Fitting God into a Sovereign Ideology

If everything happens for a reason, then God has some explaining to do.

I know that sounds provocative but follow the logic for a moment.

Christians have a remarkable ability to find purpose in almost anything that happens. The job disappears, but perhaps God is opening another door. The relationship ends, but maybe God knew that person wasn’t right for you. The house sale falls through, but perhaps God was protecting you from something you couldn’t see. You miss the flight, get turned down for the promotion, lose the opportunity you were convinced was meant for you, and somewhere along the way somebody will inevitably remind you that everything happens for a reason.

Sometimes, that belief is enormously comforting. I understand why we reach for it. When life suddenly veers away from the direction, we expected it to take, there is something reassuring about believing that what looks like chaos from where we are standing still makes perfect sense from where God is sitting.

The problem is that we rarely stop to follow that theology all the way to its uncomfortable conclusion.

Because life doesn’t only contain missed flights, failed job applications and relationships that weren’t meant to be.

Children get abused. Drunk drivers cross onto the wrong side of the road. People who have spent their lives looking after their bodies are diagnosed with terminal cancer. Earthquakes bury families beneath buildings, like the shocking footage we’ve seen from Nepal over the past few days. Sometimes terrible things happen to people who did nothing whatsoever to deserve them.

Did all of that happen for a reason too?

This is where the phrase begins to trouble me.

Because if by “everything happens for a reason” we simply mean that something meaningful can eventually emerge from even the worst experiences of our lives, I can believe that. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to make meaning from suffering, and I believe redemption can happen in places that once looked completely beyond repair.

But that is very different from saying the terrible thing itself needed to happen.

It is the difference between believing God can bring something good out of suffering and believing God required the suffering in order to produce the good.

Those two ideas are often treated as though they are interchangeable. I don’t think they are.

In fact, I think confusing them has led Christians to say some extraordinarily cruel things to people at precisely the moments when they most needed compassion.

So I’m no longer convinced that everything happens for a reason.

I believe in redemption. I believe that meaning can emerge from suffering. I believe God can take circumstances that were never good and somehow prevent them from having the final word.

But I don’t think that means God had a purpose for everything that happened in the first place.

And strangely enough, I think that might give us a much better picture of God.

Let me explain.

The Bible Doesn’t Say Everything Happens for a Reason

One of the strangest things about the phrase “everything happens for a reason” is that you won’t actually find it anywhere in the Bible.

You will, however, find plenty of stories about terrible things happening.

Take Joseph.

Joseph’s story is often presented as one of the great biblical examples of God’s mysterious plan at work. His brothers become jealous of him, throw him into a pit, sell him into slavery and then return home to tell their father that his beloved son has been killed by a wild animal.

Joseph is taken to Egypt, where he is sold to Potiphar. Things briefly begin looking up before Potiphar’s wife falsely accuses him of attempting to sleep with her, and Joseph ends up in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

Years pass.

Eventually, through a remarkable series of events, Joseph rises from prisoner to one of the most powerful men in Egypt. When famine strikes the region, he finds himself in a position to save countless lives, including those of the very brothers who sold him.

And right near the end of Genesis, Joseph finally says the line Christians have been quoting ever since:

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50:20)

There it is.

Everything happens for a reason.

Except I’m not sure that’s what Joseph is saying at all.

Notice that Joseph doesn’t pretend his brothers’ actions were secretly good. He doesn’t tell them that God made them throw him into the pit. He doesn’t say God needed him to be trafficked into slavery so that the divine plan could unfold. He doesn’t even absolve his brothers of responsibility by suggesting they were unknowingly carrying out God’s will.

He calls what they did exactly what it was.

Harm.

His brothers intended to hurt him. Their jealousy was real. Their betrayal was real. The years Joseph lost were real. The suffering wasn’t an illusion that suddenly became good because something good eventually emerged from it.

And yet their intention wasn’t the end of the story.

God was able to take what other people meant for destruction and somehow work within it toward life.

I think that’s a profoundly different way of understanding providence.

Because perhaps the miracle in Joseph’s story isn’t that God meticulously arranged the pit, the slavery, the false accusation and the prison sentence because Joseph needed to experience each one before becoming Pharaoh’s right-hand man.

Perhaps the miracle is that none of those things could prevent God from bringing something good out of Joseph’s life.

