This question has been around since who knows when. The general accepted philosophy of virtually everyone on earth is Karma. You know, do something good and good will find you. Well that just doesn't work for me. Bad things happen to everybody all the time. There is no one who is exempt. There is no rhyme or reason. It's like we are hit randomly. There has got to be a greater explanation. The following article is my attempt.
We are all Failures
There are essentially two types of bad things that could happen to a person. One is the consequences of our choices and the other is of natural occurrence. Let me elaborate. Most of the choices we make come with consequences. It can be as simple as speeding. If you make the choice to speed then you are breaking the law and risking the consequences of a ticket. Now take a moral division. Let's say one day you decide to have sex before, or outside of, marriage. You know the Bible strictly forbids it and that sex is reserved solely for the confines of marriage. The consequences for disobeying Gods word leads to a whole variety of sexually transmitted diseases, illegitimate children, broken marriages, emotional .problems and on and on. These bad things comes at your own expense. Examples are endless. Choose to be an alcoholic and die an early death from liver disease. Do drugs, fry your brain. Smoke, kill your lungs.
The choices we make do not even have to be sinful or against the law to have consequences. For example If you go sky-diving then you know that there is a slight chance that the parachute is not going to open. Now, if it doesn't open and you plummet to your demise, who's to blame? Well you are! Your the idiot who decided to jump out of the plane. You knew the consequences and yet jumped anyway. Do you see what I'm saying? A whole slew of bad things that happen to people happen because of our own stupid choices.
There is no such thing as a 'good' person. There are definitely people who are more evil then you but when it comes to being good we all fall tragically short. Take yourself for instance. You may consider yourself to be a really good chap. A person that hasn't murdered anyone or robbed a bank. Heck, you gave a bum on the street corner a dollar just the other day! But what you need to do is look deeper inside. What are your motives? What do you think about? What do you do when no one is watching? If your being honest with yourself then you will surely find something that compromises your goodness. Romans 3:10 says there is none righteous, no not one. We all fall into the "bad" category. That's not to say that we are all equal in receiving bad things, but rather it is to say that there is no partiality between good and bad. Who you define as being a good or bad person will be totally different then another's standards. The real question that should be asked is why do bad things happen at all? Why are we subject to pain and sometimes horrible tragedies?
Self Inflicted Sorrow
God Wants Friends, Not Robots.
I know what your thinking. I've told you how bad things happen but I haven't fully explained WHY they happen. Why did God make it this way? Couldn't he have intervened and prevented Eve from taking the fruit? Why was there a forbidden fruit to begin with? The reason is because he created Man with one devastating characteristic: Volition. Or, the freedom to choose. You see, God could have created man without the freedom to choose and we would function as preprogrammed robots. But God did not want that. He made it so that we would choose to love and serve Him. That would essentially make a much deeper relationship. Picture the person you love. Imagine if they were forced to love you no matter what. They cannot know anything else but to love you. That would be a pretty shallow relationship. Now, what if the person you love actually chose to love you. There is a much deeper bond. It is the same with God. He wanted us to choose to love him, making our relationship with Him profound and meaningful. The trouble is, in order to choose to love God, there has to be an alternative to turn away from. This is where evil steps in and all the crap that comes with it.
That's Just the Way It Is
I In order to have light you must have darkness. In order to a positive, you must have a negative. In order to have good, you must have evil. All of these are opposites but are necessary for the other to exist. If you were to tell me that something is good, there has to be an evil with which to compare it to. Otherwise how can something be good? You could ask why the world was designed like this but you know there is no answer this side of heaven. This is were we come to the intellectual wall with which there is no crossing. It's where we acknowledge our own inadequacies in understanding God's ways and hope for that time when we will all watch the VHS answer video in heaven.
The second way in which we are afflicted by bad things is not as direct as consequences for our choices. It comes from the world in which we live. Random events can sometimes devastate our lives. Earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes are totally beyond our control and yet cause significant pain in our world. Would you believe me if I told you that there was a time in the past when people never died? It was a also a time free from pain and sorrow. It was before 'the 'fall of man,' before Eve tasted of the forbidden fruit. The planet was a peaceful, calm and happy place. There were no natural disasters or plagues to be found.
All the natural occurrences that devastate our lives are a direct result of sin entering the world. Eve ate the fruit, passed it Adam who ate it too, and KABOOM! The World changed entirely. Genesis 3 has this account. God actually curses the land and all sorts of terrible things happened as a result. Fast forward a good 8 to 10 thousand years and the world has only gotten more deadly.
