When Good Things Happen to Bad People

But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return, and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the evil. -- Luke 6:35

This is the verse that precedes some of what I quoted yesterday, and continues the theme of the importance of how we live, act, and even how we think. 

Jesus is speaking, and we note that He, somewhat casually, blows apart a concept that most of us accept without too much thought.  God is not good to good people only.  God is good because He is Good.  He is kind – some translations say, gracious, to the ungrateful and to the evil.  To many of us, that does not seem quite the way it ought to be.  It’s not fair.  Good people should be rewarded. and bad people should be punished. 

Of course, they will be.  Both righteousness and evil carry with them their own appropriate rewards, for, as the Lord goes on to say, the seed we plant determines, inevitably, the harvest we receive.  None of us, though, can blame God  – as I must ashamedly confess I have done – for what our thoughts, our attitudes, and our behavior have yielded.  At the same time, we are all in need of God’s grace.  In light of the perfection of God, the utmost efforts of the best of us are hardly worthy of notice, as, next to Mount Everest, all anthills are approximately the same height.     

That part of it and the idea of salvation by grace, most Christians are able to grasp.  We are all condemned apart from the mercy and longsuffering of the Almighty.  Nevertheless, the natural part of us still may stumble over God’s love for those who are wicked.  We may lose patience with His patience and gentleness.  Yet for God to be other than perfect in His love for each individual would turn out all the lights in the universe.  We would be left alone and hopeless in the dark. 

The Lord offers us this truth as He calls upon us to live by the reality of it.  We must put the same graciousness and kindness to work in our own lives – forgiving, loving, doing good, helping with no expectation of any sort of repayment or of those who benefit being kind or grateful in return.  Very often, people may not even remember that we have done them a good turn.  In this way, we transcend the conventions of doing good and begin to be good. 

It can be a hard thing.  When someone forgets all that you or I have done for them or fails to respond appropriately to the grace of God flowing through us, we may feel hurt and wronged.  Instead of dwelling on it and opening a wound or keeping a wound open, we should think of the forgotten good as something done in secret, to the Lord alone.

Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.  But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.  (Matthew 6:2-4)