Have you ever asked the question, “Why do good things happen to bad people?” It’s a question I hear often from people who are wrestling to understand the nature of God and His interaction with the world. Before I give you an answer to that question, I want to challenge you to consider that it might not be the right question to ask. Why? Because in asking, “Why do good things happen to bad people” we are presupposing that we are the arbiters of good and bad when in fact, we simply are not.
The Bible tells us that God will give mercy and show compassion to whosoever he wants to (Romans 9:15), that’s because He is God and He does not need our permission to be Himself. The sovereign nature of God means that He’s not beholden to our understanding of write or wrong. No, in fact, God is the one who determines both right and wrong and because He is God, whatever He does is right, good, and just.
That means when God does something that we might think is good, it’s because we are aligning our understanding to His definition of what is good and not the other way around. Inversely, when God does something that we perceive is bad it’s not because He’s done something bad but because we don’t yet understand what He’s doing or why.
So instead of asking, “Why do good things happen to bad people?” we should be asking, “What does God know that I don’t know and how can I know him better?”
For example, you might think that God has allowed some good blessing to come the way of someone you think is objectively bad and that can be frustrating, for sure. However, if you’re being honest, you don’t really know what God is doing in that person’s life or in their heart. You don’t fully understand the journey that God is taking them on and maybe, just maybe, He’s transforming that bad person into something altogether new and good. He doesn’t need your permission or your understanding to do that. He is God.
Consider the innumerable times in which God has blessed you in spite of the fact that you have been a rotten, lowdown, dirty, sinner. Yes, it’s true, sometimes you are the bad person in the story. The answer is because God is good and kind and He blesses whomever He chooses to bless.
In fact, the Bible tells us that God’s kindness leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4). Which is why, if you’re reading this blog today and you’re a believer, even when you were the bad guy, God did a good thing for you by inviting you to turn from your sin and walk towards Him.
Look good things and bad things happen to good people and bad people, and it’s probably better for us to say simply: things happen to people. Our job as believers is to seek the Lord and better understand His long-term, miraculous plan in the lives of all people, no matter how good or bad we think they are. More importantly we are to rejoice when the goodness of God is expressed into our own lives even when we are the bad guys.