When Everything Goes Wrong

by: Michael Wilcock

Naomi was a refugee, living in a foreign country. But the loss of her home was only the first in a series of losses. While they were in Moab her husband died, then, one after another, her two sons.

“She deserved it,” some of her own people, if they heard about it, probably said. “The family should never have gone to live among the heathen Moabites in the first place. Certainly the boys ought not to have married Moabite girls.”

But that is a cruel judgment, and a wrong one too. Through much of Bible history there were friendly contacts between Israel and the surrounding nations. Even marriages between them were not necessarily frowned on. We are wrong if we ask “What had Naomi done to deserve all this?” Jesus warns us in Luke 13:1-5 not to jump to the conclusion that a person’s trouble is always the result of that person’s sin.

God does have an object in beginning the story with a tragedy. He means us to question it. What he means us to ask, though, is not “What made things go wrong?” but “Who will put things right?”