If God is good and loving, why does he let bad things happen to good people?

What is settled, and what is not

The whole answer in two lists. The first is argued from the text in the sections below. The second is not a gap in our study, it is a boundary Scripture itself draws, and we would rather mark it than paper over it.

What the text says

• Jeremiah does not reach for permission This is the striking thing about chapter 20, and it is why the passage settles the question rather than merely raising it. Jeremiah has just been beaten by a priest for preaching, and his complaint is not that Pashhur got past God. It is: O LORD, you have deceived me, and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed (20:7). He lays the whole thing at God’s feet. The verb behind deceived is the one used of a seducer talking a girl into something (Exodus 22:16), it is not a mild word, and Jeremiah chose it. And God does not rebuke him for any of it. The complaint stands in the canon, uncorrected.
• God promised deliverance, never exemption At the call, years earlier: They will fight against you, but they shall not prevail against you, for I am with you, declares the LORD, to deliver you (Jeremiah 1:19). The fighting was in the promise from the first day. Notice the same verb running through chapter 20 in both directions: God has prevailed over Jeremiah (20:7), and his persecutors will not overcome me (20:11). Jeremiah’s grief is not that God broke his word. It is that God kept it exactly, and it still cost this much.
• He tried to quit, and could not If I say, ’I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot (20:9). Obedience here is not stoicism and not enthusiasm. He attempted resignation and found he had been given no such option. Whatever we say about God’s government of this scene, it plainly includes the prophet’s own will.
• The chapter never resolves, and that is deliberate Verse 13: Sing to the LORD; praise the LORD! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers. Verse 14: Cursed be the day on which I was born! In that order, with no transition, and the chapter ends at verse 18 asking why he ever came out of the womb: no doxology, no editorial correction, nothing. Scripture lets a faithful man’s rawest words stand. Take that as God’s own permission to say this out loud to him. Job’s friends were the ones with tidy answers, and God’s verdict on them was that they had not spoken of him what was right (Job 42:7).
• “Good people” is a premise worth checking: carefully None is righteous, no, not one (Romans 3:10-12). Strictly, nobody suffers as a person to whom God owed better. But that fact has a fence around it, and Christ built the fence himself. Told about Galileans Pilate had slaughtered, he asked do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you, and said the same about eighteen people killed when a tower fell (Luke 13:1-5). Of the man born blind: It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him (John 9:3). So the doctrine is true of every human being’s standing before God, and it is never a permitted explanation of a particular person’s suffering. Anyone who uses it that way at a graveside has contradicted Jesus twice.
• Bare permission does not rescue God; it only removes his purpose The instinct to say God allowed it but did not will it is a good instinct, aimed at protecting God’s holiness. It does not work, because he is present and almighty and could have stopped it, and to permit what you could prevent is a decision. The word allowed buys nothing. What it costs is everything: an event God permitted for no reason is worse than one he ordained for a good one. The Westminster divines saw this and refused the word, God’s providence extends to the first fall and all other sins of angels and men, and that not by a bare permission, yet so as the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature, and not from God (WCF 5.4).
• The argument from original sin is right about the source, and stops short Sin entered by one man, and death by sin, and so death spread to all (Romans 5:12); the ground itself was cursed (Genesis 3:17-19); the whole creation groans (Romans 8:22). That is the true account of how suffering got here, and it puts the guilt where it belongs. But look closely at how Paul says the corruption spread: the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope (Romans 8:20). The one who subjected it is God. The curse is a sentence he passed, not a spill that escaped him, and it was passed in hope. So even the mechanism by which evil permeates everything is itself under God’s hand and aimed somewhere.
• Where the usual argument slips, for anyone who works in logic It runs: God cannot will sin; men sin; therefore God cannot will all things. It is valid only if will names the same relation in the premise and the conclusion. It does not. Under precept the premise is true (God cannot approve sin) and the conclusion does not follow. Under decree the conclusion would follow, but the premise is precisely what Genesis 50:20 and Acts 4:28 deny. Four terms. The premise actually needed is that ordaining a sin to occur is itself sinning, and that is the point in dispute, not a given: the sinfulness thereof proceedeth only from the creature. God’s end in an event and the sinner’s end in the same event are two different things, and Genesis 50:20 says so in one sentence.
• Scripture does give reasons: just never the one you want It names several, and they are real: the testing that proves faith genuine (1 Peter 1:6-7); that the works of God be displayed (John 9:3); comfort received so it can be handed on (2 Corinthians 1:3-6); sharing Christ’s sufferings (Romans 8:17; Philippians 3:10); the discipline a father gives sons, painful now and peaceful later (Hebrews 12:5-11); and a delay in judgment that is mercy, not indifference (2 Peter 3:9). Every one of those is stated. Not one of them is a diagnostic tool. Scripture never tells you which is operating in your case, and it did not tell Jeremiah or Job.

