The Question
The question of
why bad things happen to good people is a question that is directed at a
particular someone: God. And inherent in
the question is blame. “Why did you
let that happen? Couldn’t you have
stopped it? You’re the almighty creator
of heaven and earth. Couldn’t you have
done something? Couldn’t you stop the
pain, the agony, the loss? Why did my
baby have to die?” Our query is not
unreasonable.
It’s also at the
heart of what is sometimes called “the new atheism” in the bestselling books by
Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, and
others. Of course, calling it the “new”
atheism, is a bit of a misnomer, since it’s what has driven atheism for a long
time. Voltaire submitted the same
question back in the eighteenth century in his book Candide.
From the horrors
that fill both our histories and our memories, the atheist recoils and
concludes that either God is a sadistic son of a bitch, or that he doesn’t
exist at all. The atheist has decided that the best explanation for the world
as it is, is to believe that there is no one to believe in, no one to put one’s
trust in, no hope, and no future: God does not exist. There is no one out there
that cares. And that’s why bad things can happen to good people.
Are atheists
right? How can we answer their—and our—agonizing howl of why? What does
suffering demonstrate about God? What does pain tell us about who God is, how
he relates to his universe, and what our expectations are?
The better we
understand God, the easier it will be for us.
* *
*
Yea, though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no
evil: for thou art with me (Psalm 23:4)
This is what life
is like. We are all walking through the
valley of the shadow of death. Bad
things are going to happen to me. If
they are not bad now, just wait. If they
are bad now, just wait. Back and
forth we go, like a ping-pong ball.
The problem of the
ultimate question, the question of suffering, is that our emotions are in
play. We are not just thinking about an
intellectual, academic issue. We mostly don’t approach it with cool, clear
logic. It is personal. Our guts are fully engaged. We too often have tears in our eyes.
We get mad when
our expectations are not met. That’s
part of the difficulty in our relationships in general. We go to McDonalds. We order a strawberry milkshake. Then they tell us they are out of strawberry,
but they can give us a chocolate shake.
We get angry. Because our
expectations were not met. Our reasonable
expectations.
When something bad
happens to you, and you get mad at God, the reason you are mad at God is
because he didn’t meet your expectations of what he would do for you.
But consider a
possibility: that our expectations of God are out of whack. Who we think God is, what he has to do for us,
how he has to behave—we might have misunderstood everything. It would be ludicrous, for instance, to go to
McDonalds and then get mad because they refused to sell us golf clubs.
We need to worship
the God who actually is, not the one we wish for, not the one we made up in our
heads. If we are mad at God, perhaps the
problem is that we don’t know God as he actually is. We might be mad at the god we made up in our
mind. In which case, we need to stop
believing in our made-up god and find the real one. Then we won’t get mad at the real God. The real God won’t disappoint us. The real
God won’t tell us that we can have a strawberry shake when he knows there
aren’t any there. There won’t be any
bait and switch with the real God.
The characters
portrayed on the pages of scripture sometimes get mad at God. They accuse God. But that’s because they had expectations that
weren’t accurate. They’d made something
up in their head about God that wasn’t so.
We all do it, and we all do it all the time. We need to work at minimizing that. We’ll probably be happier if we ever can.
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