What this is about
The rule is almost never written down. It turns up in conversation, in the sentence somebody says when bad news comes through about a family. Here it is as it is usually heard. This is written by this page, not quoted from anyone:
Now the other family, that is a different matter. I do not like to say it, but you reap what you sow. They were warned. They went their own way, and God is not mocked.Composed by this page. Not a quotation from any person, church or ministry.
Notice something odd. You have not been told what happened to either family. Both verdicts have been delivered without the event, which is only possible because the verdict was never coming from the event in the first place.
Three different things get bundled together here, and they are not the same thing at all.
Providence
God is in it, and it means somethingNothing happens to anyone outside God’s hand. Suffering is not random. He may test, discipline, correct or judge through it. This page agrees, and so does every historic church.The diagnosis
We can tell which one it isFrom what happened, plus what we think of the person, we can say what God is doing — and the answer always matches what we already thought of them. This is the bit being tested.Just weather
It means nothing at allCancer is cells, a crash is physics, and asking what God is doing in it is a silly question. Every historic church rejects this, and so does this page.The usual defence of the middle one is to treat any criticism of it as an argument for the last one. It is not. You can believe that God governs every illness and still hold that you are in no position to say what a particular one means — and that is what Christians have generally believed. This page is not saying suffering is meaningless. It is saying you cannot read it off somebody’s face.
Nobody living is named on this page. Everyone named is dead and quoted from a published source. Every modern example is written by this page and labelled. Bible quotations are from the King James Version, which is free.
The short answer
- Jesus is handed this exact idea, twice, and says no both times. People tell him about Galileans Pilate had killed. He asks the question himself: “Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things?” The answer is two words: “I tell you, Nay.” Then he brings up a second case nobody mentioned — eighteen people killed when a tower fell on them — and gives the identical answer (Luke 13:1–5). One is a massacre, one is an accident, and he treats them the same.
- His disciples make the same assumption and are told it is simply not the explanation. Seeing a man blind from birth: “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” Look at the shape of that question. They are so sure suffering means sin that the only thing left to work out is whose. The answer: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:1–3).
- The Bible also shows the method being used by people who are not Christians at all, and getting two opposite answers in five minutes. A snake bites Paul’s hand on Malta. The locals say at once: “No doubt this man is a murderer.” He shakes it off and does not die. So they change their minds “and said that he was a god” (Acts 28:3–6). Same man, same method, five minutes apart: murderer, then god. Luke is showing you a technique that gives you back whatever you put in.
- Job’s three friends are this rule, argued properly, by serious men. Eliphaz: “Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent?” (4:7). Bildad: “If thou wert pure and upright; surely now he would awake for thee” (8:6). They are not cranks. Their beliefs about God are almost all correct, and Paul actually quotes one of them in 1 Corinthians. The mistake is not in what they believe about God. It is in what they think that entitles them to say about Job.
- You are told the answer in the eighth verse, so you can watch them get it wrong. God’s own description of Job, before anything happens: “a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil” (1:8). Every speech after that is read by someone who already knows the friends are mistaken. The book is built that way on purpose.
- What happens to a rule that has to be true: it starts inventing the evidence. By chapter 22 Eliphaz has given up on hints and is listing crimes: “Thou hast sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless have been broken” (22:9). No evidence for any of it is offered anywhere, and the reader has been told it is false. He has not seen Job do these things. He has worked out that Job must have, because of what has happened to him.
- At the end, God is angry with the friends — not with Job. “My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (42:7). Job has spent the whole book complaining and accusing. The friends have spent it defending God’s justice in polite language. The polite ones are the ones under wrath, they have to bring seven bulls and seven rams, and Job has to pray for them before they are accepted. Job had already named the problem: “Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for him?” (13:7).
- Job says out loud that the wicked often do very well, and nobody corrects him. “Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?… Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them… They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave” (21:7–13). Psalm 73, Jeremiah 12, Habakkuk 1 and Ecclesiastes all say the same. Ecclesiastes puts it in four words: “All things come alike to all” (9:2).
- Jesus says the same thing about good fortune, which is the half people forget. God “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45). If good things land on both kinds of people, then getting them proves nothing about you either.
- Sixteen hundred years of Christian teachers say you cannot read it. Augustine, after Rome was sacked and everyone wanted to know what it meant: the same fire makes gold glow and chaff smoke, and the same trouble purifies one man and ruins another — and you cannot see which from outside. Gregory the Great says Job’s friends failed because they “were unable to distinguish the different kinds of strokes”, and lists four possible reasons for affliction rather than two. Aquinas says the friends’ error was thinking “the adversities of this world do not come to someone except as a punishment for sin”. Calvin says “we cannot always put our finger on the causes of the punishments which men endure.”
- Luther says the rule is not just unreliable but backwards. Stand at the cross and apply it. A man is being executed as a criminal, abandoned, in the most visible possible state of divine disfavour. There is no worse wrong answer available in human history, and a lot of people gave it that afternoon.
- The Bible does say some events are judgement — and in every case it is the Bible that tells us. Ananias and Sapphira, Herod, the sicknesses at Corinth. Luke writes that Herod was struck “because he gave not God the glory”. Take that clause away and you have a king who died of something nasty and no way to get from there to a verdict. When a business fails today, we have the event and nothing else, and somebody has to make the meaning up.
