Life isn’t fair?
“Life isn’t fair!” How often have you heard those words spoken? We read ‘unfair’ news stories everyday. Widows and pensioners defrauded of their life savings; young women attacked and raped; young men killed or maimed in car accidents; refugees from yet another war in Africa dying of starvation or disease. The list is endless.
It’s stories like these that raise one of the most difficult questions in our Christian faith – if God is just, why is life so unfair?
Most of us from our childhood have been brought up to believe both these truths.
Firstly that God is just. Throughout the Old Testament we read time and time again of the Israelites being punished, but it is always as a result of their rebellion. Even the very basis of our salvation – Jesus’ death for our sins – is premised on the fact that God requires justice to be done.
When it comes to fairness this is something that was probably instilled into most of us by our parents. For those of you who have a younger brother or sister I’m sure that you were told on many occasions, “Come on, play fair!” In fact probably one of the rites of passage from youth to adulthood is the realization that life isn’t the way our parents tried to teach us – it’s not fair.
So how do we as Christians reconcile these concepts when we are faced with seemingly unjustified tragedy? How do we explain it when good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to those who seem to least deserve it? “Life isn’t fair” we say. And by our human definition it isn’t. But it’s when we try to impose that same definition of fairness onto God that we run into problems. God is fair, but He is fair by His standards, not ours, and, try as we might, we find it difficult, if not impossible, to understand His standards.
Let me give you one example of where we may struggle to understand God’s standard of fairness. In Romans 2 and verse 11 we read that “God does not show favourtism.” If that is true then surely in terms of human talents we should all be more or less equal especially as we are told in Psalm 139 that “God created me in my inmost being, He knitted me together in my mother’s womb.”
Therefore wouldn’t it be fair, if God doesn’t show favourtism, that He would make me with the same amount of talent as the next person? Yet it is demonstrably true that we are not all equal. I can never play rugby like Bryan Habana; I can never understand the theory of relativity like Albert Einstein; I can never care for others like Mother Theresa and even, at a more mundane level, I can’t even draw someone’s face so you could recognize it, let alone call myself an artist. We are simply not all equal. Yet we are told God does not show favourtism.
How do we explain this conundrum? Again it’s a problem of our limited definition of fairness. The moment we consider the absence of favourtism in the distribution of talent, then invariably it’s all about ourselves being as talented as the next person. But obviously that’s not the way God sees it. For Him I believe it’s all about love. He delights in the diversity and inequality He gave us, while, at the same time, seeing equal value in all of us. He does not love us more, or less, on the basis of talent but sees us all as His children – all of us more, or less, gifted but all of us loved equally, without favourites.
Again and again we run into this problem of our definition versus God’s definition. If God is just, by our definition, then life’s not fair, again by our definition. And, if we are brutally honest with ourselves, we very often think that our definitions of justice and fairness are better than God’s.
The fact is that, as we go through life, our definition of what is fair will be tested - just as Job’s was – though I hope for all our sakes in a less dramatic fashion! God will do things we don’t understand and things that we least expect. We will witness the wicked prosper and the godly brought low. What God is asking of us, as His children, is to continue to believe the promise of Romans 8: 28 “All things work together for good to those who love God..” and as a result of that belief to keep refining our definition of what is fair to be more and more in line with His own.
You see the truth is that, as humans, we are caught in the trap of time. As much as we recognize that every action and event has a consequence, we can only see those consequences in the time frame in which we are living. It’s rather like the way successive generations rewrite the history books with the benefit of hindsight.
What we have to try to understand is that God sees the consequences of everything, every loss, every tragedy, every accident with the benefit of hindsight, even as they happen. Because He lives outside of time.
His understanding of the outcome of events is not limited to the present. He can see the consequences into eternity. And it’s in the context of eternity that all things will work together for good as long as we keep our love and our trust in Him alive.
Let me give you a rather trite analogy – but it’s one that helped me to see this concept a little more clearly. As you all know Judi and I have 3 sons and I have to tell you that the eldest one, Justin, was a right terror! If Terry Griffiths, who was his headmaster at Grey Junior, was here this morning he would be able to confirm just how bad he was. In fact at one stage he boasted of holding the class ‘jacking’ record! For those of you who don’t know, a jacking was a bat to the backside in the days when such things were allowed! Now if you had asked Justin after a ‘jacking’ whether he thought it was fair – you can guess what his answer would have been. His timeframe for fairness was dictated by his sore behind!
