Human Tragedies, Divine Purposes

One of the great quests in the history of philosophy is investigation into the meaning and purpose of life. Philosophy seeks the purpose not only of human existence but also of animal existence, of flower existence, of the existence of rocks and of everything else. Philosophy is profoundly interested in questions of purpose and meaning.

But when we consider adverse events, this is the question that burns in everyone’s mind. Why did this happen? Particularly if one is a theist and especially a Christian theist, we ask the “why” question. “How could God allow this to happen?” or “Why, God, did this happen?” Christians do not allow for meaningless events to take place, because at the heart of the Christian worldview is the idea that everything in history has a purpose in the mind of almighty God. God is a purposive God; He is not chaotic. As Albert Einstein once remarked, God does not “play dice” with the universe.¹ For everything there is a purpose—including what we define as tragedies. Knowing this, however, we are still pressed to ask the “why” question.

If someone were to say to me: “Why did this happen? What was God’s purpose in all of this?” the only honest answer I could give would be, simply, “I don’t know.” I can’t read God’s mind. If you were to ask me, “Was God involved?” my answer, of course, would be yes. Because I’m committed to the Christian doctrine of providence, I’m convinced that God was involved in this act, that it was according to God’s purpose. But what His specific purpose was in this event, I do not know.

Let us turn our attention at least briefly to a discussion Jesus had with His disciples, recorded in the ninth chapter of the gospel of John. We read these words: “As [Jesus] passed by, he saw a man blind from birth” (John 9:1). Let’s stop right there for a moment. Let’s say that you are a mother. You carry your baby to term. You’re excited in anticipation of the birth of this child. But soon after the baby is born, you discover that he is blind. Few people would respond to such an experience with joy or would react to that experience as a visitation of divine blessing. In a word, the parents in their disappointment, in all probability, would see that event, at least for them and for their child, as a personal tragedy. Certainly people would be inclined to ask, “Why, God, did You let this happen?”

The disciples of Jesus met a blind person when he was an adult. They knew that he had been born blind, suffering total blindness for many years. If anything seems senseless, it is the experience of a man born blind. So the disciples came to Jesus and asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2).

Jesus immediately recognized that the question posed to Him committed a logical fallacy, for which we have a technical name. It is the fallacy of the false dilemma, sometimes called the either/or fallacy. The fallacy is committed when a person reduces possibilities or options to two and only two, when in fact there may be more possibilities. In some situations, the possibilities can legitimately and rationally be reduced to two. For instance, either there is a God or there is not a God. There’s no third alternative. It’s one or the other. Either you are going to die or you are not going to die. But in this case, the disciples rushed to judgment and reduced the options to two when there was a third option that they hadn’t considered. So Jesus, when He heard the question stated this way, essentially answered by saying, “Neither.” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).

This man had been born blind so many years before in order that, on this particular day, God’s kingdom could be manifested through his healing. God’s purpose here was to demonstrate who Jesus was. And to this day, two thousand years later, that blind man, who presumably is in heaven today and perhaps has been joined by his children and grandchildren, sits with them and talks about how God used his blindness to demonstrate the identity of Christ. He discovered that his tragic condition was by no means senseless. It had a divine purpose that has borne witness to Christ through all history.