The Question We Whispered in the Dark

Introduction: The Sound of a Breaking Heart

 

Greetings in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!

“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. Jesus wept.  – John 11:33-35

 

There is a unique warmth to a room filled with people who have gathered simply to share life together. Not long ago, I was sitting at a morning breakfast. The smell of fresh coffee and warm food filled the air, and the room was alive with the gentle murmur of conversation, laughter, and the clinking of silverware. We had just finished a weekly message—one that was beautiful, full of grace, and deeply encouraging. We prayed together, feeling that comforting safety that comes when people gather in community. It felt like a protective sanctuary, a place where the harshness of the outside world couldn’t reach us.

But then, the atmosphere shifted.

During the time of open fellowship, an older gentleman—a grandfather—began to speak. At first, his voice was steady, but as he continued, you could hear the structural integrity of his composure beginning to fracture. He started talking about his young grandchild.

He described how, months earlier, the family had received a devastating diagnosis: a brain tumor. Instantly, a canopy of prayer went up. This grandfather prayed desperately. The parents prayed. Their friends, their neighbors, and their faith community rallied together, storming heaven with tears and petitions. They begged for a miracle. They knocked on the door of heaven day and night, believing with everything they had that God would reach down and heal this innocent child.

But the tumor didn’t leave. Instead, it grew. The treatments failed. The child’s condition got worse, and eventually, the unthinkable happened. The grandchild died.

As this grandfather spoke, the memory of that loss broke wide open right there at the table. The grief wasn’t a distant memory; it was a living, breathing ache. He vocalized a heartbreaking sorrow that made the entire room fall utterly silent. The coffee cups stopped moving. The laughter vanished. In that safe, protected environment, he laid bare the rawest, most agonizing question a human being can utter.

Through his tears, he asked the question that has echoed through hospital hallways, battlefields, and broken homes since the dawn of time:

“Why do bad things happen to good people?”

It is a question that instantly connects us to a famous scene in the Bible, found in the Gospel of John. Lazarus, a dear friend of Jesus, had fallen deathly ill. His sisters, Mary and Martha, sent word to Jesus, expecting Him to rush to their aid and heal their brother. But Jesus delayed. By the time He arrived, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days.

The Bible tells us what happened when Mary finally saw Him:

When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. “Where have you laid him?” he asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they replied. Jesus wept. (John 11:32-35)

Look at that scene. Mary is doing exactly what that grandfather did at the breakfast table. She is weeping at the feet of the Teacher, crying out, “If you had been here, this tragedy wouldn’t have happened! We are your friends. We love you. Why did you let this happen to us?”

And what does Jesus do? He doesn’t offer a cold, academic lecture. He doesn’t scold her for her lack of perspective. The Bible says Jesus wept. He enters into her sorrow. He feels the weight of her broken heart.

In that small community morning breakfast, we did the same. We wept with that grandfather. We surrounded him with emotional and spiritual support. We listened, we held him, and we shared his heavy burden. That is exactly what a community is supposed to do. Jesus promised that where two or three are gathered in His name, He is there in the midst of them. In that moment, heaven touched earth because a broken heart found a safe place to cry out.

But as necessary and beautiful as that comfort is, the question still hangs in the air, demanding an answer. Why do bad things happen to good people? If God is loving, and if we are trying our best to live right, why does the tumor still grow? Why does the storm still hit?

To find our way through this darkness, we have to look past our immediate emotions and seek the profound truth of the Gospel.

 

I. The Human Search for an Answer

When human beings face unbearable suffering, our minds naturally scramble to find a framework that makes sense of the chaos. We desperately need a reason, a formula, or a philosophy to take away the sting of the pain. Over the years, some of the deepest thinkers and writers have tried to answer this exact dilemma, taking completely different approaches to solve the riddle of suffering.

The Compassionate, Limited God

One of the most famous modern attempts to answer this question came from a rabbi named Harold S. Kushner, who wrote a book titled When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Kushner wrote this out of his own deep crisis after losing his fourteen-year-old son to a tragic, rare rapid-aging disease. Looking at his innocent, suffering boy, Kushner couldn’t reconcile a completely powerful God with this terrible reality.

His conclusion was a radical one: he argued that God is completely all-loving, but He is not all-powerful when it comes to stopping natural diseases or disasters. In this view, tragedy isn’t a punishment from God; rather, God is the one weeping right alongside you, giving you the inner strength to survive a broken world that He cannot fully control. It’s an incredibly comforting thought because it completely absolves God of cruelty, but it leaves us with a God whose hands are tied by the laws of nature.

