The notion of Karma is a powerfully attractive one. The idea that there is a nice logical intelligibility behind the sequence of life’s events – the fortunes and calamities and everything in-between. That it follows a neat pattern of righteousness-blessing and unrighteousness-curse. This is so deeply wired into us that we are sometimes outraged when events do not follow this sequence.

For Christians, this temptation is especially strong since we have biblical precedent to appeal to. We do believe in cosmic justice. In a God who doesn’t let anyone get away with doing wrong, ultimately. This already sets us apart from other worldviews where perhaps there is no justice or God or any ultimate arbiter. Where the universe is empty or simply indifferent. But more than that, we have the whole history of Israel in the Old Testament where this view is the explicit frame through which their story is told. God makes a covenant with them at Sinai. If you obey, I will bless you. If you rebel, I will curse you – really nice and neat. This theme then carries on for two thousand years over Israel’s history. They grapple with different stages of that cycle and its leaders are often pinning themselves on a diagram of blessing/curse and saying “We are here because we sinned. In response, we need to repent”.

So it makes sense that as Christians, we are primed for this way of thinking. If we do good things, God will bless us. If we do bad, he will not bless us.

So why doesn’t life always look like this for us? Has God changed his modus operandi? Why does it seem there is no real order and structure to life’s events. Everything feels random. Good things are happening to all sorts of people – people we like and people we don’t. Bad things happen to all sorts of people – and we particularly notice when it happens to those we like – those we think don’t deserve calamity. Life breaks all the rules that are wired into our brains for a morally ordered universe.

So how do we respond? Very often, we are resentful. “God has not held up his end of the bargain”, we think. It can feel more righteous to be indignant on someone else’s behalf; “She doesn’t deserve what’s happening to her”. The end result is that it kills our conviction that God is sovereign and good. He either must not care, or he isn’t really good, or maybe he’s simply not there.

It is important not to trivialise these emotions. I truly believe this is the most difficult question in human life, and definitely in the Christian life.

But the picture we have painted so far is incomplete. The scriptures, and even the Old Testament, tell a more complex story. Understanding them properly is a step in the direction to resolving this tension – not that it makes things easy or neat. I should forewarn you, there is no neat cookie-cutter solution at the end of this. Some explanation that makes you sit back and go “aaah, it was this all along, and now that I understand this I am comfortable and can move on”. In fact it is quite the opposite. But the important part is this: properly understood, the scriptures never promise this kind of life or encourage this way of viewing life. In fact, the scriptures paint a picture of human experience very much like what we experience, and they offer us hope but not explanation.

The entire point of book of Job is to wrestle with the fact that life does not always follow this pattern. Job is a righteous man who deserves none of what happens to him. The conclusion of the book is a big fat null result. We turn the last page of the book saying to ourselves, “surely there’s an explanation of why here… There’s gotta be a more substantial and comprehensive explanation of suffering”. But the answer is frustratingly simple and short: God is God and we are not. That’s it.

Psalm 44 grapples with this on a national level. The psalmist begins by acknowledging God’s sovereign blessing as the source of all good things in the nation – land, peace, security, prosperity. God has won all these things for Israel. They did not achieve these things for themselves by their might or even their righteousness. Therefore God alone should be trusted. Swords and bows are of no use. The psalm then moves to a description of suffering and complete abandonment by God. He has “rejected us and disgraced us”. This begs the question of why this has happened. Our Old Testament brains kick in and immediately assume that it was because of their sin. We anticipate the next line of the psalm to call the nation to repentance so that God may bless them again. But no:

“All this has come upon us, though we have not forgotten you, and we have not been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way; yet you have broken us in the place of jackals and covered us with the shadow of death. If we had forgotten the name of our God or spread out our hands to a foreign god, would not God discover this? For he knows the secrets of the heart. Yet for your sake we are killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.”

The pattern is not being followed. This is not a covenant curse. We are left reeling at the injustice of it all. We can only conclude that sometimes the pattern doesn’t get followed.

Jesus himself in Luke 13 affirms this. He combats the underlying assumptions of his hearers by bringing up two examples where calamity befalls a group of people – most memorably with the group who the tower of Siloam collapsed on. He asks his hearers, “do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish”. It’s a brilliant response that achieves two things: First, it clearly teaches that not every event in life is a moral consequence of our past actions. That sometimes, things happen for no particular reason at all. Second, it points us forward to the day when the moral consequences of all of our actions will be calculated and justice will be done. Jesus affirms perfect ultimate justice but declares temporal justice to be imperfect.

The Apostle Paul in Romans offers us the most comprehensive treatment of the topic. By the time we get to chapter 8, Paul has spent 7 chapters outlining our sin and guilt before God, the wretched state of humanity, and the outrageous grace of God in Jesus’ sacrifice and atonement for us. He wrestles with grace and works and the accusation that grace destroys law and removes the incentive for righteousness. He declares the beautiful solution – that though we don’t earn our salvation, we are adopted as newly created sons and daughters with God’s spirit empowering us to do his will. And so he soars into chapter 8 declaring our total freedom from condemnation and new identity as spirit-controlled people. In verse 18, he is still soaring, but all of a sudden he is talking about “present sufferings”, and comparing them to future glory.

Paul acknowledges that pain and suffering dominate our existence, “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now”. He does not offer an explanation for them. He simply transcends them with hope. Over the cacophony of the groaning creation, he thunders with these two great promises:

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose”.

“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”

Quoting Psalm 44, he describes us as “sheep to be slaughtered”. A bleak image. So out of step with the incongruous and ridiculous conclusion of hope that follows:

^“No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord”

And there it is. The Christian theodicy is a borderline insane assertion of God’s ultimate justice in the face of senseless suffering. The only thing that renders this hope sane is the stunning and unavoidable facts of Jesus’ incarnation, death and resurrection.

So why is this important to grasp for the modern Christian? I believe the prosperity gospel has penetrated deeper into our psyche than we would like to admit. As a culture, we are comfortable, affluent, and have the luxury of avoiding suffering. This leads to a neat view of life where nothing goes too badly wrong and I’m pretty happy, all things considered. Without realising it, this becomes an expectation of the bargain we make with God.

The problem with this is that anyone who has lived a few years in the real world knows that life is not like that. It is messy and complicated and we frequently find ourselves screaming in despair and rage – sometimes directed at God. It often takes a few years to figure this out, which is why I have had many friends leave the faith in their late twenties and early thirties. God simply hasn’t held up his end of the bargain. Things don’t turn out quite the way we thought they would. This eats away at the heart-knowledge that God is good – the core of faith. From there, you pull any thread, and the whole thing unravels.

I think that this instinct for neatness and simplicity has been put there by God. It is eternity and Eden in our hearts – a longing for a world without sin and evil. Yet the bible never claims a simple life. All through its pages we see people grappling with dissonance and trying to reconcile God’s goodness with the mess of the world.

What if we started with greater humility and less entitlement? What if faith is, at the end of the day, simply a trust in the goodness of God despite the mess of the world? What if we don’t need to understand everything?