Why Is Life So Unfair? (Job 40:1-5, 42:1-6, Romans 8:28, 31-32, 38)

The newspaper headline was just sickening. We saw the picture of State Trooper Calvin Jenks, age 24, whose body had been found beside his cruiser in rural Tipton County. Two suspected drug dealers were arrested and charged with his murder. Calvin had moved to the Memphis area to be near his fiancée, a student at the University of Tennessee Medical School. They married and absolutely adored each other.

Yet after just three months of married life, Calvin was gunned down by criminals.1 That's not just unfair, it's absolutely rotten.

Why is life so unfair? Haven't all of us asked that question at one time or another? Most of us know that God did not cause Trooper Jenks' death or other awful tragedies. The Bible states clearly that "God does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men" (Lam. 3:33). The tougher question for most believers is this: Why does God allow such awful things to happen?

Why is life so unfair? One reason is:

We live in a sin-marred world.

In the garden of Eden, there were no tragedies or illnesses or death. It was a paradise. But Adam and Eve rebelled against God and exchanged paradise for a sin-marred world, a place where awful things can and do happen.

This is not only a sin-marred world; it is also a free world. God will not turn us into puppets or robots. To take away our freedom would be to distort our basic humanity. Therefore, God rarely intervenes miraculously to prevent accidents, to stop murderous criminals or to force terrorists to behave. God usually allows natural laws to operate, even when one of those laws causes a disastrous hurricane.

Back when Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, I was conversing with a very good friend, a Presbyterian pastor. With a twinkle in my eye, I said to him, "I sure am glad to be Methodist instead of Presbyterian this week. We Methodists see Katrina as just one more evidence that this is a sin-marred world, but you Presbyterians have to explain how Katrina was part of God's preordained plan." Of course, I greatly oversimplified our

theological differences.

God does not play favorites. He does not prevent lightning from striking Americans while leaving Australians unprotected. God "sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matt. 5:45). God loves Armenians as much as Americans; He loves Italians as much as He loves Israelis.

When our 8-year-old son Aaron first began to develop symptoms of that brain tumor that took his life, his mother was helping him with his bath one evening. He asked her, "Mom, why did this happen to me?" She assured him that we had done nothing to cause it and that God was not angry with us. She told him that this was just an illness that could happen to anybody. We live in a sin-marred world.

That leads to a second question: Why do we feel the pain of this so sharply?