- Nearly everything the Bible says about God disciplining people is said to the sufferer, about himself. “My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord” (Hebrews 12:5). “Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations” (James 1:2). “Let a man examine himself” (1 Corinthians 11:28). It is for you to use on yourself. Pointed at someone else it stops being comfort and becomes a sentence.
The first exercise: who said it?
Six statements. Some are Job’s friends, in the King James Version. Some are written by this page in modern language, and are labelled as written by this page when you open them. Most people do badly at this, and the reason they do badly is the whole point.
If that was hard, it is because the position has not changed in three thousand years. Only the vocabulary has. “They that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same” becomes “you reap what you sow”. The logic underneath is identical.
The second exercise: four cases
This one is about you rather than about the sources, and it only works if you answer honestly and do not read ahead.
Four short cases. Each gives you a person and a misfortune, and asks what you think God is doing. There are no right answers and nothing is being scored.
Before you start
Every person and every event below is made up by this page. None of them describes any real person, family or church. Some of the misfortunes are serious, because this rule gets applied to serious misfortunes and mild examples would not be a fair test. If you would rather not, the point of the exercise is explained in the paragraph underneath it and you lose nothing by reading that.
Those four cases were two events
Each misfortune appeared twice — once attached to someone described as well thought of, once to someone described as poorly thought of. The events were word for word the same. Here is what you did with them.
Why this matters
The rule has two inputs: what happened, and what you think of the person. Work through what it produces for every combination.
| Things go well | Things go badly | |
|---|---|---|
| Someone I think is godly | God is blessing him. | God is testing him. |
| Someone I think is not | God is giving him rope. | God is judging him. |
Four boxes, four confirmations, and nothing that can ever count against it. So ask the question that matters about any way of reading the world:
If the answer is nothing in particular, then the rule is not telling you anything about God or about the event. It is telling you what you already thought of the person, in religious language. A rule that cannot fail is not a rule; it is a mirror.
And notice that this cuts both ways. If you are well thought of, the rule hands you a compliment every time something goes wrong — which quietly removes the one thing the Bible actually asks a sufferer to do, which is look at himself. Calvin spotted the direction of travel in 1553 and put it bluntly: “If God chastises me with a heavier stroke, I wink at my sins.” Hard on other people, easy on ourselves.
What the church actually said, in its own words
Five witnesses, spread over fourteen hundred years, all of them writing about this exact question, usually because a disaster had forced it on them.
“Famine makes no distinction… the disease of the eyes, and the attack of fevers… is common to us with others.”
On the Mortality, written during a plague that was killing Christians and non-Christians alike.
A bishop burying people on both sides of the line. His answer is that the plague does not sort anybody; what differs is how people respond to it.
“As the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke… the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.”
The City of God I.8, written after Rome was sacked and everyone wanted to read the ruins.
The trouble is the same trouble. What it does to the person is not the same, and it is not visible from where you are standing.
“[They] were unable to distinguish the different kinds of strokes, [and so] believed him to be stricken for his guiltiness… Sometimes the person is stricken neither for past nor yet for future transgression, but that the alone mightiness of the Divine power may be set forth.”
Moralia in Job, Preface. The standard commentary on Job in the West for the next nine hundred years.
He gives four possible reasons for affliction, not two. The modern rule uses two of them. The other two are Paul’s own thorn and the man born blind.
“[The friends hold that] the adversities of this world do not come to someone except as a punishment for sin, nor prosperity except as a reward for justice.”
Literal Exposition on Job, on chapter 4.
The rule defined in one sentence in the thirteenth century, and identified as the mistake of the men God rebukes.
“Know you certeinly, that it is Gods visitation. And for what cause soever this sickness is sent unto you, whether it be to try your patience… or else it be sent unto you, to correct and amend in you whatsoever doth offend the eyes of your heavenly father…”
The Order for the Visitation of the Sick. Spelling as in the original.
This is the sharpest one. It is completely certain that the illness comes from God — and it refuses to say which of the two things it is, offers no way of telling, and says all of it to the sick man about himself. There is nothing anywhere in the service that lets a visitor form a view.
That is the pattern in all five. Very confident that God is at work. Very unwilling to say what he is doing in a particular case — and least willing of all when the case belongs to somebody else.
It would be dishonest to pretend this was unbroken. In 1755 an earthquake destroyed Lisbon on a feast day with the churches full, and John Wesley published a pamphlet within weeks asking “Is there indeed a God that judges the world? And is he now making inquisition for blood?” He was not a fringe figure. Two things can fairly be said: he is reading a whole nation’s public disaster the way the Old Testament prophets read nations, which is a much older move than reading one person’s cancer; and where the tradition is most careful — Augustine on Rome, Calvin on the blind man, the Prayer Book at a bedside — it refuses.
The three best replies, and what they are worth
“Deuteronomy 28 lays out blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. God set up that link himself.”
