Tragedy and Sovereignty

This week, my wife had a miscarriage. Many tears were shed in my house. But through it all, we took comfort in the sovereignty of God.

Meanwhile, online, a debate erupted. I cannot claim to have followed it closely, but it seems to center around whether or not a 10-year-old girl getting kidnapped and raped and tortured could rightly be called a tragedy.

Some held the obvious position that the event was tragic. Others insisted that in the sovereignty of God, there is no such thing as a tragedy – and that this girl did not suffer anything worse than she deserved because of her sin.

Here are a few thoughts.

1 - Firstly, the sovereignty of God. Is God sovereign over tragedy? Scripture’s clear answer is yes. God is “the one forming causing well-being and creating calamity.” (Is. 45:7) God assumes total sovereignty over what happens on this earth.

In Scripture, for example, we see that God hardens the heart of Pharaoh (Ex. 7:3). We see that God had a plan for Christ to be crucified since the foundations of the earth (Rev. 13:8). We see that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God and who are called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28). We see that God is utterly sovereign over the devastation that besets Job.

This is a source of great hope for the Christian. In the midst of our sorrow, we have an anchor; our God is on the throne. When we encounter tragedy, it is not as if life dealt us a lemon. It is not accidental. It is not meaningless. Rather, we serve a God Who is working things in His perfect wisdom towards His perfect ends.

So could God have kept my little baby alive alive, and given us a full term delivery? Yes, He could have. And could God have struck the child molester with a heart attack and thus preserved this little girl from her horrifying experience? Yes, He could have.

So why didn’t He?

This is the question that Job asks, and God‘s response is not one that is pleasant to the ears of self-important humanity. God reminds Job Who exactly is in charge. Who exactly is the boss. Who is the One Who gives and takes away. And at the end of it all, Job is not convinced by a beautiful explanation of how all the sad things are for good ends. Job is convinced that he needs to shut up and worship.

This does not mean that God has not given us sweet promises, true hope, deep comfort. But it does mean that our hope is not found in understanding those ways which are higher than our own (Is. 55:9). Our hope is not found in knowing that God answers to us, or that He’s going to explain everything. Our hope is not found in demanding that God give an excuse for His actions. Our hope is found in trust and in worship. We cling to His promises and worship His holiness, and do not presume to demand an explanation.

2 - On getting what we deserve. It is quite clear in Scripture that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). Without Christ, humanity is a community of dead and damned rebels. The cosmic justice of eternal holy hell awaits those who refuse to bow before King Jesus.

All sinners deserve this. Even the sinners that we think are too cute or too nice. When God in His holy wrath metes out justice on the wicked, He is good and praiseworthy. Only a fool would contest the verdict of the Judge of all the earth.

Therefore, every breath we breathe – every bite we eat - every heartbeat – is a gift from God. It is far more than we deserved. He could’ve just thrown us into eternal torment, and instead He gives us air conditioning and Chinese buffets and baby laughter.

We have much to be thankful for and nothing to whine about.

When bad things do happen, we are not getting something that we did not deserve. The wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23), and those wages are paid out to all in this fallen world.

No one is ever justified in shaking their fists at the holy God. He has never allowed something to happen to a person who deserved better.

Well. Actually, He did that once.

3 - Does this mean that there are no tragedies?

Absolutely not. The idea that the sovereignty of God negates sorrow – including righteous indignation – is an example of ivory-tower theology that needs to stop taking itself too seriously.

I would classify tragedies in two categories.

The first would be amoral tragedies. This would include my wife’s miscarriage, hurricanes and tornadoes, and cancer.

In such situations, we are simply reaping the fruit of what our grandfather Adam sowed in the garden of Eden. We live in a broken and fallen world. Sometimes bears maul people. When it happens, it is a tragedy because it is not the way that God designed it to be. It is completely appropriate for us to mourn, to feel shocked, to wear black.

What we may not do is then become angry with God and blame Him for allowing this fallen world to do what it does.

But this does not somehow cause the terrible event to no longer be a tragedy. That is the whole point of the world being fallen. The sin of our first parents was the first great tragedy, and the world has been a story of tragedies ever since.

The glory of the Gospel is not that tragedy magically vanishes, but rather that it is overcome by the blood of the Lamb.

