Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good people, does not believe that Jesus Christ is the Word of God, but he agrees with a nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbi’s words “human beings are God’s language.” He explains, “God shows His opposition to cancer and birth defects, not by eliminating them or making them happen only to bad people, but by summoning forth friends and neighbors to ease the burden and fill the emptiness.”<br/><br/>
Kushner notes that we become “the devil’s martyrs” when we have doubts about God and reject the goodness of this world.<br/><br/>
“We do not love God because He is perfect. We also do not love Him because He protects us from all harm and keeps evil things from happening to us. We definitely do not love Him because we are afraid of Him, or because He will hurt us if we turn our backs on Him.”<br/><br/>
“We love Him because He is God, because He is the author of all beauty and order around us, the source of our strength and the hope and courage within us, and of other people’s strength, hope, and courage with which we are helped in our time of need.”<br/><br/>
“In the final analysis, the question of why bad things happen to good people translates into very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.”<br/><br/>
The Gospel of John has also given us the answer: “As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples then asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered: ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.’” (John 9:1-3)