Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People? – PART 7

The Gospel Of Guilt Or Grace

Because we associate the Law with God, and sin with breaking the Law, and breaking the Law with the wrath of God, every time we sin we feel like we are making God mad. Not realizing that Jesus Christ has already fulfilled the demands of the Law by Himself, and that there was none found righteous enough to complete the Law’s requirements within themselves has pulled many unsuspecting believers away from the place of forgiveness into a place of condemnation and regret.

Jesus became a curse for us that we can be free. If we fail to embrace His finished work in us, we will always live in the backwash of sin, trying to get what we already have and trying to be good enough to get our prayers answered.

The promise of “no condemnation” is only to those who walk in the Spirit. If we continue to process our righteousness and the finished work of Christ through our own self effort, as the Law prescribes, and judge our spiritual position and condition based on how we “feel” about ourselves, we will continue to walk in fear and condemnation.

As long as we still feel guilty, the Enemy will still be able to rightly charge us with the judgments of sin and its consequences. Rather than acknowledging, like Eve, the trick of the Serpent to deceive her, we take on the guilt as our own, and the punishment for sin as a debt we must pay.

Once the Enemy has gotten us to agree that we are guilty, he can punish us with the penalties of one found guilty, including the loss of blessings and the infliction of pain. Guilt separates us from the Gospel of Grace and the Goodness of God in causing us to agree with accusations of God’s Enemy who tells us grace is only for the perfect and God must still be pacified.

This distrust and slander against the goodness of God in our minds ties God’s hands and allows the Enemy cut us off from the love of our Heavenly Father and to bring the judgments and consequences of the Liar upon us because we believe, “we had it coming” or “deserve it”. Not realizing the deceptive nature of our Enemy or the wiles of his ways creates a predicament that causes us to agree with the idea that “God is mean” and does not care about us. How clever and manipulative that the Enemy can even implicate God as suspect to wrong doing?

If all spiritual warfare is based on “agreements and authority” and we believe that everything that happens to us is either God’s fault in that He did not try to stop it, or my fault, the Enemy continues to argue his right to enforce his sentences against us without any hope of justice or relief.

And if we believe that all that we see and experience are merely random acts of injustice to discourage us until everything becomes “pointless”, we get to the place where we don’t “care anymore”. We become resigned to the injustice which only insures its continuance.

In order to accurately understand why bad things continually happen to the innocent, we must grasp the reality that life is more than just a set of random events determined by good and bad luck. “Luck” only exists in our analytical minds as an explanation for the unexplainable.

We are constantly trying to “figure out and fix” our problems. Some how we believe that if we can come up with an rationalization for things that happen, we will be in control of our lives instead of being its victim.  But when things are not fair and do not make sense, we get “mad”.

The truth is that we are caught up in the war between God and Satan where both faith and fear make their demands on us. The walk of faith is not one of immediate gratification or constant reward. Nor is the walk of fear always recognized at first sight, for what it is. Therefore, we must wait for the fruit, as Jesus admonishes us, and let “Patience have its perfect work”, (Ja. 1:2-4) to be able to discern what is what. Fruit does not appear at the planting of the seed.