Morning Devotional

July 6, 2004

"Bad Things and Good People (Part 2)"

by Don Emmitte

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For he gives his sunlight to both the evil and the good, and he sends rain on the just and on the unjust, too. (Matthew 5:45 NLT).

As we continue to look at why bad things happen to good people, we need to explore the truth that sometimes there simply is no reason. It is difficult to accept that truth. We crave an answer other than “just because.” It is extremely difficult to accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe. We want to believe that the world is mostly an orderly, predictable place, showing ample evidence of God's thoroughness and handiwork. However, there are pockets of chaos in our world. Most of the time, the events of the universe follow firm natural laws. But every now and then, things happen not contrary to those laws of nature but outside them. Simply put: things happen which could just as easily have happened differently.

Harold Kushner, explains it this way: “An engine bolt breaks on flight 205 instead of on flight 209, inflicting tragedy on one random group of families rather than another. There is no message in all of that. There is no reason for those particular people to be afflicted rather than others. These events do not reflect God's choices. They happen at random, and randomness is another name for chaos, in those corners of the universe where God's creative light has not yet penetrated. And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless, because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God's goodness." Further he writes, "A system left to itself may evolve in the direction of randomness [as thermodynamics says]. On the other hand, our world may not be a system left to itself. There may in fact be a creative impulse acting on it, the Spirit of God hovering over the dark waters, operating over the course of millennia to bring order out of the chaos. It may yet come to pass that, as 'Friday afternoon' of the world's evolution ticks toward the Great Sabbath which is the End of Days, the impact of random evil will be diminished. Or it may be that God finished His work of creating eons ago, and left the rest to us. … In that case, we will simply have to learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us." ¹

Rabbi Kushner is correct in this assessment. Simply stated, God is not finished yet! Now, in this world of evil and darkness, it does rain on the just and unjust. Bad things happen to good people. God is in the process of righting that injustice, however the end of times has not yet come to pass. As we live in this parenthesis of time, we ought to be very careful not to question either God or ourselves in the randomness of evil. God is good. He can be trusted. Tomorrow we’ll explore more of this theme.

1.       Kushner, Harold S.; When Bad Things Happen to Good People; 1981.