Everything happens for a reason. Really?

“Everything happens for a reason,” I hear it all the time, and it’s almost always concerning something negative. You lost a child, everything happens for a reason. You are diagnosed with cancer, everything happens for a reason. No, no, no, a thousand times no! You see it’s one thing to say that God uses the bad things that happen to us for our good, it’s quite another thing to say that God is the cause. And that is a very clear implication of the saying “Everything happens for a reason.”

“God took your child, because He wanted a little angel in heaven.” Really? Is He so impatient that He could not wait a few years for it to occur naturally? I mean He is outside of time anyway! Jesus tells us, that the thief (the devil), comes for no other reason than to kill, steal and destroy, but that He came that we might have life in all its fullness (John 10:10). So if it’s about killing, stealing and destroying, then it flows out of the agenda of the Evil one, not the agenda of our Lord and God. If I as a father, had the ability to give my child cancer in order to teach him or her lesson, and I did it, it would rightly be called child abuse!

And the truth is that “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). That is that God is actively at work behind the scenes working good through the evil for those who align themselves with Him. And part of the good He works through the evil, is that He uses it to draw us closer, to make us more like Jesus, and to make us fruitful (verse 29).

Father, so many have believed the lie that you are capricious (given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behaviour), but You are always good. I do not however, pretend to even begin to understand why You allow what You allow, but I do know that you are not the source of evil. And I do know that You are good all the time, and that all the time You are good in Jesus Name Amen