Life is Not Fair

My first cousin was killed in a car accident this week in Arkansas, so I will not be able to respond to comments for awhile, so my apology. He was so young, getting ready to get married, but he just got saved. I was able to share the Gospel with him just last year! I told some co-workers about it and they said "That's just not fair, he had his entire life ahead of him". So I amended this article to update this to answer their statement about why life seems unfair and why God does allow suffering. For example, He may allow it for me to be able to say some words at the funeral, as they wanted me to do the service, that they might hear the Gospel for the first time. I can tell the grieving family and friends of my cousin that, "If you want to see him again someday, you must accept Christ today to guarantee that you will live beyond the grave".

God may use this tragedy to inspire others who have not yet come to believe that Jesus Christ is the Savior and Son of God and that my cousin's death was not in vain. Those uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends who are not saved today have no guarantee that they will be alive tomorrow, just like my cousin. But my cousin is not really dead. God is the God of the living and not the dead. I thank God he was saved, so I know that I can reunion with him on that Great Day and not worry about my life ending without hope.

Children are the same way as many adults. They sense injustice in the world. "They cheated and got an A!", "why did that grumpy old man win the lottery, he's already rich? That's not fair!" No one likes it when good things happen to "bad people" and bad things happen to "good people". Good or bad in the sense of that person's life, like in how they treat others or help the less fortunate. Like it or not, humans display an internal sense of injustice when they see it. Human beings seem to have universal feelings of anger when a great miscarriage of justice has occurred or a crime that goes unpunished. Life seems so unfair; so much so that I even wrote a book about this subject.

My son always used to say that he didn't play even half the innings of a game because the coach's son was always starting the game ahead of him. My son was not only a slightly better hitter, but he was almost a year older than the coach's son. By experience, he was better at his position than most of the other players. He didn't want to hear that life just isn't fair, or that nothing in the Bible does says that life is always fair.

The hardest thing to do is to swallow your pride and allow things to work out for themselves. If you hold onto the anger thinking no justice will ever be done and if you try and make it fair, you risk having two wrongs. And you are taking God's place. He is the final judge of everything that everybody ever did or will ever do in their entire lifetime. Paul says in Romans 14:10, 12 that everybody "...will stand before the judgment seat of Christ...So then every one of us will give an account of himself before God" (NKJV, 2002.). Now, would you want to be that grumpy old miser on that judgment day? Or how about that securities con-artist who swindled your grandmother out of her inheritance? But no one will ever get away with anything at all. Here lies the problem. If one dies before accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, then yes, it is too late. But it's not too late yet. Read on!

Someday it will all come out in the wash! And if we have accepted Jesus as our Lord, remember that He was treated more unfairly than anyone that has ever lived in human history. He didn't do anything bad. He was so good. He was perfect. No one else is. But He never hurt anyone at all. But they hurt Him, and they lied about Him, they picked on Him, bullied Him, they hit Him. But did He say, "Wait, that's not fair". No, the Lord was silent because He trusted God enough that He knew God would take care of that. And in the Highest Supreme Court there is! Not the U.S. Supreme Court...The Highest Court! No one can overrule the Supreme Judge, Who is God Himself!

So, life's not fair. But not as unfair how Jesus was treated. And it's not fair that He died, on purpose, for us, so that we could live with Him forever. Giving His own life as a ransom for people who don't deserve it. You know what's unfair? God gives us what we really don't deserve (grace) and He doesn't give us what we really do (mercy).

An excerpt from Chapter Three of "Do Babies Go To Heaven?, Why Does God Allow Suffering?" from Amazon.com