However a couple of years ago when he came here from America with his 6 year-old son he seriously considered sending him back to Grey as a boarder. The intervening 20 years had changed his perspective on fairness entirely. Imagine how much ours will change one day when we look back on tragedy and loss with the perspective of eternity! That’s always God’s perspective.
Now, you may be sitting there at the moment wondering why on earth I started down this rocky road. In fact when I got to this point in my preparation I began to wonder the same thing myself!
The reason is that in both our Old Testament and Gospel readings we meet up with women for whom the statement – “Life’s not fair” – could not have been more true. Both had lost their husbands and as a result would have, in those days, been condemned to a life of relative poverty. There was no social welfare system and both would be relying on their sons to take up the reins of making a living. Now their sons were dead too – and there are few tragedies in life to compare with the loss of a child. All of us can feel for the desperate cry of the widow to Elijah, “What do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?”
Notice how she saw the death of her son as a punishment for sin. For her that was the only explanation which brought justice and fairness to her tragedy. Whereas her loss had nothing to do with her sin but everything
to do with the demonstration of God’s power over death and the glory that this story brings to His name throughout the ages into eternity.
In Luke’s gospel we never hear the widow of Nain speak, but I’m sure she had much the same feelings. Why was this happening to her? What had she done to deserve two deaths in her family? We can imagine her,
tear-filled, asking over and over again, “Is it my fault Lord?” “Why couldn’t you punish me and let him live?” “It’s not fair, he had so much of his life in front of him!” But yet again, this was not about fairness in a human time frame but about the opportunity for God to demonstrate His compassion and power for all eternity.
Of course it’s easy in both these stories to see the fulfillment of Paul’s promise in Romans that all things work together for good. Both have a happy ending.
But what of the stories that never seem to have a happy ending? What of the young sons and daughters who succumb to death, drugs or other self-destructive behaviour despite our most fervent prayers? What of the other tragedies and losses we see around us? And let’s be honest those happen far more often than the miraculous cures or deliveries. Does that mean that God doesn’t keep His promise? Does it mean that He is not fair? Not at all. What it does mean is that our definition of fairness falls far short of God’s. It means that we can only see the immediate consequences of tragedy – not the consequences that stretch into eternity.
I suspect there may be at least one person here this morning who is thinking, it’s easy for me to say these things. It’s far more difficult to grasp their meaning when you yourself are caught up in tragedy. And you would be absolutely correct. It’s always difficult to learn any lesson when you are caught up in the emotion of the moment. Again it’s that trap of time.
What we need to do is put on some ‘armour’ of God long before tragedy strikes – because strike it surely will. We need to convince ourselves every day of the love of God for each one of us; we need to recognize everyday His hand at work in our lives and acknowledge it to ourselves and to others; we need to appreciate time and time again that all things, even the small ones, work together for our good. Because the more we absorb these lessons in the good times the easier it will be to trust God in the difficult ones.
And few men knew those lessons better than Blake Hobson. For those of you who didn’t know him, Blake was a dear friend known to many of us through Emmaus.
A couple of weeks back he was involved in a tragic motor car accident and on Friday evening we heard that he had died. I think most of us have asked ourselves both after the accident and on Friday, “Why?” It just doesn’t seem fair that such a wonderful and tireless worker for Christ should be struck down by a drunken driver.
We can never presume to know the eternal consequences of Blake’s accident and death. We cannot know the long-term effects of the love and support that has been shown his family throughout this ordeal. We may never know the ultimate outcome of the reconciliation of his estranged brothers that Blake was able to orchestrate from his hospital bed. We’ll never know the lasting power of Deline’s testimony in the moments and days after the accident. We can only wonder at the way that God will use a Christian farming community drawn together through tragedy.
Today we mourn. Life isn’t fair but God is and one thing that we can be sure of is that Blake’s death will bring glory and honour to His name.
The last thought I want to leave you with this morning is an answer to anyone who says, in the face of tragedy, “no-one knows how I feel.” I want you to know this morning that God knows exactly how you feel. And I can explain that fact no better than to read you the words of Dorothy L Sayers, the British novelist.
“For what ever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering, subject to sorrows and death – He had the honesty and courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept to His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He himself has gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life; the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money, to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”
God keeps to His own rules and He always plays fair. Amen.
