Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? The Question Scripture Asks Too

Somebody decent got the diagnosis. Somebody who worked hard for thirty years lost all of it in eighteen months. And a few streets over, a man who has treated people badly his whole life is comfortable, well, and entirely untroubled by any of it.

That is the complaint, and it has two halves. Good people are getting what they did not earn, and so are bad people, in the opposite direction. Both halves are the same question, which is why people usually ask them in one breath.

Before any answer, one thing is worth establishing. Scripture asks this question. It is raised there as an accusation, put to God directly, by a patriarch, two prophets, a man on an ash heap, and a whole congregation. Not one of them is rebuked for asking.

So the question is not disloyal. It is in the book.

Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?

Scripture gives several answers. 

The world is damaged and everyone lives in the damage, so outcomes fall on people who did not cause them (Romans 8:20-22).

Outcomes in this life are not distributed by merit, and God says so plainly. “He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).

Nobody is good in the sense the question needs, if the standard is God’s. “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). That is true, and it is the wrong place to start, for reasons this article will come to.

The one genuinely good person who ever lived suffered worse than anyone, and he chose it (Acts 2:23; Romans 5:8).

And the ledger, currently unreadable, will one day be readable. God’s own answer to this complaint is that a day is coming when you will “discern between the righteous and the wicked” (Malachi 3:18).

What You Actually Mean by Good

Nobody asking this question is claiming that the person they have in mind was sinless.

They mean she was kind. They mean he paid his taxes and raised his children and looked after his mother. They mean that whatever this is, it is not what that particular life earned. Everyday English has a word for that person and the word is good, and using it that way is ordinary speech rather than sloppy doctrine, and the moral weight behind it is real.

This matters because of what usually happens next. Someone raises the question, and the first answer they get is that no one is good, no not one. The verse is true. Used as an opening move it functions as a way of not answering, and the person who has just buried a decent friend hears God being defended at their friend’s expense.

Scripture itself does not open there. It opens by agreeing that the ledger looks wrong.

The Bible Says the Ledger Looks Wrong

Before Scripture explains anything, it states the reader’s observation as a fact about the world.

“There is a vanity which is done upon the earth; that there be just men, unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked; again, there be wicked men, to whom it happeneth according to the work of the righteous: I said that this also is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 8:14).

Read that again. Righteous people getting what the wicked deserve, and wicked people getting what the righteous deserve. Both halves of the complaint, written down as an observation, in the Bible.

And a chapter later: “All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean” (Ecclesiastes 9:2).

Whatever else is true, the Bible is not surprised by your question and does not treat the observation behind it as a mistake.

Scripture Puts This Complaint to God’s Face

This is the part most answers leave out, and it changes where the reader is standing.

Job

Job is usually quoted for his patience. He also said this: “Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?” (Job 21:7). He watched them prosper into old age, and then noted the ending that made it worse: “They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave” (Job 21:13). No long decline, no reckoning. A comfortable life and a quick death.

Jeremiah

Jeremiah opens by conceding the point before he argues, which is a striking way to complain. “Righteous art thou, O LORD, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?” (Jeremiah 12:1).

He does not begin by doubting God’s justice. He begins by granting it, and then says he wants to talk about it anyway.

Habakkuk

Habakkuk puts it hardest. “Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?” (Habakkuk 1:13).

He is telling God that his silence does not match his character. And he says it to God, in a book God put in the Bible.

The People in Malachi

The last complaint comes from the congregation rather than the prophet, and God quotes them word for word. “Ye have said, It is vain to serve God: and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance… And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up” (Malachi 3:14-15).

Serving God has not paid. The arrogant are the ones doing well. That is a complaint from the pews, recorded by God in his own book, in the words the people used.

Four complaints, and no rebuke in any of them for raising it. If you have been carrying this question and feeling faithless for having it, you are standing in fairly serious company.

Read also: Book of Habakkuk Summary by Chapter

Abraham Argued It and God Did Not Correct Him

There is one more, and it is the boldest.

God tells Abraham that Sodom is about to be destroyed. Abraham knows his nephew is in it, and he does not ask for a favour. He makes a case, and the case is an appeal to God’s own justice.

