"Everything has a Reason"?

I recently met a man who told me he didn’t believe in coincidences. I think he must have meant that events are not coincidences, because surely he couldn’t have meant that everything was meant to happen together. If that was true then it would have to be more than a coincidence that I ran out of mayonnaise this morning and a man in Istanbul hit his wife.

I think I will be accused of missing the point. What the man is likely saying is something like this: “Everything that occurs happens for a reason. Every event is part of God’s plan.” Now I don’t think fatalism is being advocated here. But I do think he’s saying that God often forces something to happen that wouldn’t have happened had He not intervened. We experience these things as coincidences, but really it is God interacting with our life.

Well, how can I tell the difference between the statistically required coincidences that are going to happen in a world of 6 billion of people (for example, I meet a person at the store who had a car accident the exact same day that I did), versus the things that God actually wills. The man might say “that’s the thing, there are no coincidences, God meant for you to meet that person!” But reading “God’s will” can sometimes be a little difficult. Let me illustrate.

I had a cousin who quit going to church and started biking on Sunday mornings. On a race a few months before his wedding, he got into an accident on a Sunday and broke his back, nearly paralyzing him for life. My grandfather was convinced God was punishing him, but my aunt defended her son: “You can’t know that dad, it was just an accident.” And there’s the rub. We really can't know.

In the Bible there were prophets who interpreted world events. They predicted that unlikely events would occur and gave a reason for it.:“This big empire will be crushed because they have persecuted my people.” We however, take the opposite tactic. We wait until things have happened, and then we say “ah, that was God.” And of course, different perspectives “see God” in exactly the opposite events.

But what about the “Everything has a reason” quip in tragedies? I mean, the man who said this to me was telling me that his brother-in-law had been shot execution style because he’d been a witness to a murder! It seems that he has been comforted by this thought in a genuine tragedy! But what is he really trying to say? That good came out of the murder (people came to his faith) and that good is even more wonderful that the event was tragic? I mean if this is really how we should be looking at the world, does that mean that this world only seems to be a place of awful tragedies, but its actually the most wonderful place possible and all these events are only apparent tragedies?

I doubt he would go this far, but I wonder how far you can actually take the idea to its logical conclusion.

Perhaps we can simply agree that bad stuff happens. God isn’t behind every tragedy, willing it to happen because something even better awaits. Perhaps it is just a plain tragedy in a world that God has allowed to operate using a combination of “laws of nature” and “human free will.” Perhaps this world would be easier to understand, and require fewer mental gymnastics if we just said “that was really bad.” The shooter was not being ruled by kingdom principles when he was murdering. God was not king in his life, he was rebelling, and God wasn’t the underlying force behind him. Greed and evil were. "Christians" are not exempt from time, chance and the evil decisions of other people. God has sovereignly decided to let this world run its course and allow us to choose right or wrong in this hectic mix.

What do you think?