When Theology Bypasses Grief

Sometimes theology confuses God’s ability to redeem pain with the idea that God caused the pain. When theology bypasses grief, it can make God sound cruel because it rushes to justify loss instead of allowing people to honestly mourn it.

For example, let’s say someone dies in a terrible car accident after being hit by a driver who was texting. Instead of simply grieving the loss, people may begin searching for a way to explain it, blame God, or even blame the person who died. Someone may say, “That’s why you gotta stay prayed up,” or “Did they not hear from God? Maybe God would have told them to take another street.” Others may struggle with the question, “If God was so good, why would He let that happen?”

But Jesus Himself pushed back against the idea that tragedy always happens because someone did something wrong. In Luke 13:4, Jesus referred to eighteen people who died when a tower fell on them and asked, “Do you think they were worse sinners than everyone else living in Jerusalem?”

In other words, He did not allow people to turn tragedy into a simple blame game.

We often try to make sense of loss because we do not want to believe something like that could happen to us or to someone we love. Tragedy makes us feel vulnerable, and vulnerability can be terrifying. So instead of sitting with the grief, we sometimes rush to explain the pain, hoping that if we can understand why it happened, we can somehow protect ourselves from experiencing something similar.

However, God does not want us to live in fear every second of the day. He does not want us to be afraid to take a cross-country road trip because we are afraid of an accident. He does not want us to live constantly scanning for the next life-threatening event. We can use wisdom, pray for protection, and still trust God enough to keep living. As 2 Timothy 1:7 reminds us, “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”