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When Life Isn't Fair

February 25, 2001

TEXT: PSALM 73

How's the old saying go, "I wish i had a nickel for every time I've heard that one?" Maybe we should adjust for inflation. "I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard that one."

Well as a parent, I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard these words: "It's not fair!" I'm sure that any parent has heard those words more times than you'd care to count. In fact, I heard them just yesterday.

Part of our standard equipment seems to be a highly developed sense of fairness. We want things to be fair. Actually, we want things to go our way, and we define that as fair. Children and adults alike don't seem nearly as concerned about fairness when circumstances favor them. But nothing can get to us quicker, nothing can make us angry faster than if we feel we have been treated unfairly.

It's evident to me that we bring that into our relationship with God. People decide every day whether or not God is real on the basis of whether or not life is fair. I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with folks who say something like this: "I believed in God once, but after so many disappointments there's just no way I can believe in a God who knows me and wants the best for me."

Consider the most common curse in the English language, using the name of God followed by an expletive. People say it not only in the face of great tragedy, but also when their cars won't start, when their team loses, or when they hit their thumb with the hammer. That common oath reveals something about how we see God and the world. It renders an instinctive judgement that life ought to be fair and that God should somehow do a better job of running his world.

In psalm 73 we hear the writer struggling with this question. "Does it really do any good to serve God?" How come it seems like those who thumb their noses at God get on just fine and those of us who try to serve God suffer?

I guess that's what really can make this psalm meaningful to us today. The psalmist is not calmly discussing the problem of evil in the world. He is personally sharing his own journey at a time when his confidence in God was threatened.

That is a very real part of what it means to be servants of the living God. From Job to the Christians of Asia Minor to our modern day brothers and sisters in China, thinking people have always struggled with how to handle this basic dilemma.

If God is fair, if he is a God of righteousness and justice, and if he is really all powerful and if he is really loving and good, then how is that the problems the psalmist articulates here can exist?

My suspicion is that all of us have faced that question at some point in our lives. It really doesn't matter what the circumstance is whether illness or a lost job or being treated unfairly at school. The questions that hit us hard at those moments are not so much questions of belief in God but rather questions of how this relationship really works. "Do I belong to God? Do I matter to him? Does God answer my obedience and trust with his protection and care? Does it really matter at all when I pray?"

Author Annie Dillard tells of going to her church. She says, "There is only one church here so I go to it. On Sunday mornings I wander down the hill to the white frame church in the firs. The members are of mixed denominations; the minister is a congregationalist, and wears a white shirt. The man knows God.

"Once, in the middle of the long pastoral prayer of intercession for the whole world - for the gift of wisdom to its leaders, for hope and mercy to the grieving and pained, relief to the oppressed, and God's grace to all - In the middle of this he stopped and burst out, 'Lord we bring you these same petitions every week.' After a shocked pause, he continued reading the prayer. Because of this, I like him very much."

One of the reasons we like the psalms so much is their painful honesty and bold expression of how life feels. So I think it would be helpful for us today not only to hear how the psalmist expresses this dilemma, but also where he finds the answer.

This is not a struggle of unbelief but a struggle of faith. The first verse makes that clear. Even though the writer will be very honest about his questions, we know from the beginning that the outcome is not in doubt. This is his faith: "Surely God is good to Israel."

But he expresses his problem. Why is it that those who care nothing for following God seem to be so healthy, wealthy and wise? Not only do they live carelessly with regard to God they also are arrogant about it. Verse 11 says, "They say, 'How can God know? Does the Most High have knowledge?"

In other words, "I can live in whatever way brings the greatest benefit to me because God is looking the other way." Now we might say, "Wow, if you talk to God like that you'd better get out of lightning range."

But right there we begin to learn something about God's perspective on all of this. He does not react to the slanderous arrogance of the wicked. We want justice to be immediate. God works on a different timetable. That should be a clue.

In verse 13, though, the writer shifts the focus from how the wicked are living to his own fate. Here is where he asks the poignant question, "What good has it been to me to follow God? Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure."

Have you ever felt that way? Have you ever had those thoughts? When God seems to have failed to come through for you at a critical moment, have you ever wondered, "What good is it to serve God?"