Fair, and it makes the page narrower. But three things about that chapter survive. It is addressed to a nation, not an individual, and the curses are national — harvests, sieges, exile. It is the terms of a particular covenant with a particular people, not a description of how the world works everywhere. And when Israel’s disasters were identified as covenant curse, prophets said so, by revelation; nobody was working it out from a neighbour’s bad harvest. In fact Ezekiel 18 forbids exactly that kind of reading by name. The link is real. Running it backwards, in one case, from outside, is not.
“Paul says plainly that some of the Corinthians were ill and had died because of how they took communion. Sickness can be judgement.”
Completely granted — it is one of this page’s own examples. The question is how anybody knew. The answer is that an apostle told them, in writing, about a specific and public abuse in their own congregation. That is not the same as an onlooker working it out. And look at what Paul does next: not examine each other but “let a man examine himself” (11:28), and “if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged” (11:31). Even in the clearest case in the New Testament, the instruction that comes out of it is about yourself.
“If we can never say what God is doing, providence is useless. You have left us with a God who runs everything and tells us nothing.”
A serious objection, and it deserves an answer rather than a shrug. Nobody has said we can never say anything. Where the Bible labels an event, we know. If it is your trouble, you are positively urged to examine yourself and take it from God’s hand — without needing to be certain which of his purposes is at work. And in every case we know a great deal that is not a diagnosis: that God is not absent, that “he doth not afflict willingly” (Lamentations 3:33), that nothing separates us from his love (Romans 8), and that the accounts are settled later rather than never. One thing is withdrawn, and one only: the verdict on somebody else. Set against that what the rule actually delivers — a compliment to people already admired, and a sentence passed on the bereaved by people with no facts.
What to do instead
If the rule is out, something has to take its place, and the Bible is not short of instructions. None of them is a diagnosis, and all of them cost more than a verdict.
Start with the one thing Job’s friends did that the book never criticises. They travelled a long way. They wept. They tore their clothes. And then they “sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great” (2:13). A week on the ground, in silence. Nothing in the book is held against them for that. Everything goes wrong in chapter 4, the moment Eliphaz starts explaining.
Not commanded anywhere
- Working out what God is doing in somebody else’s trouble.
- Treating a person’s reputation as evidence of where they stand with God.
- Supplying the hidden sin your theory needs when there is no sign of one.
- Offering the verdict as comfort, in either direction.
Commanded repeatedly
- “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15).
- “Bear ye one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2).
- “I was sick, and ye visited me” (Matthew 25:36) — and note that the prisoner in the same list gets visited without anyone asking whether he deserved it.
- “To him that is afflicted pity should be shewed from his friend” (Job 6:14).
- Examining yourself, when it is your own trouble.
And here is the part most likely to be useful. Everything this page argues against applies to the rule pointed outward. Pointed inward — at yourself, by yourself — the Bible not only allows it but presses it on you. The difference between a discipline and a weapon is which way it is facing.
This page gives no advice about confronting anybody or leaving a church, and nothing here should be read that way.
Where this page lands
If you want the evidence for all of that, with every quotation dated and sourced, the ten strongest objections answered one at a time, and the prompt that produced it published so you can run it yourself and see whether you get the same answer — that is the full dossier.
Check it yourself
All of this is free and most of it is short.
- 1. Luke 13:1–9, John 9, and Acts 28:1–10. Half an hour. This is most of the argument and you can check every word of it yourself. Read Luke 13 past verse 5 to the fig tree, and read Acts 28 slowly enough to notice how fast the islanders change their minds.
- 2. Job, whole. Three or four hours, and there is no substitute. Read it knowing what chapter 1 told you and the friends did not. Mark every sentence of theirs you have heard said in a church. Then read 42:7–10 and ask why the men with the correct theology are the ones in trouble.
- 3. Psalm 73, and Ecclesiastes 7:15 and 8:14 and 9:1–3. Twenty minutes. The Bible’s own record that the scoreboard does not work, from writers who were not trying to undermine anything. Psalm 73 is the one to read carefully — watch where Asaph finally gets his answer, because it is not from the evidence.
- 4. Augustine, The City of God, Book I chapters 8 to 10. An hour, free online in the old Dods translation at New Advent or the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. The best single treatment of this question anywhere. Be warned that chapter 9 is harder on Christians than you will expect.
- 5. Calvin on John 9:2. Twenty minutes, free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Two pages, and he breaks the mistake into three parts. The first of the three is the one this page’s second exercise is about.
- 6. The Book of Common Prayer 1662, the Visitation of the Sick. Fifteen minutes, free from the Church of England and at justus.anglican.org. Read the whole service, not just the sentence quoted here, and notice how much of it is about the sick person examining himself and how little of it gives a visitor anything to conclude.
- 7. John Wesley, Serious Thoughts occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon (1755). An hour, free on Project Gutenberg in his collected Works. This is the one that goes against this page. If you suspect the evidence here has been stacked, start with this and judge for yourself whether what Wesley says about a nation can be said about a person.
Want the whole thing?
The full dossier has ten interactive sections, every source dated and quoted at length, the twelve-date timeline, the ten strongest objections weighed one at a time, and the prompt that produced the page so you can run it yourself.
Read the full dossier → Simple English →