One version of God needs the evil.

The other redeems it.

And those are two very different Gods.

But Doesn’t God Work Everything Together for Good?

At this point, someone is probably reaching for Romans 8:28:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.”

Fair enough. It’s an important verse. But I don’t think it means what we sometimes make it mean.

Imagine I deliberately push you down a flight of stairs and you break your leg. While you’re in hospital, you meet the person who eventually becomes the love of your life. Ten years later, you’re happily married with three kids and you tell me the extraordinary story of how you met.

Would you then thank me for pushing you down the stairs?

I would certainly hope not.

Something wonderful came out of something terrible, but that doesn’t suddenly make the terrible thing necessary, good or purposeful. I don’t get to say, “See! I knew what I was doing. Everything happens for a reason.”

I pushed you down the stairs. I was a jerk.

The good came afterwards.

I think we sometimes confuse those two things when we read Romans 8:28. Paul doesn’t say that everything that happens is good, or even that God causes everything that happens. He says that God works in all things for good.

That’s different.

In fact, the whole chapter assumes that plenty of things are very much not good. Paul describes creation as groaning. He talks about suffering, weakness, trouble, hardship, persecution, famine and death. This isn’t a picture of a world where every event is unfolding exactly as God wants it to.

It’s a picture of a world in which terrible things happen, and God is somehow still at work.

Perhaps, then, Romans 8:28 isn’t really explaining why bad things happen at all. It is telling us what God can do after they have happened.

God’s ability to redeem something doesn’t prove that God caused it. And that seems to me to be a much more hopeful way of reading Romans 8:28. It means I don’t have to look at every terrible thing that happens and somehow convince myself that God wanted it.

I only have to believe that terrible things don’t get the final word.

Jesus Once Talked About a Tower That Collapsed

There is a story in Luke 13 that I don’t remember hearing many sermons about.

Jesus is talking about suffering when he mentions a recent tragedy that his listeners would presumably have known about. A tower near the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem had collapsed, killing eighteen people.

Jesus asks:

“Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them — do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:4)

It’s worth thinking about what Jesus could have said at that moment. He could have told them that those eighteen people died because God had a greater purpose. He could have reassured everyone that the tragedy was somehow part of God’s plan. He could have said that although the collapse looked terrible from a human perspective, God could see the bigger picture and one day everyone would understand why it needed to happen.

Jesus says none of those things.

He doesn’t call the collapse good. He doesn’t say God caused it. He doesn’t say those eighteen deaths were necessary. He doesn’t even promise that something wonderful will eventually come from the tragedy.

Instead, Jesus addresses the assumption people were making about the victims.

In the ancient world, suffering was often connected with divine judgement. If something particularly terrible happened to you, it was easy to assume that you must have done something particularly terrible to deserve it. Jesus rejects that conclusion. The eighteen people underneath the tower were no worse than everyone who happened to be standing somewhere else that day.

That’s important.

Because although our explanation has changed, I wonder whether we are still trying to do something similar. They wanted to explain tragedy by looking backwards: What did these people do for this to happen? We often explain it by looking forwards: What is God going to accomplish through this happening?

Both approaches make the tragedy easier to live with because both give us a reason.

Jesus doesn’t give them one.

As far as the story tells us, a tower fell and eighteen people died.

Of course, Jesus does use the incident to confront his listeners with their own mortality and call them to repentance. But he never turns the deaths of those eighteen people into evidence of some carefully orchestrated divine plan.

And maybe we should be cautious about doing what Jesus didn’t.

When a tower falls, perhaps we don’t need to explain why God wanted it to fall. When someone gets cancer, perhaps we don’t need to discover what God is trying to teach them. When an accident takes a life, perhaps we don’t need to reassure the grieving family that it was somehow meant to be.

Sometimes a tower falls.

And Jesus seems perfectly capable of calling that a tragedy without needing to call it a plan.

So, How Then Shall We Live?

If everything doesn’t happen for a reason, what are we supposed to do when something happens that we desperately wish hadn’t?

For a start, perhaps we can stop trying so quickly to explain it.

I think one of the reasons Christians reach for phrases like “God has a plan” is because suffering makes us uncomfortable. When someone we love is sitting across from us trying to comprehend a diagnosis, a death, a divorce or some other devastating turn in their life, we desperately want to give them something that will make sense of it all.