The second category of tragedy is an immoral tragedy. This would include murders, rapes, drunk-driving collisions, someone losing their livelihood due to false accusations. Everything that could be said about the first category could also be said about this category. However, in these situations, another layer is added – that of righteous indignation.

If the story of a 10-year-old girl getting kidnapped and brutalized does not fill you with rage, there is something wrong with you. If a holy and just God thinks that this sort of crime is wicked, so should we. To say “well, it was not a tragedy because God is sovereign“ is like saying “well it’s not sad that Romeo and Juliet committed suicide, because Shakespeare had a happy ending in mind.”

Shakespeare knew what he was doing. But it’s still really sad. And more than sad, injustice is rightly infuriating.

The issue is that we must understand where to direct the anger. The anger is not at God for failing at His job as the cosmic judge. The anger is at the wicked perpetrator.

And the feeling that we get that this young girl did not deserve such treatment is completely appropriate. This is not a statement of cosmic adjudication. We recognize the justice of God in sending people to hell – even young people who still have rebellious, sinful, wicked hearts.

(Yes, by the way, I do believe that Scripture gives us good reason to believe that all babies go to heaven, but that is beyond the scope of what I am discussing here.)

The point is, just because we recognize the justice of divine holiness does not mean that we cannot also recognize the injustice of human sin. The justice of God‘s holiness is not justification for human wickedness. Saying that a person deserves the just punishment of their sin meted out by the just Judge of the earth is very different than saying that they deserved to get raped to death by a sadistic predator.

4 - Does God use wicked people to bring about just judgments? Yes, sometimes He does. But God‘s overarching sovereignty does not nullify the wickedness of the perpetrator.

It is often said that God is not the author of sin, and this is true. But this works the other way as well. Sinful people are not the embodiment of God’s holy justice. God may use them to bring His wrath in certain situations. That in no way makes their conduct any less reprehensible.

We even see in Scripture that God brings heathen nations to judge Israel for their rebellion against God… And then later brings judgment on those heathen nations for their wickedness.

5 - So let’s bring this back around. Amoral tragedies and immoral tragedies both happen. They are both sad, and the latter are also infuriating.

The sinfulness of the human condition means that none of us can stand before God and say that we got something worse than what we deserved.

Yet, this in no way prevents us from recognizing the reality of tragedy. Nor does it prevent us from acknowledging the purity and innocence and sweetness of children, for example.

We can believe in original sin and also acknowledge that a five year-old child, while still sinful and in need of Christ, is also a beautiful and innocent person.

We can still recognize that while it is sad for men to die in war, it is infinitely more broken for pregnant women and little children to be slaughtered in the streets.

So when a child dies in a car accident or a miscarriage and we say “he was too young,” our impulse is good. It is reflective of the tragic reality of the fallen world. We are sad enough about deaths that happen at 75 years old, because we can feel in our bones that death is not how the world is supposed to be. But death at five years old is all the more shocking, because it is all the more broken. It is tragic. Not because God is unjust, but because the world is broken.

When the criminal rapes or murders someone, and we say that they did not deserve this, this is again not a referendum on the justice of God. None of us receives anything from God that we don’t deserve – unless we are receiving mercy.

Nevertheless, there is also a felt reality that we all have as image bearers of God: that we have rights – life, liberty, property – we deserve to get to do what we were put on this earth to do. In this sense, they did not deserve this.

We recognize that a 45 year-old gangbanger who gets shot in the middle of a drug deal in a ghetto was just harvesting the fruits of his life’s work. But a five-year-old who got ran over by a drunk driver got something that she did not deserve. It was not just. And it is completely appropriate to be furious at the injustice.

So long as we remember that it is not the injustice of God.

So our fury at the molester is a simple acknowledgment of reality. He did something deeply evil. He sinned in a way that was especially deviant. We want justice.

So we should.

(And we should always remember that no sinner is beyond the reach of the cleansing blood of the Lamb, which can satisfy the demands of holy justice no matter how dark the crime.)

We have compassion on the victim whose life he destroyed. We mourn with the family members. We show compassion and pray for their healing.

So we should.

(And we should always remember that apart from Jesus even the best and sweetest humans still will stand before God thoroughly guilty of their sin and worthy of eternal punishment.)

In sum, the Christian message brings hope within tragedy. It doesn’t pretend that tragedy does not exist.

Photo by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash