God and the Death of "Good" People

A favorite poem in handouts for funerals ends with the words, "God takes only the best." While meant to comfort people who have lost a loved one, especially at a young age, the poem is either saying that everyone is good or that God is not very perceptive, since everyone dies, whether they are good or bad from our perspective. To believe that God is a good, powerful God, only increases the pain at such times, because if God is good and powerful, couldn't the death have been prevented?

Of course, for a parent, almost anyone is good, and how do you understand God taking a child? I've never forgotten the comment from a mother who had just lost her son to death. Her son-let's call him Jim (not his real name)-had grown up as a member of a family that was considered to be "from the wrong side of the tracks" and was the butt of many jokes and rude comments in the relatively small town in which he lived. Jim had a foul mouth and was not shy when talking about the girls in his life and what he did with them. As he grew up, Jim made a confession of faith in Jesus and was baptized. There were no dramatic changes in his life, but he seemed to be heading in the right direction. Then he met a young woman and I performed their marriage ceremony.

Six months later, with his wife pregnant, Jim died in an accident in a salvage yard when a jack, holding up a car he was under, slipped, pinning him beneath the car. As I walked into his mother's house to discuss the funeral arrangements, his mother said to me, "This is a hard one; how can I understand this?" Implied was the question of what kind of God would allow Jim's death. [I had moved onto to another state when another tragic event happened to this lady. Jim's daughter, whom he had never met, was killed as a teenager in a car accident.]

Unhelpful Answers. Unfortunately, I had no easy answers to offer her, and I still don't. It's not enough to say, "When your time to die comes, you die." What does that really mean except that you die when conditions are right-either from some illness or being the victim of an accident, etc. Does God keep a schedule that tells when God will cause you to die, or does God simply know ahead of time when you will die?

Or, God only takes the best? See the first paragraph.

Or, all things work together for good? (Romans 8:28) How much sense does that make to someone who has just experienced a crushing loss in his or her life? I can say from personal experience that good things can come from what we call bad events or situations. Just the simple thing of having surgery and enduring a long visit from a clergyman made me more sensitive to how I should conduct myself as a clergyman visiting a post-op patient. But the death of a loved one is something far more serious and, at the time, so impossibly "bad" that it's difficult to see how anything good can ever come out of it.

Are we foolishly trying to find absolute answers? Again, I have no easy answers. However, recently, in a church staff meeting, the subject of easy answers came up in the discussion. The comment was made that 21st century young people are not looking for hard and fast answers, but are accustomed to processing issues without necessarily arriving at a final answer. I work with older people in the congregation. I was asked how such people would respond to a minister who admitted that he had not figured out everything in the Bible. My response was that the older people in my Sunday School class have come to the point where they have accepted the reality of what has happened in their lives-the death of a spouse, serious health issues, etc.-and have resolved the question of God's goodness or badness with the simple belief that God is with them, whatever has happened or whatever will happen. They don't have to understand what has happened. They can be content with the presence and comfort of God. It may be foolish for mere human beings to try to find anything more definite or absolute.

That's my answer, too, at least for today!