which actually flies in the face of how we usually understand original sin, but that is another post for another day) who is enduring all of this not because of any sin.
This is an old, old story (no matter when it was actually written), and it is from a time before there was an understanding of an afterlife. This is why perceived injustice was such a mystery to these people: why Job would cry to the heavens for an answer to what was happening to him and why his friends were absolutely convinced Job had sinned to cause all of this. There was no understanding that beyond death life continued and all things were sorted out then.
Since we live on this side of the Incarnation of God in Jesus, we know there is an afterlife where the sins of the world will be sorted out. And yet we still find ourselves quite often in the position of Job’s friends giving out “proverbs of ashes” to the world. Quite often Christians will still try to defend God when bad things happen. God does not need our defense. God can take care of himself. Let’s face it, we really do not know why bad things happen at all. We can come up with some wonderfully intricate theories of why people’s free will allows bad things to happen, but that only succeeds in explaining people’s conscious choices to commit bad actions. Those theories do nothing to explain why accidents happen that kill small children or why natural disasters occur that wipe out entire regions.
Despite all the insight God has given us, we still do not know a whole lot about the world and why things happen. We know we live in a fallen world, but are the evil events around us tests? Are they spiritual warfare affecting the physical world? Do they have some greater good? Are they random and senseless? Does God allow them? Does God create them? Are they acts of rebellion? We don’t know.
What we do know is that God is just and loving and perfect. We know that life extends beyond death; that just because the body wears out doesn’t mean we stop living. And we know that justice will ultimately be had for all of creation. Why do bad things happen? We don’t know. What we do know is that Jesus endured evil all around him, culminating in his execution, and he is the one who will be by our sides, through the evil in this life and during the judgment of the next.
God can redeem any evil situation, it’s just that the redemption does not always happen in this life. God willing, we Christians will stop playing the role of Job’s friends to the world trying to defend God. Let us boldly proclaim what we know with certainty: Jesus Christ overcame the evil of the world and offers us the opportunity to share in his victory by becoming one with him in his sufferings and in his eternal life. Why the sufferings? I don’t know. So I’ll stop pretending I do.
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