Tradegy: Why Did God Let This Happen?

In the face of tragedy and suffering, it is natural to have feelings of anger and to ask the question, "Why?" There are no simple answers to this mystery. Explanations or philosophizing may only make the grief process more intense. However, the Christian faith offers some affirmations which can give comfort and guidance in the midst of a tragic experience.

One of the greatest misconceptions about God is that he directly uses tragedy and death and pain as a way to intervene in this world. While some of the Old Testament stories seem to imply that concept of God, other passages make clear that God is a loving Father who does not want any of his children to suffer or to have their potential cut short. He does not use tragedy as a way of punishing us or forcing us to his will. Things happen as a result of misfortune or the natural consequences of the flow and intersection of human events.

Thus, we cannot blame God for tragic experiences, except in the sense that he created the kind of world in which they can happen. He created an orderly universe and established certain laws in it. If the nature of these basic realities is not reckoned with, we suffer the consequences. Because of the cause-and-effect nature of this world, there sometimes are innocent victims in tragedies.

Among God's laws is that of human freedom. He has given us the power to make choices, to decide for ourselves between good and evil. Tragedy may then result from the consequences of the wrong or careless choices which we or others may have made. To expect him to deliver us from those consequences would be to make a mockery of human freedom.

While most misfortune can be traced to the fact of human choice or error, we cannot ignore the element of chance. It sometimes is a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Disease, accidents, natural disasters: these events defy explanation. But this does not mean that we are at the mercy of a random universe in which there is no meaning or redemption. Regardless of what life brings, we do have a loving Father who cares about us and wants to help us.

So even though God does not send suffering on us in a vindictive or capricious way, he can use our painful experiences to give us greater strength, understanding, and closeness to Christ. Biblical faith affirms that in these experiences of pain or loss, God reaches out to us as a Comforter. And we are given the assurance that he has the power and the willingness to bring good out of even the most tragic experience.

When we can share our pain with him, we begin to understand God's purpose in giving life to us. God wanted to share the joy of aliveness so much that he created beings who could participate with him in the ongoing nature of creation, who could relate to him and each other. The price of our interrelatedness is that we are vulnerable, we can be hurt when loss is experienced. But this underscores one of the greatest truths of the Christian faith: that God himself suffers. He knows our pain and thus can strengthen, comfort, and guide.

There is also the important point of being a part of the mainstream of eternal life. When we see things in the perspective of eternity, we can find deeper meaning in the past, the present, and the future. We can know that no experience, no relationship, no person is ever completely lost. For life is not part of a wider experience of death. Death is only part of the wider experience of life.