Bad Things Don't Always Happen to Bad People

My plan with these blog postings is to share insights into kingdom principles as I come across them in my daily Bible reading. And I did come across one this morning that, in the course of the day, proved to be an encouragement to a local family when I spoke to them about it. So I will note it now while it is still fresh in mind.

Jesus was once approached and told by people about a group of Galileans whose blood the Roman Governor Pilate has "mixed with their sacrifices" (Luke 13:1). Evidently these Galileans had come to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices at the temple, and while doing so, had been set upon by Roman soldiers and slaughtered. The outcome had been that their blood had been mixed with that of the sacrifices they were offering. To any Jew the act must have seemed one of horrendous sacrilege. 

When told of this event, Jesus asked the question, "Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way?" (v. 2). Jesus understood their thinking well. He knew the tendency of people in his day to apply the "retribution principle" in a wooden way, much as Job's comforters had centuries earlier. Simply put, this principle taught that bad things happened to bad people, and good things to good people. According to this way of thinking, it must have been because they had been terrible sinners that the Galileans suffered the fate that they did.

But was that really the case? Jesus provided the answer. "I tell you, no!" he said. But unless you repent, you too will all perish" (v. 3). The important part of what he said for our purposes is his emphatic "No!" Terrible, tragic events don't necessarily indicate that the people affected by them are great sinners. Life in our fallen, Satan-afflicted world doesn't work out like that. We simply cannot say, when bad things happen to people, that its because they are particularly bad people.

That's something farmers need to hold onto. A failed swede crop, an outbreak of Brandenberg among expectant ewes, a TB infection in a milking herd - these and the many other on-farm disasters than happen year by year can't be taken as indications of some terrible sin that a farmer (or his family, or even his forebears) have committed. Yet it's easy for us to think that way. No one is blameless - true. And if the truth be known, we all deserve constant affliction and chastisement from God. But the truth remains, you can't measure the size of a person's sin by the size of the tragedy (or hardship) that strikes them.