And I asked “why, why, why, oh God? Why did it have to be only my sister who was killed on the patrol that day?” -20-year-old female American soldier speaking at her twin sister’s funeral.
It is the mystery that always seems to move further from our reach the more we reach out for an answer. The issue you bristle at hearing. The question you can’t help but ask.
Why do bad things happen to innocent people?
Years ago I would have responded to this question differently than I do today. Like most questions, I assumed this one was a blank needing to be filled in, a query looking for the most biblical and reasonable solution that can be offered. And while that is partly true, it is obvious that for many who voice these words, it is not a question at all. It is a cry of anguish. It is the way people say, “I am hurting so badly, and I just don’t understand it.” No matter what “answer” someone gives to the problems of pain and evil, suffering people are still left with the gap of what or whom they have lost. Answers don’t replace people. The question is not one of philosophy, but of personal need: “Why, oh why, does this have to be?” Or, as the Psalms so often say, “How long, O Lord?”
I’ve been asked many times by someone in a severe crisis, “Why?” The blank expression, the lines etched deeply in the face, the wide, searching eyes all echo the question. No matter what “explanation” I offer, the emptiness in the face doesn’t disappear. It is like pouring water into a bucket with holes in it. The one thing that does seem to “take” is the truth that God is with us. And sometimes we are more aware of that when we are suffering than at any other time.
How can we explain that the people who suffer the most are usually driven not toward the black hole of skepticism, but toward God? The parent who loses a child, the worker who loses a job, the young woman whose doctor tells her she has to come back for a biopsy-how frequently these people cry out to God in their distress, their pain not taken as proof that no one above is listening, but as the occasion to believe all the more, to pray that most solemn of prayers: “Have mercy on me, O Lord.”
Philip Yancey quotes Scottish theologian James Stewart on this point, “It is the spectators, the people who are outside, looking at the tragedy, from whose ranks the skeptics come; it is not those who are actually in the arena and who know suffering from the inside. Indeed, the fact is that it is the world’s greatest sufferers who have produced the most shining examples of unconquerable faith.”
Some people have looked for a common-sense, real-life kind of answer, and have thus wondered, “Maybe God isn’t good, or maybe God isn’t almighty.” The first “solution” proposes that bad things happen because God can simply do whatever he wishes, and it just doesn’t matter that it seems bad to us. The second is to say that God would like to prevent bad things from happening, but that he is just not able to do it–perhaps not even God is able to keep up with all the chaos in the world. If only God had one war to deal with at a time…
But most of us realize that to give up on God’s goodness or his greatness is to believe in an utterly different kind of God. Not God at all, really. But this is not what Job or Jeremiah or David meant in the Old Testament when out of the pits of their distress they asked, “Aren’t you good, O God?” In their most honest prayers (intentionally left there as markers in Holy Scripture so that we can know that God would rather have us say anything than stay silent) these sufferers were simply saying, we know, God, that the evil things that happen are so contradictory to who you are, such a violation of what you stand for-please reassure us that you are in fact the Good God.
Another misleading solution is to simply believe that God is not. But atheism has always been and always will be a cheap answer. Augustine pointed out that if you ask, “If there is a God, why is there so much evil?” then you also have to ask, “If there is no God, why is there so much good?” Atheism solves nothing. It offers no comfort, takes away no pain, provides no hope. The only comfort it provides is an act of supposed resignation that says, you should have known all along you are only dust. Forget God, and the Genesis breath that turns dust into man.
Others have tried to suggest that maybe the solution to the problem of pain is that suffering is illusory. It deals with pain by saying we only think we experience pain. The religion founded by Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science, teaches this. Yet, Mrs. Eddy did die. The idea that suffering is an illusion flies in the face of common experience. Even if it is an illusion, the illusion hurts a lot. There is still a problem.
When I visited Esther in her tin shed in a Nairobi slum, I found myself talking to the person closest to Job in the Old Testament that I’d ever met. I didn’t know at that moment that she was within a couple of weeks of dying from AIDS.
