Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People

Official answer 2026-08-22

The Bible asks this question more sharply than most sceptics do, and it does not resolve it. That is worth knowing before anyone offers you a tidy explanation. Psalm 73 describes exactly your observation: the writer sees the arrogant prospering and says his own feet nearly slipped. Jeremiah asks God directly why the way of the wicked prospers. The entire book of Job exists because a good man suffered and his friends produced explanations that God later rebuked. That last detail is important. The friends said what people still say: there must be a reason, you must have done something. The book records God calling that wrong. Two ideas to put down. Suffering is not a scoreboard: Jesus was asked directly about a man born blind and about people killed by a falling tower, and in both cases he refused the assumption that the victims were worse than anyone else. Prosperity is not evidence of approval: the same Psalm that notices the wicked flourishing also notices how the story ends. What is left is not an explanation but a claim, that God is not outside this. He entered it — born poor, a refugee, betrayed, tortured, executed. The cry from the cross asking why God had abandoned him is in the Bible, and it is not answered on the page. Whatever else that is, it is not a God who has never been here. As for your friend: do not bring her a reason. A well-meant explanation offered to a suffering person almost always lands as dismissal, however true it is. Bring meals, transport, presence, and the willingness to sit without fixing anything. And you are permitted to be angry about it.