I remember quite well the first time that problem became personal and real to me. I was just a boy, probably about 9 or 10 years old. Vietnam was raging and I had two cousins there. We prayed for them every day. We asked God to watch over them and protect them. They were both good, Christian young men. They both had godly parents.

Gary came home in one piece and we praised God for answering our prayers. Jack came home in a coffin. Nobody in our family, as far as I know, lost their faith over it. But it was a struggle.

I could identify with the psalmist in verse 16: "when I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me." And yet something shifted in the writer's experience and thinking that enabled him to come out in a place of faithfulness and not faithlessness. Verse 17 reveals how the shift happened. It came in worship. He talks about how troublesome and oppressive this problem is until, he says, "I entered the sanctuary of God, then I understood."

What did he understand? In worship he gained a new perspective. He saw from God's perspective that the wicked were on a slippery slope. It might seem like they've got life by the tail now, but their fortune is a fool's paradise.

The understanding he gained was really fairly simple. Life is not fair, but God is. We dare not get the two confused. Left to ourselves, we are unable to see things from an eternal perspective. We tend to become very closed-minded and small-minded when life gets focused on our particular brand of fairness or goodness.

But in worship, I begin to understand that there is far more to life than immediate fairness. There is more than comfort, more than health, more than happiness. It's amazing how we tend to identify the goodness of God with those things.

In verse 23 the confession of faith begins. There are actually three confessions of faith, three perspectives that the psalmist gains that bring a sense of equilibrium into his life.

First, there is the promise of God's presence. "Yet I am always with you; you hold me in your right hand. You guide me with your counsel."

Second, there is the promise of future glory. Verse 24: "And afterward you will take me into glory." And third, there is the a contentment in who God is and what he provides. "Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."

The affirmations of the psalmist are really pretty simple. He wants simply to say that in the final analysis, when all the unfairness of life happens, things cannot be judged by the appearance of the moment.

If the answer to these dilemmas is sought in the world then the conclusion is "life is not fair so God must not be fair." But if the answer if sought in the worship of God, then the conclusion is "God is faithful and there is coming a day when all the 'unfairness' of life will be set right."

The real issue is, which way will we choose to see things? Which "reality" will we believe? Will I allow God to be defined by the world and by my life? Or will I allow the world and my life to be defined by the revelation of who god is?

That revelation of who he is comes to us most completely in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Because of him, I know that ultimately nothing can destroy the communion of life that God offers me, not even death. And that's where the psalmist ends up. "I have made the sovereign Lord my refuge."

Henri Nouwen tells the story of a family he knew in Paraguay. The father, a doctor, spoke out against the military regime there and its human rights abuses. Local police took their revenge on him by arresting his teenage son and torturing him to death. Enraged townsfolk wanted to turn the boy's funeral into a huge protest march, but the doctor chose another means of protest.

At the funeral, the father displayed his son's body as he had found it in the jail - naked, scarred from the electric shocks and cigarette burns and beatings. All the villagers filed past the corpse, which lay not in a coffin but on the blood-soaked mattress from the prison. It was the strongest protest imaginable, for it put injustice on grotesque display.

Isn't that what God did at Calvary? "It's God who ought to suffer, not you and me," say those who bear a grudge against God for the unfairness of life. The curse expresses it well: God be damned.

And on that day, God was damned. The cross that held Jesus' body, naked and marked with scars, exposed all the violence and injustice of this world. All at once the cross reveals what kind of world we have and what kind of God we have. The world is unfair. Life is unfair. But in the midst of it all we have a God of sacrificial love and of resurrection power.

No one is exempt from tragedy or disappointment - God himself was not exempt. Jesus offered no immunity, no way out of the unfairness, but rather a way through it to other side.

I think what the psalmist sees that brings him hope in the midst of the unfairness is that this indeed is the character of God. The question now is, "Can you trust your life, in all of it's unfairness, to a God like that? Are you willing to give up the notion that life should be fair, and instead embrace the truth that God is fair and he is faithful to make everything right?"

I cannot offer you convincing philosophical arguments. Even if I could I would not. Because what I want to offer you today is the very best argument: the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.