This slum on the east side of the city is a cluster of huts and sheds made with odd-shaped pieces of corrugated sheet metal, or stacks of sharp black stones. Tens of thousands of people are crammed into this area. A meandering path takes you through the clusters of shacks and you step over the trickling streams of putrid open sewers. Children stare as you walk past. Adults give a glance and even a friendly greeting. My Kenyan host, Jane, who runs an amazing ministry of mercy for mothers with AIDS, led the way into the 6×8 foot shed that was Esther’s and her daughter’s home. Reclining on her bed, and too thin and weak to do more than raise herself on one elbow, Esther greeted us with a smile. I sat on the corner of her daughter’s bed near a couple of pots and an alcohol stove on the ground. Jane had Esther flip through the yellowed plastic pages of a small picture album, which brought smiles to Esther’s face as she briefly identified who was in each picture. There was one of Esther on her wedding day, a tall and strikingly beautiful woman wearing the cleanest white and beaming the whitest smile, standing outside in the Nairboi sunshine. It was hard to believe this was the same person lying, emaciated, in that shack. A few pages over was a photo looking straight down on her husband’s wooden casket lowered halfway into his grave by men holding two ropes. He contracted HIV and developed AIDS first. Esther contracted the disease from him. Mercifully, their daughter has tested negative for HIV.
Esther’s arms were covered with sores. She blinked slowly and weakly; her voice was raspy. But she spoke of the good things with joy. I learned that even when she was quite sick, she had given her testimony in church, and that she never gave up loving the Christian songs she had led her whole life. The women, like Jane, who helped her get good nutrition and who were genuine friends were visible signs of God’s grace flowing amid the sewers. When she had been strong enough, Esther worked with the other HIV mothers in a small warehouse making beautiful rugs. Someone was helping her do something constructive while she had strength, instead of consigning her to the number of the cursed.
“Curse God, and die,” Job’s wife had told him when he was in a similar situation. Others do give up faith. But untold numbers reach the extremes that Esther did and cling to God right to the last moment. Those who choose atheism relinquish the only hope we have when all other hope is gone.
Suffering and Evil Intent
When we look at Scripture, the overarching truth we find is this: suffering is not the way things were meant to be, but God is moving things toward redemption. There are numerous sources of suffering in the world. First of all is Satan’s destructive intent-that malevolent evil force at work in the world. It’s a voice that comes through the crafty serpent of Genesis 3: “Did God really say, you must not eat from any tree in the garden?” Untold suffering has happened in the world because people have chosen to succumb to temptation no matter the harm that may come to others. In the story of Job, Satan says that he has been “roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it,” the picture of a pure predator. The Bible teaches that there is an Evil One who has an interest in all human suffering. When the apostle Paul is talking about a “thorn in the flesh” that he had, which was most likely a physical impediment, he calls it a messenger of Satan. Paul asked God to take it away-a prayer that we are always permitted to pray. Three times he pleaded with God. And even this apostle, who knew more about the power of God and the reality of evil than most of us do, knew this pain might be taken away and might not. He came to believe that God was giving grace in many other ways and that God’s power would be seen in his weakness.
That story can be told many times over. Some of the people with the strongest faith show that strength at the hour of their greatest weakness. That is why evil does not have the final word. Evil may delight in pain, but evil never cashes in on pain.
Human-Caused Suffering
Another source of suffering is humanity’s sinfulness expressed. The first murder occurred just four chapters into the Bible. What’s worse is that it was a brother killing his own brother. Why did bad things happen to a shepherd named Abel? It was because Cain chose hot, bitter jealousy. It was because Cain had the opportunity to live in harmony with God, but he took his God-given ability to choose and listened to the dark side of his nature. God doesn’t murder. People do.
C.S. Lewis speculated that 80 percent of the world’s suffering is caused by the immoral choices of human beings. Several years ago I was in the Ethiopian countryside looking over vast fertile fields. The grain was laid like great sheets across the hills, shifting in color and shadow as it was pushed this way and that by the breezes. Women wearing red and yellow and green walked along the road, hunched over with large baskets on their backs. I recalled the severe famine of Ethiopia in the 1980’s. My guide told me that Ethiopia is fertile enough that it could feed the whole of Africa. There was a drought in those days, and the crops were affected, but in the end it was sinful human beings who hoarded the available grain and prevented its distribution-purely political and tribal manipulation. That was the reason why hundreds of thousands of people died in the famine. God did not cause people to shrivel up and die of malnutrition. Cruel human beings did. And it is not the way things are supposed to be.
