Every now and then, tragedy rushes in on us and we find ourselves torn between our belief in a loving, caring God and the harsh reality of a world where things can go terribly wrong. Such was the case for our community a few years ago. With only a week to go before school resumed for the year, two high school boys were killed on a country road when their car went under a road grader. It didn't help matters that they were two of the finest young men you could ever meet—community leaders from strong Christian families. The deaths left everyone in our little town wondering how this could happen to such good people. Almost everyone has a similar story and similar questions. Maybe it's the young father who suffers a heart attack in the prime of his life, or the mother who dies of cancer while her children are still growing, or the solid youth group member who is killed by a drunk driver. Whatever the situation, the questions and the pains are universal; why do things like this happen to people like that? Isaiah doesn't seem to help much. He writes at the beginning of chapter fifty-seven, "The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart." But we do, Isaiah. Some days it seems like that is all we do. We ponder over and over again in our hearts why the righteous would be taken from us. The questions cause us to look to heaven and shake our fists and cry, "Unfair!" to any higher power that might be listening. We wonder if anyone is listening. If God is such a loving Father, why doesn't he take better care of his children? Why do they seem to be treated as badly or worse than the people of this world? The questions are serious concerns posed by people of strong faith who, in their heart-of-hearts, sometimes find a little voice asking, "Could it be that there is no God?" Few of them will ever say it aloud, but the voice is there, and it raises its question just often enough and just loud enough to be heard. Most people believe that no one else hears it. They think that they are the only ones who face such doubts, and in their shame they keep the questions to themselves. But the fact is many people hear the question. Most will brush it off and try to get on with life as best they can, but some of them will act on it by turning their lives from the paths of righteousness; they give in and live like there is no God. After all, if the righteous are not going to be treated any better in this world, what is the point in being righteous? Israel got to this point. They began with the firm promise that they were the chosen people of God—they had been chosen out of all the races of the world to receive special treatment from the creator. Their lives were going to be different; they would be granted success in all that they did. However, sin crept its way into the community. Other gods were worshipped, immorality grew, and Israel no longer saw the success of their glory days. In fact, quite often it seemed that the hand of God was against them. The divine theocracy gave way to a corrupt monarchy, vision to disillusion, and the people lost their way and their God. That's where we find them in Isaiah 57, not as the chosen race, but as an atheistic state. Any reliance upon Yahweh had long since been replaced by reliance upon self and what a person could do for the god he had made with his own hands. And so Isaiah makes the statement, "The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart." As we look at the society he lived in, we can see he is right; the people had long ago abandoned any belief in God and his care for those considered to be his children. If there is no God to regard certain people as righteous, then there is no God to question when bad things happen to good people—"Stuff happens," to paraphrase a popular bumper-sticker. We can contrast these people with Job's "worthless physicians." They saw the great suffering that Job was going through but still saw a greater God that had to be in control. So they concerned themselves with the justice of God, the power of God, and the consequence of sin. While the answers they produced were ultimately hollow, their searching pointed to a solid faith in a sovereign God. Isaiah's contemporaries did none of this searching. To admit to a sovereign God was to admit to a need to be subject to him. So they did no searching, demanded no explanations, and went on with their lives. But there are those of us who still ponder it in our hearts. We still wonder how such horrible tragedy can happen in the lives of people who find hope in their faith. We see it as more than a contradiction; we see it as a slap in the face of the Almighty. And yet, as we look at Isaiah, we realize that our pondering points to something very important in our lives. It points to our hope. If we didn't have hope then we wouldn't ponder the perishing of the righteous. Our questioning reveals that, in our heart-of-hearts, we know there is a God to question. We can raise the questions and dwell on them, letting them eat us up inside. We can let our faith be chipped away by doubt or we can do something else. We can realize that our pondering of our pain points to a belief deep inside us—a belief in a God that must care for his children. We can look to our questions and realize that if there was no God we would have no reason to wonder. Isaiah offers little in the way of explanation. He only goes on to say, "Devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil. Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death." Nothing concrete to end the debate, only the hope that there is a God who promises eternal care to his children and delivers even in the midst of tragedy. Philip Yancey in Disappointment with God And if our eyes are open to him, we do see God in our pain. We see a God of mercy who takes the righteous away from an unrighteous world to spare them from evil. And when we look long enough we begin to see his two great arms spanning the expanse of eternity, in one he holds those taken out of our world and in the other he holds us. And though we are separated from them, through him we are united in Christ.
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makes the point that at the end of the book of Job, while restoration had been made and blessings had been imparted, Job was
still pretty much in the dark. He still had no idea of the cosmic game of tug-of-war that had been played with his life. More amazing than this is that Job seemed content with his life, not continuing to ask questions despite the lack of answers. Perhaps the key is, as Frederick Buechner put it in 
"God doesn't reveal his grand design. He reveals himself."