Does God Cause Bad Things to Happen?

“I’m angry at God right now. I don’t know if I will ever have faith again.”

Those were the heartbroken words of a friend of mine who had recently lost his beloved wife to cancer. Yet he isn’t the first nor will he be the last person to express such anger towards God over the loss of a loved one.

As a pastor I have witnessed more anger directed towards God than I care to mention. 

In fact, I have harbored my own share of anger towards God over the loss of my mother many years ago. It is not unusual for one to get angry with God and a lot of that misplaced anger is the result of bad theology.

As Franciscan Richard Rohr so aptly observes: 

"I believe that behind every mistaken understanding of reality there is always a mistaken understanding of God." 

Often times we humans mistakenly interpret the events in our lives inappropriately due to an inappropriate understanding of who God is.

Allow me to explain.

The reason my friend was angry with God was because he blamed God for his wife’s cancer and death. So did I with my mother’s death. There was cognitive dissonance between what he believed about God and what actually happened to his wife. His inability to harmonize his understanding of God as an all-good all-loving God with the harsh reality of his wife’s death created anger in his heart towards God. I understood his pain. 

This is by no means unusual. 

As I said, it happened to me over thirty years ago when my mother succumbed to cancer. I became intensely angry with God given that I had committed my life to full time ministry as a pastor. 

“How could he do this to me” was my oft-repeated refrain.

I was fortunate to have a perceptive Rabbi as my roommate in Chaplain’s school during the final days of my mother’s fight with cancer. I shared with him my anger with God and my own disillusionment with him over my mother’s suffering (who was herself a deeply committed Christian woman).

He gave me a book that was fairly new written by another Rabbi named Harold Kushner. The book became a best seller and it helped me work through some of my own anger towards God. The title of the book was: When Bad Things Happen to Good People. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I still had a long way to go in developing a better understanding of God but Kushner’s book helped launch me in that direction.

What I have been describing is what is classically referred to as the “Problem of Evil.” 

It is traditionally stated in the following manner: 

“If God is All-Powerful, All-Good, and All-Loving then why does he allow bad things to happen to people?”

Christian apologists and theologians have written tons of books attempting to answer this perplexing question. But the short answer for me is this, without over simplifying a complex problem:

“God does not cause bad things to happen to people. God is not the author of death!”

In other words, God was not to blame for my mother’s cancer and death. God did not cause my friend’s wife to have cancer and eventually die. 

God is not in the death-dealing business. God is a life-giving God who offers life in abundance. 

There is a culprit behind all the sickness and death in this world and it isn’t God. There is a malignant spirit, or force in the universe that stands opposed to God. The Bible refers to this evil force as “Satan.” 

One author refers to him as “Old Scratch!”

Jesus made it definitively clear that he came to bring life (not death) and to offer it in generous abundance (john 10:10). The very first act of God recorded in the very first book of the Bible (Genesis) finds God creating life (not death). 

Death is of another origin or source other than God.

The eternal promise of God is the offer of life with him forever. 

So perhaps we have been placing the blame for the hard-to-deal-with tragedies of our lives in the wrong place. It is not God who is behind the death-dealing evil in the world. Jesus made this clear once and for all.

If we are to get angry with anyone it is with Satan, the prince of darkness.

One final observation: God does not cause bad things to happen to us in order to fulfill some perfect plan of his. 

More crudely put:

God does not create bad in order to bring about good. 

We just have to learn to quit blaming God for all the bad things that happen to us so that we might be able to embrace him as the All-Loving God that he really is.