“That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).

That is the complaint of this whole article, put as a question, by a man standing in front of God. And God does not correct him. He agrees to spare the city for fifty, and then for forty-five, and down to ten.

The instinct that the righteous and the wicked should not share one undifferentiated fate is not a failure of faith. Abraham had it, and God let it stand.

The Answer That Is True and Should Not Come First

Now the answer that everyone reaches for, because it is genuinely true and it does belong here.

“There is none righteous, no, not one: there is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one” (Romans 3:10-12).

Measured against God rather than against the neighbours, the category of good people is empty. Nobody is owed a comfortable life on the strength of their record, because nobody’s record will bear the weight.

That is not a small point and it should not be softened. It is also an answer to a question about desert, and it does not touch the question about distribution. Even granting that no one deserves better, you can still ask why the load is shared out the way it is. Ecclesiastes asked it. Job asked it. Habakkuk asked it.

So say the verse, and mean it, and keep going.

The Cross Is the Answer to the Question as You Asked It

Take the question exactly as it is meant. Why would a truly good person suffer terribly and undeservedly?

That has happened once, in the whole history of the world, in the strict sense the question wants. And he was not ambushed by it.

“Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain” (Acts 2:23). Both things are in that sentence at once. The hands were wicked and the act was murder. And it was not an accident that got past God.

“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

Which turns the question round. The complaint assumes that a good God would keep good people out of suffering. What he actually did was go into it, on purpose, on behalf of people whose records could not bear examination.

That does not explain your particular loss. It does establish something about the God you are complaining to. He is not on the outside of this.

And Why Do Good Things Happen to Bad People?

The other half burns just as hot, and Scripture has more to say about it than most people expect.

Asaph Nearly Lost His Faith Over It

Psalm 73 is one man’s account of very nearly walking away, and he says so in the second verse. “But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped” (Psalm 73:2).

What nearly did it was watching people with no interest in God do well and stay well. “For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked” (Psalm 73:3).

He does not solve it by thinking harder. “When I thought to know this, it was too painful for me” (Psalm 73:16). What changed was where he took it. “Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end” (Psalm 73:17). He came into God’s presence and saw the whole line rather than the stretch of it in front of him.

Then he says something about himself that is worth borrowing. “So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast before thee” (Psalm 73:22). He does not congratulate himself for the question. He recognises that he had been reading a long story from one page of it.

And he lands somewhere other than where he started, with nothing in his circumstances changed. “My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever” (Psalm 73:26).

Sun and Rain Fall on Everybody

Part of the answer is that God is generous to people who have not earned it, and that he does it on purpose.

“He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).

Jesus says it as a reason to love your enemies, which is worth noticing. The good things landing on people who do not deserve them are not an oversight in the system. They are how God behaves, and he tells his people to behave the same way.

The Part About Us

Here is the uncomfortable half. Nobody has ever complained about undeserved blessing when it landed on them.

None of us prays that God is being unfair to give us more than our conduct earned. The unfairness only registers when the kindness goes to somebody we dislike, which suggests that at least some of what we are calling injustice is envy wearing better clothes.

Jonah is the case study. In chapter two he is delighted by mercy, because it is his: “Salvation is of the LORD” (Jonah 2:9). In chapter four the same mercy goes to Nineveh and he is furious about it, and says he had known all along that God was gracious and merciful and that this was exactly why he ran (Jonah 4:2). Same God, same attribute, opposite reaction, and the only variable is who received it.

Not Every Prosperity Is a Blessing

There is one more thing worth holding while you look at somebody else’s comfortable life.

Agur prayed, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD?” (Proverbs 30:8-9).

He was not being modest. He believed that too much could cost him God, and he asked to be spared it. Which raises a possibility about the untroubled life you have been watching from a distance: it may not be the reward it looks like from here.

That is not a licence to comfort yourself by imagining other people are secretly miserable. It is a caution against assuming you can read a life from the outside, which is the same mistake the question keeps making in both directions.