People naturally ask, “So why can’t God prevent people from causing the suffering that they do to other people?” The answer is that he could, and someday he will. He will decisively interrupt the affairs of the world, bring a curtain down on history, and judgment will come, along with a new creation in which there are no more tears and no more pain. But in the meantime, God allows human beings to exercise a quality that is one of the most noble things human beings possess, and also one of the most dangerous: freedom.
The Dignity and Danger of Freedom
Freedom is one of our most cherished attributes. Why did the young men emerge from landing crafts on the beaches of Normandy and run up the beach in the face of leveling gunfire? Why did they throw themselves toward the vicious teeth of a powerful enemy? Why did they lay down their lives, many of them never to take another step toward age 20? It was for freedom. Trapped in a battle, but struggling toward freedom. It was because we need to be free to live. It is because to be human means to be free. It is because that’s the way God made us-it’s the way things were meant to be.
But the very meaning of freedom is that we are free to choose the good and we are free to choose evil. It is, in fact, the only way freedom works.
Now think about how we experience this every day with our growing and developing children. If someone asked you, “So, when exactly did you lose control of your kids?” the right answer would be, “What makes you think I ever had control of them in the first place?” A parent realizes with the passing of years that parenting is not about control, but about training. Even if you physically constrained a child, you would not really control him or her, because a human being, no matter what age, asserts the drive to act freely. He or she may comply on the outside, but crossed arms, knit brow, and stiffened lips reveal an independent will inside. Parents realize that their teenagers are progressively moving toward independence. How could it be any other way? Soon the kid will be an adult and will have to make daily decisions that will come out of whatever ethical and moral fabric has developed in his or her consciousness. With that freedom of choice the adolescent will make good decisions and bad decisions-and that will continue through every phase of life that follows.
To be human means to have freedom, whether we use it or abuse it. (That does not mean we are uninfluenced by forces without and within. The fact of free choice does not mean that we are entirely self-determinative. We are profoundly influenced by God, by other people, by temptation, compulsion, and addiction. But in the end, only we are responsible for the choices we make.)
Why do bad things happen to innocent people? Frequently it is because human beings act carelessly, cruelly, and maliciously toward each other. Of course it leaves us asking, why? Why must this be? Why would a young man abandon a baby at a rest stop? Why would somebody have his wife murdered? Why would somebody drive by a house and fire a gun randomly at it? Why would someone kill someone for a wallet or a jacket? Why would somebody fly a jetliner full of innocent people into a skyscraper? There is no good answer because there is nothing of goodness in this. It is, at its core, unanswerable because it is nonsensical. But even without a rational explanation for what is in essence irrational, this piece of reality does fit with everything else we know about reality. The foolish and dark use of freedom is a fracture in the world that can be traced from one end of the human race to the other; it runs to the heart of human nature. There is a terrible consistency in this randomness.
Could God have created humanity without this awesome power to choose? Yes, he could have, but then we would be robots and not human beings. We would not know a single moment of chosen love or devotion or goodness. We would not be able to worship God, or love our children or our friends. We would be incapable of understanding grace instead of greed, light instead of darkness.
God wanted to make a certain kind of creature as the last step of the creation. He created human beings invested with this incredible privilege and power, the life-giving and life-taking power of freedom. The misuse of freedom has set into human nature a series of fault lines that goes not only through humanity, but through the whole creation as well. Like us, the whole of creation groans “as in the pains of childbirth,” it is “subjected to frustration,” and it “waits in eager expectation” for God’s final redemption when the bondage will end, and the adoption of sons and daughters of God will be complete (see Romans 8:18-39).
Suffering-What’s It All For?
Why do bad things happen to innocent people?
Is there any purpose in it all? Here is where the issue stings. If I have to suffer, is it all for nothing? Must I pay such a high price for no apparent benefit? How can God expect me to lose-just lose?
The Bible teaches that there is indeed a higher purpose above and beyond suffering. But the way we get there is not by calling a bad thing good. We don’t have to do the mental gymnastics that somehow calls a car crash that decapitates a teenager a good thing; or cancer cells, which violate all the rules of how healthy cells are supposed to behave; or soldiers who wipe out the women and children of a village. If we don’t keep the moral and spiritual acuity that sees evil for evil and good for good, then we’ve entered a confusing fog.
God is almighty, and good is what it is, just as evil is what it is. But here is the hope: God works through the bad, bringing us inexorably to a better place. How could it be any other way? He is a God of construction and repair, of putting pieces together and putting pieces back together.
