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“And when your people ask, ‘Why did the LORD our God do all this to us?’ you must reply, ‘You rejected him and gave yourselves to foreign gods in your own land. [Jeremiah 5.19a]

Jeremiah really didn't pull any punches. But it wasn't Jeremiah so much as it was God Whom he quoted.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Here is the answer if we will just listen:

Bad things happen to good people because good people are only good in their own eyes and not God's. Therefore, regardless of how their own deceitful hearts have lied to them making them believe they are good, their circumstances reveal the truth that, instead, they are in sin and therefore in need of repentance.

There will be no popularity contests won with the statement above. In fact, if most theologians got a hold of the statement above, they would shred it with their complex explanations that have no foundation in the pure Word of God. In fact, most people will reject the notion presented in the paragraph above. But, that does not make it any less true and it does not persuade me otherwise.

God designed curses for one purpose: to bring man to repentance. Our curses are our call to repentance. If we fail to repent in the advent of a curse, then we are destined to the full course of the curse. We only have one option as far as God is concerned: repent.

However, mankind has learned many other options of its own manufacture. We have become adept at addressing our curses. We have learned quite well to depend on our solutions - our science, our medicine, our social structure, our politics ...instead of God. "Besides, if we can figure it out, we don't need God, right?"

Unless we come back to the basic understanding that curses are a call to repentance, we are literally damned to powerless religion on earth, and, I fear worse, an eternity in hell.

Father, regardless of what my reason (my heart) tells me, I want to repent in my pain and suffering - in my curses. I don't want to depend on anything or anyone else but You to deliver me. Help me rid myself of and flee from all the false gods in my life - the idols - that call me to trust in them instead of in You.