When God Seems Completely Unfair

Otherwise known as when bad things happen to good people and good to bad. In A Strangled Baby and a Gold Cup, on the Alliance of Confessing Evangelical’s Reformation21 website, which I commend, Pastor Mark Jones relays a story from the fourteenth century Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Bradwardine’s De Causa Dei contra pelagium addressing the problem.

The story goes that a hermit, vexed by this problem, leaves his hermitage and wanders the world. He’s joined by an angel in disguise, who on successive nights steals a golden cup from someone who’d taken them in for the night, kills the baby of someone who also treated them well, gave the golden cup to someone who treated them badly, and then killed the servant of someone who treated them well. The hermit decided this leave this wicked man (about three nights too late, I think), and then the angel revealed himself and explained why he’d done what he’d done.

The first man they met whom they took the cup from profited because, before possessing the cup, he feared God. But after getting the cup he became drunk every day with that cup. God sent the angel to remove this incentive to drunkenness in order that the man be saved.

To the third man whom I gave the golden cup, that is, the wicked man who did not give hospitality, the angel did much harm to him, even though he appeared to outwardly prosper. This man became a drunk once in possession of the cup. God gave him the cup as a sign of judgement, even though he thought he prospered.

Regarding the man whose child I killed, he was generous to the poor before he had his son. But after having a son he no longer treated the poor or cared for them. God ordered that the angel kill the child so that the man would no longer endanger his eternal salvation and return to his previous life of generosity.

Regarding the servant whom the angel threw over into the rushing waters, that servant was about to murder his kind master and his family, including his wife and child, that night. But the Lord loved this family and so prevented that evil.

Then the angel said: “Off you go and stop judging divine providence in the wrong way, because you see bad things happen to good people and good things to bad people.”

The story has its limits. There’s not always such a direct relation between the evil we experience and the good God wants for us. Sometimes bad things just happen, as the famous bumper sticker put more colorfully. All things can work for the good of those who love God, as St. Paul said in Romans, but because we can use them for our sanctification, not because each bad thing directly saves us from a worse thing.

The story has its limits, but it also reminds us that we don’t have all the data and that we tend to evaluate what data we have with reference only to this world. Sometimes the losses we experience are really “severe mercies,” as C. S. Lewis put it.