When a loss has no reason anyone can see, people build one, and fast. I have done it. A man I had counseled for two years stopped coming, and I never found out why. Within three weeks I had built a story in which the ending had been good for him. The sentence “everything happens for a reason” is not in the Bible. Scripture says God rules over all things, and it does not hand you the reason for your particular loss. Jesus refused to read a disaster as a verdict on the people it fell on.
A massacre and a tower
My three-week story was tidy, and it comforted me more than it told me anything. I have said the sentence aloud to people too, because the silence in the room was unbearable to me. Jesus was once handed a disaster and asked, in effect, to supply the reason.
There were present at that season some that told him of the Galilæans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And Jesus answering said unto them, Suppose ye that these Galilæans were sinners above all the Galilæans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.
Luke 13:1-3 (KJV)
Then he brings up a second one himself, in 13:4, eighteen people killed when “the tower in Siloam fell,” and gives the same answer.
The people with the news had already done the sum: these died, so these deserved it. Jesus refuses the sum. He leaves the tower unexplained and turns the question away from the dead and onto the living who were asking it. His “except ye repent” is spoken to the people who brought him the news, not about the dead.
Who did sin
The disciples once put the question in its cleanest form, about a man born blind.
And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.
John 9:2-3 (KJV)
Jesus refuses the blame outright, and then he does name a purpose: “that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” He names it to take the blame from the man and his parents, and then he heals him. When Lazarus fell sick, Jesus named a purpose there too, in John 11:4: “This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby.”
So the Bible does have reasons. In these scenes the one who gives them is Jesus, speaking about what God is doing, and beside the blind man the reason he gives takes the blame from him. Romans 8:28 says that “all things work together for good to them that love God,” and the next verse names the good: to be “conformed to the image of his Son.” The people around these sufferers had a different kind of reason in mind, the kind that explains why a particular person had it coming, and Jesus answered it with “Nay” and “Neither.”
Joseph’s sentence
Joseph comes closest to the sentence. His brothers sold him, and years later, standing over them with the power to repay it, he says this, in Genesis 50:19-20: “Fear not: for am I in the place of God? But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.” Paul widens it in Ephesians 1:11, where God “worketh all things after the counsel of his own will.”
That leaves a hard question for anyone grieving: did God plan this? Scripture holds that nothing is outside his rule, and it does not tell any of us what his counsel was in our own loss. Joseph said his sentence about his own life, to the men who did it, at the end of the story, and he opened it by asking whether he stands in God’s place. Paul says God works all things after his counsel, and there he does not claim to have read that counsel for any particular death. What Jesus did say plainly, about the tower and beside the blind man, is that the people watching a loss may not read it as a verdict on the one who suffered it. The other sentence people say at funerals, that God won’t give you more than you can handle, meets the same Paul, who was pressed “above strength” and said so.
The friends with the reasons
Job lost his children, his herds and his health, and three friends came to him. For seven days and seven nights “none spake a word unto him,” as Job 2:13 puts it, and then Job cursed his day, and they started explaining. Job kept asking God for a hearing: “Oh that I knew where I might find him!” he says in 23:3. When God answered, he rebuked Job too, in 38:2: “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” He gave Job no reason for any of it.
Then he turned to the friends, in Job 42:7: “My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.” The friends had the reasons, and Job had the questions, and God said Job had spoken rightly.
A friend sitting beside someone in grief can do what Job’s friends did first: sit on the ground and say nothing. And anyone grieving may keep asking God why, the way Job did, without accepting the reason a friend supplies.