So we offer explanations.

God must have a reason. God is closing one door to open another. God won’t give you more than you can handle. One day you’ll look back and understand why this had to happen.

Maybe we don’t need to say any of that.

Maybe we can simply sit beside someone and acknowledge that what happened is awful.

That seems much closer to what Jesus often did anyway. When Lazarus died, Jesus knew resurrection was coming. If anyone could have stood outside that tomb and told everyone that things were about to work out for the best, it was him.

Instead, Jesus wept.

Knowing that redemption was coming didn’t stop Jesus grieving what had been lost. The promise of what might happen next didn’t require him to pretend that death was somehow good.

Perhaps we could learn something from that.

When someone is suffering, our first responsibility may not be to explain God to them. It may simply be to enter their suffering with them. We can grieve what should be grieved, rage against what should never have happened and acknowledge the unfairness of things that are genuinely unfair.

And when it is our own life that has fallen apart, we can give ourselves the same permission.

We don’t have to immediately find the lesson. We don’t have to discover the blessing hiding inside the tragedy. We don’t have to work out what God is trying to teach us before we’re allowed to be angry, disappointed or heartbroken.

Meaning may come later. Something beautiful may eventually grow in the place where something terrible happened. We may even reach a point where we can look backwards and see ways that God brought good from circumstances we would never have chosen.

But we don’t have to call the terrible thing good to be grateful for what eventually grew from it.

We grieve what is lost. We help where we can. We love the person in front of us. We resist the things that cause unnecessary suffering. And when life hands us something that makes absolutely no sense, we don’t manufacture a reason just to make ourselves feel safer.

Maybe There Doesn’t Need to Be a Reason

I feel miserable tonight.

I don’t feel like blogging. I don’t feel particularly inspired, grateful or optimistic. I want to mope around the house, feel sorry for myself and perhaps go to bed considerably earlier than any self-respecting adult should on a Friday night.

My wife has terminal cancer. I’m working two jobs. My boss is riding me pretty hard in one of them at the moment. I’m tired, I’m sad, and tonight I’m just a bit over it.

And maybe that’s partly why I’ve been thinking about all of this.

Because the Christian version of me from years ago would probably have felt compelled to do something with these feelings. I would have searched for what God was teaching me, reminded myself how blessed I was, looked for the purpose in the pain or tried to work out what God was doing through this particular season of my life.

Tonight, I don’t particularly want to do any of that.

I don’t know why my wife has cancer. I don’t believe God gave it to her. I don’t believe our family needed this experience to become better people. I don’t believe there is some future outcome that will eventually make me look back and think, Oh, now I understand why that had to happen.

It didn’t have to happen.

I wish it hadn’t.

And I think I’m finally comfortable saying that without feeling as though I’m somehow diminishing God.

Maybe faith isn’t trusting that everything happens for a reason. Maybe faith is trusting that when something happens for no good reason at all, God is still there.

The tower can fall and still be terrible. Jesus can stand outside the tomb knowing resurrection is coming and still weep. Something good can eventually grow from the worst thing that has ever happened to us without making the worst thing good.

So tonight I’m going to allow myself to be tired. I’m going to be sad about the things that are sad. I’m going to be pissed off about some things that are genuinely worth being pissed off about. And I’m not going to force any of it into a neat little story about God’s plan.

Tomorrow might feel different.

Tonight, this is where I am.

And perhaps I don’t need a reason for that either.

Sometimes God is as shocked as we are when we do some things or act out some of our decisions which are contrary to his leading or his teaching.

Amon raped Tamar, and God was shocked. Cain killed Abel, and God had to ask Cain where his brother was! David killed Uriah, and God had to send a prophet to him to share a parable. Adam ate the forbidden fruit, and God was shocked when he went into hiding instead of approaching Him with confidence, as he had always done. Jezebel arranged for Naboth to be put to death, and God was shocked when the plan was executed. God said he would no longer strive with man because his imagination had become corrupt and evil.

Promoting the idea that God is sovereign and knows all things or predetermines and plans all things is an error.

A lot of things happen without God's say-so or even His knowledge. Blaming God for every ill or praising him for every win (even those gotten by rigging an election or embezzling money or cheating your opponent in any way) is just a delusion.

-Dan Forster