The Mystery of the Whirlwind

Then, we have the ancient biblical approach found in the Book of Job. Job was a man who was blameless, upright, and incredibly righteous. Yet, in a single day, a series of catastrophic events wiped out his wealth, killed all of his children, and destroyed his health, leaving him covered in painful sores, scraping his skin in the ashes.

Job’s friends arrived, and they brought the standard human formula: “Job, you must have sinned. God is a cosmic vending machine—good behavior brings blessings, bad behavior brings punishment. Therefore, you must be hiding a terrible secret.” But Job refused to accept this. He demanded an audience with God to protest his innocence.

When God finally answered, He didn’t give Job a neat explanation. Instead, God spoke out of a raging whirlwind. He asked Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. God revealed a universe so vast, complex, and beautifully wild that it completely bypassed human comprehension. The takeaway from Job is that suffering is not a simple game of cause and effect, and God’s purposes are often far too grand for our limited human eyes to see.

The Crucible of the Soul

A third approach comes from a writer named Shaul Rosenblatt, who lost his young wife to cancer. He wrote a book with a provocative, flipped title: Why Bad Things Don’t Happen to Good People.

Drawing from deep mystical perspectives, he argued that from an eternal standpoint, there are actually no “bad” events at all. Instead, every painful, heartbreaking, and gut-wrenching experience we endure is specifically designed by a loving Creator for our soul’s growth. In this view, suffering is a heavy, difficult tool meant to scrape away our superficiality and help us uncover our hidden, godlike potential.

The Common Thread

Every single one of these approaches contains a beautiful piece of truth. Kushner reminds us that God weeps with us. Job reminds us that God is infinitely greater than our small formulas. Rosenblatt reminds us that pain can produce profound spiritual growth.

But if you look closely at all three of these approaches—and indeed, at the very question itself—you will notice they all share the exact same underlying assumption. They all take for granted the premise built into the question: the assumption that we are, fundamentally, “good people.” We think of ourselves as decent, well-meaning, righteous individuals who deserve a smooth, happy life, which makes any incoming tragedy seem like a profound cosmic injustice. But to truly understand the Gospel, we have to pull back this final layer of protection and look at how the Bible actually defines who we are.

 

II. Shifting the Mirror from “Good” to “Sinner”

To find the true anchor for our souls in the midst of tragedy, we have to look into the mirror of God’s holiness, rather than the mirror of our own self-estimation.

The assumption that we are good people is not new. In the Gospels, a wealthy, powerful young man came running up to Jesus. He was successful, highly respected, and by all cultural standards, an exceptionally “good” person. He knelt before Jesus and asked:

“Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17)

Notice his mindset. He assumes that eternal life is something he can achieve by performing a few more good deeds. He sees himself as a fundamentally good person who just needs a little bit of expert guidance from a great teacher to complete his spiritual resume. But look at how sharply Jesus responds to him in the very next verse:

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked. “Only God is truly good.” (Mark 10:18)

Jesus completely deconstructs the young man’s entire worldview with a single sentence. He drives a wedge into the human habit of self-proclamation. He is saying, “You don’t know what the word ‘good’ actually means. You are using human standards. But compared to the absolute, blazing purity and holiness of God, no human being is genuinely good.”

In our comfortable, safe environments, we love to claim our own goodness. We build communities where we automatically assume that because we are nice, spiritual, and supportive, we belong to a “good” category of people. When we self-declare our goodness, we are often secretly begging for a cosmic guarantee—a spiritual insurance policy that says, “Because I am a good person in a good community, bad things shouldn’t happen to me.”

But the Bible strips away this empty, self-consoling illusion. The foundational truth of human reality is far more sobering. The Bible tells us that before a holy God, we are not “good people” who occasionally do bad things. We are broken, fallen human beings. We are sinners.

Think about the Apostle Paul. If there was ever a spiritual giant who could claim to be a champion of goodness, it was Paul. He planted churches across the known world, wrote a massive portion of the New Testament, underwent shipwrecks, beatings, and imprisonments for the sake of love, and lived a life of radical devotion. He was an Olympic-level champion of the faith whose record has never been broken.

Yet, listen to what this spiritual giant wrote near the very end of his life:

This is a trustworthy saying, and everyone should accept it: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”—and I am the worst of them all. (1 Timothy 1:15)

Paul didn’t say, “I used to be a sinner.” He didn’t say, “Compared to most people, I’m pretty good.” He looked directly into the light of God’s holiness and declared, “I am the foremost, the chief, the absolute worst of sinners.”

When we finally get rid of the false narrative that “we are good people,” the entire landscape shifts. The question changes shape. It is no longer, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” The real question, when looking into the mirror of truth, becomes: “Why do good things happen to sinners like us?” When we realize our true standing apart from God, we stop viewing life as a series of entitlements that God has failed to deliver. We realize that every single breath of air, every heartbeat, every sunrise, and every moment of peace is not a reward for our goodness—it is a scandalous, unearned gift of divine mercy.

