Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

Answer

Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

Yes.

There. We finally got one where the giant red answer on the graphic sounds exactly like the thing printed on inspirational coffee mugs.

Everything happens for a reason.

Unfortunately, we should probably discuss what that sentence means before somebody loses a job, gets dumped, and immediately starts waiting for God to replace the whole mess with a promotion, a hotter spouse, and a lake house.

Because Christians often use “everything happens for a reason” to mean something considerably more specific than the sentence actually says. Something painful happens, therefore God must have allowed it because He intends to give me something better. The relationship ended because God has someone better for me. I lost the job because God has a better one waiting. The flight was canceled because God was protecting me from something. The door closed because God is opening a bigger one.

Maybe.

But Scripture never promises you any of that.

The Bible does teach that history is purposeful, that God is sovereign over it, and that even human evil cannot overthrow what He intends to accomplish. What it does not teach is that the reason behind every event is your immediate happiness, success, safety, or personal advancement.

Sometimes everything happens for a reason.

The reason just isn't about you.

Joseph Had a Really Bad Week

If anybody gets used as the biblical mascot for “everything happens for a reason,” it is Joseph.

And fair enough. Joseph's story is one of Scripture's clearest demonstrations that God can accomplish His purposes through circumstances that look like absolute disaster.

Joseph begins as the favored son of Jacob. His brothers hate him, throw him into a pit, discuss murdering him, decide slavery is apparently the more reasonable option, and sell him to traders headed for Egypt.

Not ideal.

Joseph eventually ends up in the house of Potiphar, where things finally begin improving. He becomes successful and is entrusted with responsibility over Potiphar's household.

Then Potiphar's wife falsely accuses him of attempting to sleep with her.

So Joseph goes to prison.

Also not ideal.

In prison, Joseph interprets the dreams of Pharaoh's cupbearer and baker. The cupbearer is restored to his position, giving Joseph what looks like his first realistic opportunity to get out. Joseph specifically asks the man to remember him before Pharaoh.

The cupbearer forgets him.

For two years.

At this point, if Joseph had been using modern inspirational theology, he would have needed an impressive collection of increasingly desperate coffee mugs.

But eventually Pharaoh has dreams nobody can interpret. The cupbearer finally remembers the Hebrew prisoner who interpreted his dream, Joseph is brought before Pharaoh, God gives Joseph the interpretation, and Joseph goes from prisoner to second in command over Egypt.

There it is.

Everything happened for a reason.

Joseph suffered because God wanted to promote Joseph.

Right?

Not exactly.

Joseph Wasn't the Point

Joseph certainly benefited from what happened. He went from a pit to slavery, from slavery to prison, and eventually from prison to extraordinary authority in Egypt.

But if we stop there, we have somehow managed to make Joseph's story considerably smaller than Genesis does.

A severe famine comes upon the land. Because God revealed what was coming through Pharaoh's dreams, Egypt has stored enormous quantities of grain under Joseph's administration. People come from the surrounding lands to buy food.

Including Joseph's brothers.

Eventually Joseph reveals himself to them. Understandably, they are terrified. The brother they sold into slavery now possesses enough political authority to make the rest of their afternoon extremely unpleasant.

Instead, Joseph says:

“You sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life” (Genesis 45:5).

Then he gets even more specific:

“God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors” (Genesis 45:7).

There is the reason.

And it is much bigger than Joseph getting a promotion.

God was preserving people through the famine. More specifically, He was preserving Jacob's family.

That matters enormously because Genesis is not merely telling us the inspirational story of one guy whose terrible circumstances eventually worked out.

This family carries the promise.

God had promised Abraham that He would make him into a great nation and that through his offspring the nations of the earth would be blessed. That promise continued through Isaac and then Jacob. Jacob's sons would become the fathers of the tribes of Israel.

Judah was among those sons.

And generations later, from Judah would come David.

And from David's line would come Christ.

Joseph did not know the entire shape of that story while sitting in the pit.

But God did.

Joseph's suffering was caught up in a purpose extending far beyond Joseph.