Jesus Refused to Read Outcomes Backwards

Since the whole complaint is about reading circumstances as a verdict, it is worth saying that Jesus would not do it.

Told about Galileans killed by Pilate, he asked, “Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2-3). He refuses the verdict on the dead and turns it into a warning to the living.

Asked whose sin had caused a man’s blindness, he answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:3).

Outcomes are not a scoreboard. That cuts both ways, and it is the reason the question cannot be settled by looking harder at anyone’s circumstances, including your own.

Read also: Why Does God Allow Suffering? The Real Biblical Answer, and What God Never Explains

The Answer Many People Have Been Given Instead

A great many readers meet this question through a book written in 1981 by a rabbi whose son died of a rapid-ageing disease, and the answer it offers is worth naming, because it is kind and it is widely held.

The proposal is that God is entirely good, entirely loving, grieved by your suffering, and not able to stop it. On that view he is on your side and doing his best in a universe he does not fully control.

It is easy to see why that comforts people. It clears God of the charge instantly.

What it costs is everything the four complaints above assume. Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Job and Abraham are not addressing a God who is doing his best. They are addressing a God who could act and has not, which is precisely why they are angry and precisely why the argument is worth having. A God who cannot help is not being accused of anything, and he also cannot promise anything about how this ends.

Scripture keeps both claims that make the question hurt. God is good, and God is able. It will not trade one away to make the arithmetic easier, and neither will this article.

What God Actually Said to the Complaint

Malachi is the only place where the complaint is recorded and God’s reply is recorded with it, and the reply is not what most people expect.

He does not explain. He does not defend the distribution. Here is what he does.

“Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name” (Malachi 3:16).

They talked to each other about it, and God listened, and he wrote it down.

Then the promise: “And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels; and I will spare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him. Then shall ye return, and discern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not” (Malachi 3:17-18).

Then shall ye discern. Not now. The distinction between the person who feared God and the person who did not is real, and at the moment it is invisible, and there is a day coming when you will be able to see it.

That is God’s answer to the ledger looking wrong. The ledger is not wrong. It is not finished, and you are reading it early.

What to Do With the Complaint

Say it to him rather than about him.

Every one of them took it straight to God. Habakkuk told him his silence did not match his character. Jeremiah said he wanted to talk about God’s judgments. The people in Malachi said serving God had not paid, and God heard that and had it written down instead of striking anyone.

There is a difference between arguing with God and walking away from him, and Scripture is far more patient with the first than most churches are.

So write down the thing you actually think. The name, the situation, the exact unfairness of it, in the words you would use if nobody religious were listening. Then take that to God, and keep taking it, and expect to be heard rather than answered.

And go where Asaph went. He did not think his way out of it and he says so. What broke the spiral was God’s presence, not a better argument, and what he came away with was not an explanation but a sentence about who he had: “God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.”

Read also: The Story of Job in the Bible: Faith Without an Answer

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Articles to Read Next

For the wider question underneath this one, why there is any suffering at all, read Why Does God Allow Suffering?.

To sit with the man who asked this hardest and whose friends got the answer badly wrong, read The Story of Job in the Bible: Faith Without an Answer.

For the prophet who told God his silence did not match his character, and what God said back, read Book of Habakkuk Summary by Chapter.

When your prayers feel like they are landing on the ceiling, Psalm 88: The Darkest Psalm is the passage the Bible gives you for that night.

And if heaven has gone silent while you wait, Reasons Why Our Prayers Are Not Answered takes that question on its own terms.

You came here with a ledger that does not balance. Nothing in Scripture asks you to pretend it does.

What Scripture does is stand beside you while you say so. It puts the same complaint in the mouth of a patriarch arguing outside Sodom, a man on an ash heap, two prophets, and a whole congregation who had decided that serving God was not worth it. Then it tells you that God heard that last complaint and had it written in a book.

The good people are not being overlooked and the comfortable are not getting away with anything. You are reading a page and calling it the story.

So bring him the actual objection tonight, in your own words, the way Habakkuk did. And then keep going, on the strength of the one thing Asaph came out of the sanctuary holding: not an explanation, but a God who was his portion for ever.