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

• Augustine (Enchiridion, XI) The sentence the whole tradition after him leans on: for the Almighty God… would in no way permit the existence of anything evil among his works, were he not so omnipotent and good as to bring good even out of evil. Augustine’s move is not to explain evil away but to deny that its existence counts against God’s power or his goodness: precisely because God is powerful and good enough to make it serve.
• John Calvin (Institutes, I.16-18) Gives three chapters to providence and will not accept permission as a resting place, arguing that a God who merely watches is not the God of Scripture and that the word is used to avoid saying what the text says. Two things are easy to miss. First, he is equally firm that God is not the author of sin and that the wicked act from their own desire, so the guilt is entirely theirs. Second, his stated purpose for the doctrine is comfort, not explanation, in chapter 17 the whole point is what a believer may rest on. He had earned the right to say so: after his infant son Jacques died in 1542 he wrote to Pierre Viret that the Lord has certainly inflicted a severe and bitter wound in the death of our infant son. But he is himself a Father, and knows best what is good for his children.
• The Westminster Confession (1646) and the 1689 London Baptist Confession The confessional statement is careful in both directions in a single sentence: God did freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass; yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creatures, nor is the liberty or contingency of second causes taken away, but rather established (WCF 3.1). Chapter 5.4 then applies it to sin itself, refusing a bare permission while insisting the sinfulness comes only from the creature. Spurgeon’s own confession, the 1689, reproduces both almost word for word.
• The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Q&A 27-28 Written to teach children, and it takes the hardest doctrine on this page and makes it a comfort. Providence is God’s power upholding all things so that all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand. Then question 28 asks what that knowledge is good for, and answers: that we may be patient in adversity, thankful in prosperity, and confident about the future. Note the order, the doctrine is not offered as a theory to be defended but as ground to stand on when things go wrong.
• Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892) Preached God’s sovereignty over all things his whole life, and was not spared. Chronic illness, and a depression he described from his own pulpit rather than hiding. In October 1856, while he was preaching at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall, a false cry of fire caused a crush that killed seven people; he was in his twenties, and it broke him for weeks. A great many warm sayings circulate under his name on this subject, the one about kissing the wave that throws you against the Rock of Ages is the usual example, which we could not trace to anything he published, so we leave them out (DOCTRINE.md, the Berean rule). The verifiable fact is better than the quotations anyway: the man who taught this most cheerfully taught it from inside the trouble, not from above it.
• D. A. Carson (How Long, O Lord?, 1990) Works the question at book length and refuses to relieve the tension by weakening either side. His summary of the biblical pattern is that God is absolutely sovereign, but his sovereignty never functions to reduce human responsibility; and human beings are genuinely responsible, but their responsibility never functions to make God contingent. He also insists: usefully, for anyone tempted to argue this abstractly, that most of the Bible’s treatment of suffering is pastoral rather than philosophical, and that the book of Job ends without ever giving Job the information the reader was given in chapter 1.
• Timothy Keller (Walking with God through Pain and Suffering, 2013) Makes the comparative point that a purely philosophical answer misses: every worldview has to tell sufferers something, and the question is which one has anything to say at the bottom. His argument is that Christianity is alone in saying that God has himself entered the suffering, so the sufferer is not asked to accept a distant verdict on their pain from someone who has never been in it.
• A note on quoting Quoted words above are quoted because we could check them against a published text. Where a teacher’s position is summarized rather than quoted, that is deliberate and means we could not verify exact wording. We would rather describe an argument than put a sentence in a man’s mouth.

Where it lands

Every other answer to this question ends in an argument. This one ends in a person.

Look at what the question assumes, and then look at the cross. The question wants to know why a good person suffers. Scripture’s reply is to show us the only one who ever fully qualified: betrayed, tried by a court that knew he was innocent, flogged, and executed. If suffering proves God absent, or indifferent, or beaten, then Golgotha closes the case against him. Instead, that is the exact place Scripture says the plan was running (Acts 4:27-28), and the exact place his love is demonstrated: God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

So the answer to is God good is not finally a syllogism. It is a wound. Whatever you cannot yet see about your own trouble, you are not being asked to trust a God who has kept his distance from it.

That is what licenses Romans 8:28, and the licensing is done by the next few verses, not by optimism: He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? (Romans 8:32). The argument runs from the hardest thing God ever did to everything easier. If he did not withhold his Son, nothing withheld from you now is withheld out of indifference.

Jeremiah never got an explanation. He got God, the LORD is with me as a dread warrior (20:11), and then he went back to the gate and preached for another thirty years and watched the city fall anyway. Centuries later another prophet wept over the same city, was handed over by the same kind of men, and was not delivered from the hand of evildoers, so that we could be. Jeremiah 20 has an ending. It is simply not in Jeremiah 20.

Questions to sit with

For reading this with someone else, a family, a study, or a friend who asked in the first place.

1. Jeremiah 20:7 accuses God to his face, and Scripture preserves the accusation without correcting it. What does that permit you to pray?
2. Verse 13 praises God and verse 14 curses the day he was born, with nothing in between. Have you been in both verses in the same hour?
3. If your hardest thing was something God merely allowed rather than ordained, what comfort would you still have? Work it out concretely before answering.
4. In Luke 13:1-5 Jesus is handed the question everyone expects him to answer and asks a different one instead. What is he after?
5. Which line on the “not given in this age” list is hardest for you to leave there, and what would you do with the answer if you had it?