The prisoner in the graphic is looking toward Egypt.

We are supposed to be looking much farther.

“You Meant Evil Against Me”

Near the end of Genesis, Joseph gives us perhaps the clearest theological summary of his entire story.

After Jacob dies, Joseph's brothers become frightened again. Maybe Joseph was only being nice because Dad was alive. Maybe now the bill is finally coming due.

Joseph tells them:

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

That sentence deserves more attention than it usually gets.

Joseph does not say his brothers secretly meant well.

They didn't.

He does not say selling someone into slavery became good because things eventually worked out.

It didn't.

He calls their intention exactly what it was:

Evil.

But in the same event in which human beings intended evil, God intended good.

That is considerably stronger than saying God noticed the disaster afterward and figured out how to salvage it.

Joseph says his brothers meant something by their actions, and God meant something through those same events. Human intention was genuinely evil. God's intention was genuinely good. God's purpose did not excuse theirs, and their evil did not defeat His.

Then Joseph tells us what that good purpose was:

“to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.”

Again, notice what the good is.

It isn't merely:

Joseph got a nicer job.

Many people were preserved alive.

Jacob's family survived.

God's covenant purposes continued.

The story is bigger than Joseph.

Romans 8:28 Does Not Promise You a Promotion

Of course, eventually somebody is going to quote Romans 8:28.

They should.

It's a fantastic verse.

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

There it is.

All things.

Work together.

For good.

So apparently the lake house is back on the table.

Except Paul keeps writing.

The next verse explains the direction of this good: those God foreknew He predestined “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Romans 8:29).

That is slightly different from getting the job you wanted.

The good God is accomplishing in His people is ultimately bound up with His saving purpose: conformity to Christ, justification, glorification, and final restoration.

And the surrounding context makes it impossible to interpret “all things work together for good” as “Christians will eventually understand why everything happened because their circumstances will improve.”

Romans 8 contains suffering.

A lot of it.

Creation is groaning. Christians groan while waiting for the redemption of their bodies. We experience weakness. Paul goes on to mention tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and sword.

Some Christians reading Romans 8 were going to suffer terribly.

Some would die.

Paul's promise is not that every tragedy eventually turns into a visible earthly upgrade.

His promise is that none of it can derail God's purpose for those who belong to Christ.

That's better.

It just doesn't fit on the coffee mug quite as nicely.

Sometimes You Never Learn the Reason

This is where “everything happens for a reason” can become unintentionally cruel.

Someone experiences something devastating, and Christians immediately begin trying to explain God's reason for it.

Maybe God let your child die because He wanted to teach you something.

Maybe your marriage collapsed because God has somebody better.

Maybe you got cancer because somebody is going to get saved through your testimony.

Maybe God took that person away because He knew something you didn't.

Stop.

You don't know that.

There is a difference between trusting that God has purposes and pretending we have access to them.

Scripture contains stories in which God reveals why particular events happened. Joseph is one of them. That does not give us permission to manufacture divine explanations for events where God has given us none.

Job is particularly useful here.

Job loses his children, wealth, and health. His friends spend an enormous amount of time trying to explain why.

They have theories.

Very confident theories.

Job must have done something.

God must be correcting him.

There must be a moral explanation that makes the whole thing understandable if everybody would just sit down and reason through it properly.

The reader knows something Job and his friends do not. The opening chapters reveal a heavenly dimension to Job's suffering.

Job never gets that information.

Read that again.

The book tells us things God never tells Job.

When God finally answers Job, He does not hand him a detailed explanation of every event. He confronts Job with something more fundamental: the difference between God's knowledge and Job's.

Job learns that he can trust God without knowing everything God knows.

Apparently “I don't know why” is sometimes a perfectly biblical answer.

God Can Use Evil Without Calling Evil Good

This distinction matters because badly stated versions of God's sovereignty can make God sound morally indistinguishable from the evil He overrules.

Joseph gives us better categories.

“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

The brothers remain morally responsible for what they intended and did. Their jealousy was evil. Their hatred was evil. Selling Joseph was evil.

God did not need their motives to become pure in order to accomplish His purpose through their actions.

