It gets said in a hallway three or four days afterward, by somebody with a paper cup who means well and has run out of anything else. “Everything happens for a reason.” Then it gets said again a month later, in the car, in your own voice, because by then you would like it to be true.
It is not in the Bible. Jesus met that question twice, and both times he took it apart.
Pilate and the tower
Some people came to him with news of a massacre. Pilate had killed a group of Galileans, and their blood had ended up mixed with their sacrifices.
Jesus answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way. Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the men who dwell in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but, unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way.”
Luke 13:2-5 (WEB)
Two disasters, one political and one a falling building, same answer to both. The people bringing him the news wanted the sum that makes a catastrophe legible: these men died, therefore these men had it coming. He tells people who arrived holding a calculator that it is the wrong instrument, that everyone in the room will die of something, and that nobody stands outside the question by pricing another’s death.
Making the reason afterward
I do this myself, and fast. A man I had counseled for two years stopped coming, I never found out why, and inside three weeks I had a story about how the ending had been good for him. The story was tidy, it flattered the part of me that needs the world to make sense, and I have never been able to check it. I have said the sentence out loud to people too, because the silence in the room was unbearable to me and not because it did anything for them, which is exactly how the other sentence for that room fails.
If the thought has come to you that you would rather not be here, call or text 988. It reaches a crisis line in the United States and, since 2023, in Canada. There is a chat at 988lifeline.org, and 911 if you are in danger tonight. Outside those two countries, your local emergency number.
Blind from birth
His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
John 9:2 (WEB)
The disciples put it in its cleanest form. Whose fault is this. Jesus answers that half flatly: neither.
What he says next is a sentence the Greek leaves open, because the original carries no punctuation. The World English Bible ties the purpose to the blindness: “but, that the works of God might be revealed in him.” Move the break and the purpose points forward into the next verse instead. Scholars have argued that way in print, no major translation follows, and I cannot settle it. Both agree on the half before. Neither this man nor his parents, and then Jesus spits on the ground and makes clay.
Two ways to read Romans 8:28
Paul is deep in a page about suffering by then. He has just said the whole creation is groaning, and that when you have run out of words the Spirit does the praying. The famous sentence is the next thing he tells them.
We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:28 (WEB)
With all things in the subject slot it can sound like machinery, gears grinding good out of whatever gets dropped in. Several modern versions put God in that slot instead. The New International Version has “in all things God works for the good of those who love him,” and the New Living Translation and the New American Standard both have God causing it.
The Greek allows both, and the manuscripts divide. Westcott and Hort printed the word God into the sentence as its subject; the Nestle-Aland text leaves it out and keeps it in the apparatus. The reading with God is in Vaticanus and in Alexandrinus and in Origen, which makes it old rather than modern. The versions with God in that slot are not only interpreting. Gears do not need a reason for what goes in, and a God working with what he has been handed is under no obligation to have sent it.
Paul also puts a door on the sentence and says who is inside it, for those who love God. If you cannot say this month that you love God, and plenty of people in a first month cannot, the sentence describes where he is taking people, not how he screens them at the entrance.
For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
Romans 8:29 (WEB)
Paul names that good first, and adds two more right after, justified and glorified. None of the three is a statement about how a situation turns out. He names where God is taking his people, and he does not say that is what your loss was for.
Where Genesis cuts the other way
Joseph tells the brothers who sold him that they meant it for evil and God meant it for good, in Genesis 50:20. He says it about his own life, to the men who did it, so it can be reached.
Nobody in Scripture hands it to somebody else and is upheld for it. Paul says his own thorn was given so that he would not be exalted too much, in 2 Corinthians 12:7, and he never prices anybody else’s. Whoever is inside the loss owns that sentence, and they reach it late.
Time and chance
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11 (KJV)
Ecclesiastes sits in the same Bible as Romans 8, a verse over from an instruction to get on with your work.
Job asked God for a hearing and kept asking, chapter after chapter, while three friends explained his losses to him. What came back was the sea, the snow and the ostrich, and not one word about why. Then God turned to the friends, the men with the reasons, and said they had not spoken of him what was right, as his servant Job had.
The man who would not stop asking is the one God defends.