 

III. The True Gospel – Grace in the Midst of Brokenness

This realization might feel incredibly heavy at first glance. If we are not good, and if we are all sinners living in a fallen, broken world where tragedy strikes indiscriminately, where do we find hope? If we can’t protect ourselves with our own goodness, what is left to hold onto?

This is exactly where the beauty of the Gospel shines brightest. The Gospel does not require you to pretend you are perfect, nor does it promise you an easy life free from pain. The Gospel is the announcement that God saw our utter brokenness, our sin, and our inability to save ourselves, and He chose to enter into our mess anyway.

Look back at the story of Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus. Why did Jesus weep? He knew that in just a few minutes, He was going to raise Lazarus back to life. He knew the sorrow would turn to joy. Yet, He still wept.

He wept because He saw the horrific damage that sin and death had inflicted on His beautiful creation. He wept because He loved Mary and Martha, and their pain broke His heart.

This tells us something life-altering about God: The moment we share our deepest heartbreaks, we are not met by a distant, silent God who is coldly analyzing our theology. We are met by a Savior who is surrounded by mercy, quietly listening to us, and weeping alongside us.

God didn’t stay on a distant throne. He became a human being in Jesus Christ. He walked our dusty roads, felt our physical exhaustion, and experienced the sting of betrayal and loss. And ultimately, He took that ultimate “bad thing”—the absolute agony of the cross—and bore it Himself.

On that dark hill of Calvary, the only truly good person who ever lived willingly let the worst imaginable thing happen to Him. He was innocent, blameless, and full of perfect love, yet He was crushed, broken, and abandoned. Why? To pay the price for our sins. He took the punishment that we deserved so that we could receive the unconditional love, adoption, and eternal life that we could never earn.

When that grandfather lost his grandchild, it was an absolute tragedy born of a fallen world broken by sin. God did not cause that tumor, nor did He take pleasure in that family’s tears. But in that safe community, as the grandfather cried out, Christ was right there in the midst of them, holding him through the hands and voices of his brothers.

The Gospel means that our suffering is never the final chapter. Because Jesus rose from the dead, defeating sin and death once and for all, we have a living hope. We have the absolute assurance that a day is coming when He will wipe away every single tear from our eyes. The brain tumors, the cancers, the car accidents, and the heartbreaks will not have the last word. Jesus Christ has the last word.

 

Summary: Walking Forward in Truth and Grace

As we wrap our hearts around these deep truths today, let us step out of the illusion of our own self-proclaimed goodness. We do not need to perform, to hide, or to pretend that we have it all together to earn God’s favor.

What We Have Learned Today:

• Community is a Sanctuary: We are absolutely called to support one another emotionally and spiritually. Sharing our raw pain in a safe, loving community is a beautiful reflection of heaven on earth.

• God Alone is Good: We must lay down the exhausting burden of trying to prove we are “good people.” Before a holy God, we are all sinners in desperate need of a Savior.

• The Gospel is Our Anchor: Jesus Christ did not come for the self-righteous; He came into the world to save sinners. He enters into our suffering, weeps with us in our losses, and offers us an eternal inheritance that can never be destroyed by the tragedies of this world.

You don’t have to be perfect to come to Jesus. You don’t have to have all the answers to the mysteries of suffering. You just have to come as you are—broken, honest, and ready to receive His boundless grace.

Prayer

Let us bow our heads and pray together.

Heavenly Father, we come before You today with hearts that are entirely open and bare. Lord, we acknowledge that this world can be deeply painful, confusing, and full of heartbreaking losses that we cannot fully comprehend. We thank You for the gift of community, for the safe places where we can weep, share our burdens, and find comfort in one another.

Forgive us, Lord, for the times we try to rely on our own goodness or assume we are entitled to a life without trials. We look into the mirror of Your holiness and confess, like the Apostle Paul, that we are sinners in need of Your mercy. We thank You that Your love for us does not depend on our perfection, but on Your unmerited grace.

We thank You that Jesus wept at the tomb, showing us Your deeply compassionate heart. We pray for anyone here today who is carrying a hidden wound, a devastating diagnosis, or a silent grief. Surround them with Your supernatural peace. Anchor our souls in the glorious truth that Jesus has conquered death, and that our suffering is not the end of the story.

We pray all of these things in the Name of Jesus, Amen.

 

 

As Jesus was starting out on his way to Jerusalem, a man came running up to him, knelt down, and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked. “Only God is truly good.”  – Mark 10:17–18