When Bad Things Happen to Good People

There are three unchanging truths regarding suffering. These truths are propositions that form the Christian attitude toward sufferings.

(1) Our Suffering is Temporary-Romans 8:19-22

“The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

We live in a frustrating world, don’t we? Nothing works the way it is supposed to. You buy something, it breaks, you fix it, it works for awhile, and then breaks again. Eventually it wears out completely and you have to replace it. That’s what Paul means when he says the creation was subjected to frustration. Nothing lasts forever, nothing works right. We live in a Murphy’s Law universe.

But it’s not just creation, it’s also you and me. We don’t work right either. Children are born with horrible defects, we get cancer or Alzheimer’s or AIDS or some other wasting disease. If you live long enough, you’ll have a stroke or a heart attack or grow senile and end up in a nursing home. That’s ahead for all of us, and there is no escape for any of us. Unless you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and get shot at a freeway rest stop in Florida–or on the streets of Chicago.

Verse 21 speaks of the “bondage to decay.” Every Thursday morning two trucks come by my house. One picks up the newspaper and glass bottles for recycling; the other picks up our garbage. The trucks come every Thursday. Why? Because the flow of garbage never ceases. The more we make, the more we spend. The more we spend, the more we use. The more we use, the more we waste. The more we waste, the more garbage we produce. If you doubt that, just let the garbage truck drivers go on strike for a week or two. Just see how fast the mountains of garbage pile up all around you. We live in a decaying, frustrating world.

Open the newspaper in the last 10 years and you read about the Mississippi River flooding. You read about storms, tornadoes, famines and earthquakes. You read about children that are being shot almost everyday. You read about famine and starvation in Haiti and Somalia and Bosnia. You open the newspaper today and you see where the leaks from the damaged reacters in Japan have created havoc.

Something has gone wrong with the world. This is not the world as God meant it to be. This is a world full of pain, suffering and death. This is the world as it has been messed up and knocked out of kilter by the entrance of sin.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the most powerful man in the world. It doesn’t matter if you are President of the United States. If you live long enough, you will know pain. You will know heartache. If you live long enough, you will brush the tears away as death comes to your door. We live in a frustrating world. A world filled with pain and suffering and death.

The Christian viewpoint on suffering is to say, “Yes, it’s bad. But it’s not going to last forever. Yes, it’s terrible, but this isn’t the final story. This isn’t the last chapter. Yes, we suffer, but God has ordained that our suffering is temporary. Something better for us is on the way.” That’s the first proposition. Our suffering is temporary.