The same pattern reaches its greatest expression at the cross.

Peter tells the people at Pentecost that Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God,” and then immediately says, “you crucified and killed” Him (Acts 2:23).

God had a purpose.

The people involved were still responsible.

Later, the believers pray about Herod, Pontius Pilate, the Gentiles, and the peoples of Israel gathering against Jesus, saying they did “whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place” (Acts 4:27–28).

The worst evil human beings ever committed did not escape God's purpose.

And God's purpose did not make their evil righteous.

At the cross, sinful people acted sinfully, and through those very actions God accomplished salvation.

If God can accomplish His redemptive purpose through the murder of His Son, Christians have substantial reason to trust that human evil cannot make Him lose control of history.

That does not mean the evil stops being evil.

It means evil doesn't get the last word.

Not Everything Is a Secret Message About You

There is another strange place this idea can take us.

Once we become convinced that every event has a reason specifically directed at us, ordinary life starts turning into a divine scavenger hunt.

The car won't start.

What is God trying to tell me?

It rains on the day of the picnic.

What does this mean?

Somebody takes the last glazed doughnut.

Clearly spiritual warfare.

Sometimes the car won't start because the battery is dead.

Sometimes it rains because clouds contain water.

Sometimes Gary wanted the doughnut.

God's providence does not require treating every inconvenience as a personalized coded message from heaven.

Scripture calls us to wisdom, obedience, prayer, and trust. It does not teach us to interpret every circumstance as though God has hidden a prophecy inside it.

God may use ordinary events in ways you cannot see.

That's the point.

You don't have to see them.

Joseph spent years experiencing circumstances whose significance he could not possibly have understood from where he was standing. The pit did not come with explanatory notes. Neither did slavery. Neither did the false accusation. Neither did prison. Neither did two more years after the cupbearer forgot him.

God was not obligated to explain the plot to Joseph while Joseph was living inside it.

He's not obligated to explain every page of yours either.

What About My Plans?

This doesn't mean your life is irrelevant to God.

Scripture gives us no picture of a God who cares about preserving the messianic line but cannot be bothered with individual people.

Jesus tells His disciples that the Father knows what they need. He teaches them to pray for daily bread. He tells them that even the hairs of their heads are numbered. Peter tells suffering Christians to cast their anxieties on God “because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

God's larger purposes do not require Him to care less about you.

They require us to remember that His purposes are larger than you.

That can be difficult because we naturally evaluate providence from the few feet of history directly surrounding us.

This hurt me.

This helped me.

This door opened.

That door closed.

This worked out.

That didn't.

God sees the whole thing.

Joseph saw a pit.

God saw Egypt.

Joseph saw prison.

God saw a famine coming.

Joseph saw a forgotten promise from a cupbearer.

God saw Pharaoh having dreams two years later.

Joseph eventually saw his family standing in front of him asking for grain.

God saw promises made generations earlier and generations yet unborn.

And even Joseph, who understood far more by the end than he did at the beginning, did not live to see the whole story.

He never met David.

He never saw Bethlehem.

He never watched Christ come from the family God had preserved through him.

Joseph's story mattered in ways Joseph himself never lived long enough to see.

Yours may too.

When Something Terrible Happens

This is where the clever lines stop.

If something terrible has happened to you, you do not need to immediately discover the reason.

You may never discover it in this life.

You also do not need to pretend it was good.

Joseph didn't.

“You meant evil against me.”

Christian faith does not require looking at abuse, betrayal, disease, death, injustice, or tragedy and somehow convincing yourself that the terrible thing was secretly wonderful.

Some things are evil.

Some things hurt because they are supposed to hurt.

Death is an enemy, not a motivational exercise.

Sin destroys things.

People make wicked choices.

Creation groans.

And in the middle of all of that, Christians confess something audacious: none of it is capable of overthrowing God.

You may not know what He is doing.

You may not understand why He allowed something.

You may pray for deliverance and not receive the answer you wanted.

You may never reach the moment where you look backward and say, “Oh, that's why.”

Joseph did.