We should never blithely tell someone who is in the middle of the agony of their suffering that “it is all for the good.” But when the time is right, we can say with sensitivity that the God who is always good is never absent or indifferent. He holds all the pieces of our lives together into a whole that can never be calculated as a negative, but always a positive.
I have lived forty-five of my forty-nine years so far without a father. I can count dozens of times when I thought it would have been so good to have a father-to watch a football game I was in, to show me how to shave, to meet my fiancé, to introduce me to his friends at the shop, to ride with me as I learned how to drive. I had thought that grieving the loss of my father would have occurred in the first few years after his death, when in fact every new phase of life brings an awareness of the missing element in the equation, the falling short, the empty space. Yet the loss somehow does not tally out as a negative.
God’s Different Kind of Algebra
In reality there are no set equations in life; God works a different kind of algebra. If one seemingly essential part of life is torn out, life does not collapse.
My father’s death meant that I grew up in Wisconsin instead of Illinois, and with an extended family who came around me like a safety net. I saw life from the perspective of a town of two hundred instead of a city of five million, enjoying regular exploratory trips to the town dump and twice-a-day swims in Lake Michigan. Later we moved to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and lived two miles from the stadium during the days of coach Vince Lombardi, when professional football players were the town’s heroes and friends you saw at the department store. I figured out how to shave, and how to have a styptic pencil close at hand. The empty space was never very empty-only empty of one specific person.
I’m certain that growing up fast, having to be “the man of the house” when still a boy, taught me a sense of sober responsibility in life. It trained me to be a leader, although that was the last thing on my mind, especially after suffering a withering defeat in my run for class president in high school at the hands of a pot-head who benefited from a three-way split.
I live daily with a sense of my own mortality, which I take to be a good thing. And I’ve had dozens of opportunities to talk to young families who have lost Mom or Dad, and let them know that even though it seems like they’ve lost everything, they’ve lost someone, but they’re not alone.
Now although losing my father at age four is a significant loss, I cannot imagine the losses some people endure-those wearing tattered clothes in a refugee camp, the people who are physically or sexually abused by a parent or priest, the people with chronic severe pain, the multitudes who never have enough to eat on any day, those who are unjustly imprisoned. Yet I hear the personal testimony of so many who have suffered so much and who have seen the math, and who believe that the sum of life is still positive. This is not to say that if you write the Bad Things in one column and the Good Things in a second column that the second will be longer than the first. It’s more mysterious than that. Somehow God is able to keep the heart beating, the spiritual breath flowing. He brings light into even the darkest corners.
It is that promise we hold onto: “In all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). Not that all things are good (they’re not). Not that all things add up to a positive sum (life is not about accounting). Not that all things become good things (that’s just not true). Rather, God is at work amid “all things,” which means all days and every chapter of life, even the dark ones. He is at work. He doesn’t sleep, and he doesn’t leave. Any work that God does is good, because he is God.
That is why “the Spirit helps us in our weakness” (Rom. 8:26), why we can believe “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (8:18), why we can live knowing that “if God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all-how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (8:31-32).
Why do bad things happen to innocent people? We’re all good creations twisted, and we live in a spectacular world that also twists and turns and breaks into pieces every day. We use our freedom for good, and we choose to use our freedom in ways that spin us out of control. When there is order, when we are receptive and obedient, then we see great things happen. When there is chaos people get hurt.
But through it all, God remains the creator of Good Things, and Lord and Master over all humanity, even when we so often choose the Bad Things.
Today I received the news that one of my friend’s eighty-seven-year-old father died, having suffered a major stroke a few days ago. This man had been a pastor for sixty-six years and had seen his share of joy and sorrow. When asked what he thought about the suffering in the world, his reply was an old poem he had committed to memory. It is a simple confession, but those usually serve as our bottom line. It is a statement of what faith says when it looks at pieces, and discerns God’s redemptive patterns instead:
My Life is but a weaving
Between my Lord and me,
I cannot chose the colors
He worketh steadily.
Oftimes he weaveth sorrow,
And I in foolish pride
Forget he sees the upper
And I, the underside.
Not til the loom is silent
And the shuttle cease to fly
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the Weaver’s skilful hand
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.
Excerpt from Putting the Pieces Back Together: How Real Life and Real Faith Connect.