In the face of crisis, misfortune, and calamity, people sometimes quip, ‘life is not fair’. The implication is that ‘life’ is to blame for whatever may have happened or befallen a person in life. ‘Life’ in this sense, is personified. However, to conclude that life is unfair, has both philosophical and theological connotations. Life, no doubt, is a teacher, and humans have a lot to learn from life itself. For a man who has struggled hard in life and is not able to make ends meet, he blames life for his setbacks. A couple who has not been able to bear a child after some number of years, blames life for the delayed childlessness. A young lady who is yet to marry despite all efforts, including prayer and fasting, blames life for her setbacks. The list is endless, and the blame game goes on ad infinitum. My concern here really, is how people arrive at the conclusion that life is to blame or that life is not fair to some but fair to others. How did we arrive at the conclusion that life discriminates and perhaps has favourites? There is, I suppose, a kind of fatalism behind such assumptions.
That whatever struggles and efforts people make in life, what will be, will be. It implies that even when some people do not even make any frantic efforts in achieving set goals in life, debarring any circumstances, they must surely get there, while others, despite their labours and struggles, hardly make it in life. This kind of situation has often prompted the age long question; ‘why do good people suffer?’ Or better still, ‘why do bad things happen to good people?’ This whole idea is captured in the 1981 book written by Harold Kushner, a Conservative rabbi, titled ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People.’ Kushner dedicated his book to the memory of his son, Aaron, who died at the age of 14 in 1977 of progeria, an incurable genetic disease. Obviously bewildered by the trauma of his loss and grief, he queried why there is so much pain and suffering in a world created by a God who is Good and loves tenderly. Although, in his attempt to answer the philosophical problem of evil and seek to offer comfort to grieving people, he concluded that ‘God does his best and is with people in their suffering but is not fully able to prevent it.’
God is benevolent but not all-powerful to prevent evil. As much as Kushner tried to unravel the problem of evil, based on his own personal experience, he however gives room for a more fundamental question that unsettles any curious mind; is God truly helpless and powerless in preventing evil? No one can deny the fact that before the very face of God, he watches and observes the afflictions, sufferings, injustices, and mindless killings His beloved, loyal and faithful children are daily subjected to, and yet he allows and permits them. As a merciful and forgiving father, he even waits patiently for those who perpetrate various abominable acts, injustices and evils against their fellow brothers and sisters, to come back to their senses, repent and ask for forgiveness like the prodigal son (Luke 15:11- 32), Saul who later became Paul (Acts 9:1-9), and the thief by the side of his cross at Calvary (Luke 23:42-43). However, it is pertinent to note here that the merciful, compassionate, forgiving, and if you like, permissive nature of God does not reduce from His All Powerfulness and All Mightiness.
Anything that God does and or permits, is borne out of love and goodness. Even the ‘bad things’ that God refuses to prevent from happening to good people does not still rob Him of his Goodness, tenderness and love. It also applies to the ‘good things’ that He allows to happen to the so- called ‘bad people’. Even the sacred scriptures affirm that we are all God’s children, “for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matt. 5:45). And in another text, it says;
Continues next week
