Sunday Morning Service

We have often heard the phrase “Bad Things happen to Good People”. There is a bestselling book with the same title, written by a conservative Rabbi, Harold S. Kushner. 

The story was written after his three-year-old son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease that meant the boy would only live until his early teens, he was faced with one of life’s most difficult questions: Why, God? Rabbi Kushner wrote a straightforward contemplation of the doubts and fears that he dealt with and that often arise when people deal with adversity and tragedy.

Kushner’s book states that bad things do indeed happen to good people, and he offers the reasons for such saying that life is indeed full of injustices. And it is true that some of these things happen due to our freedom of choice; we suffer the consequences of our actions or inaction.

Today we will consider the same, and we will ask the question “why”? Why do good people experience hardship and trials. It would seem to us that if we do good, we ought to be exempt from hard times. But we all know some good people that have suffered greatly. Adversity, health issues, family problems, unfair practices in work situations, and even the death of loved ones, and the list goes on and on.

The Jew took this phrase a step further, they believed that they were special in God’s sight, that they were God’s anointed people; and they were – yet they also thought that God would keep them from all tragedy. Whenever there was much evidence from their past that this was not necessarily the case. They thought, if bad things happened to a person, it was evidence of God’s judgment on their lives. Jesus addresses this topic in our text today from Luke 13 verses 1-5.