Why do good people suffer while wicked people prosper?

Question 6040.

Why the wicked prosper while decent people are ground down is not a question invented by modern sceptics. It is asked, at length and with considerable heat, by the writers of Scripture themselves.

That fact alone should reassure anyone who has felt guilty for asking it. The Bible does not treat this as an impertinent question. It treats it as an honest one, and it answers at a level most of us are not looking at.

The question is in the Bible

Jeremiah puts it bluntly. Righteous are you, O LORD, when I complain to you; yet I would plead my case before you. Why does the way of the wicked prosper (Jeremiah 12:1)? He affirms God’s righteousness and then complains anyway, which is a model worth copying.

Habakkuk asks why God is silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he. Job spends chapters observing that the wicked prosper, grow old and die comfortably in their beds. Asaph nearly lost his footing over it.

So if you have been carrying this quietly, thinking that faith requires you not to notice, the prophets are better company than you have been keeping.

Psalm 73 and the turning point

Asaph describes his envy of the arrogant with painful honesty. They have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are. Their eyes swell out through fatness (Psalm 73:4-7).

His conclusion at that stage is that his own purity has been pointless. All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. Anyone who has watched the dishonest do well while doing everything right has felt that sentence.

The turn comes in verse 17. Until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. Nothing changed in his circumstances. What changed was the vantage point, and the whole psalm pivots on it.

The problem is a timescale problem

Asaph did not receive new information about the wicked; he received a longer view of them. Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. The prosperity was real and it was temporary, and he had been evaluating a story by its middle chapter.

That is the consistent biblical answer. Not that the wicked prosper only apparently, but that they prosper only briefly. Psalm 37 says the same: fret not yourself because of evildoers, for they will soon fade like the grass.

We find this unsatisfying because we want the accounts settled by Friday. Scripture insists the accounts are settled, and does not accept our deadline.

What “good people” means

The question contains an assumption worth examining. Scripture is clear that there is none righteous, no, not one, and that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Strictly, the category of innocent sufferers is empty.

I am not saying that to be clever or to shut down the complaint. Job was described by God Himself as blameless and upright, and the Bible has no difficulty calling people righteous in the relative and practical sense.

But it does mean that nobody is owed a comfortable life. When we ask why the wicked prosper and the good suffer, we are usually assuming a contract that God never signed.

The patience of God is the reason

Peter gives the explanation that most of us skip. The Lord is not slow to fulfil his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance (2 Peter 3:9).

The delay that lets the wicked prosper is the same delay that gave you time to be converted. Judgement withheld is mercy extended, and it is extended indiscriminately, which is what Jesus meant about the sun rising on the evil and the good.

Paul asks the Romans whether they presume on the riches of God’s kindness, not knowing that His kindness is meant to lead them to repentance. Prosperity is not approval. It is often a summons that is being ignored.

When the wicked prosper it may not be a blessing

There is a bleaker possibility that Scripture raises. Asaph says God sets them in slippery places, and Paul in Romans 1 speaks three times of God giving people up to what they insisted on wanting.

To be allowed to succeed at something destructive, without interruption, is not a kindness. It is one of the more frightening things that can happen to a person, and it looks from the outside exactly like good fortune.

So when the wicked prosper, the right emotion is not envy. Read the end of Psalm 73 and you will find pity, and a sense of narrow escape.

Why the righteous suffer

The other half of the question has its own answers. Some suffering is discipline from a Father who will not let His children settle, and Hebrews says He disciplines the son He receives, which frames the pain as evidence of belonging rather than of rejection.

Some is training, producing endurance, character and hope. Some is testimony, as with the man born blind, so that the works of God might be displayed. And a great deal is simply the ordinary consequence of living in a world that is broken.

What none of it is, is proof that God has lost interest. I have written more on this in the article on whether God causes or allows suffering.

The cross is the decisive case

If ever there was an innocent sufferer while the wicked prospered, it was at Calvary. The only genuinely righteous man who has ever lived was executed by the powerful, who went home to their dinners.

That event is either the collapse of the whole argument or its answer. Christians say it is the answer, because what looked like the triumph of injustice turned out to be the mechanism of salvation, and the verdict was reversed three days later.

God is not a spectator to this problem. He entered it, at the sharpest point, and He did it deliberately.

Judgement is coming and that is good news

Paul told the Athenians that God has fixed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom He has appointed (Acts 17:31). That is not a threat tacked on to the gospel; it is part of the comfort.

A world in which the wicked prosper permanently and nothing is ever put right would be intolerable. The doctrine of final judgement says that every cruelty will be addressed, every hidden thing brought into the light, and every victim seen.

The believer’s own account has been settled at the cross, which is why we can look forward to that day rather than dread it. Justice delayed is not justice denied when the Judge is eternal.

What this does not mean

It does not mean Christians should be passive about injustice now. The prophets who complained that the wicked prosper also demanded that the courts be cleaned up and the poor defended. Waiting for final justice has never excused ignoring present injustice.

It does not mean suffering should be minimised or spiritualised. The Psalms complain in detail, and there is no virtue in pretending a loss is smaller than it is.

And it does not mean prosperity is automatically suspicious. Plenty of godly people have done well, and plenty of wicked people have died poor. The correlation we are complaining about is loose in both directions.

Where Asaph landed

The end of the psalm is not a solution to the puzzle but a relocation of the affection. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you (Psalm 73:25).

He had wanted an explanation and received a Person, which is the same movement we saw in Job. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever.

That is the only ground on which this question stops tormenting a person. Not because it has been answered to our satisfaction, but because the thing we were envying has stopped looking desirable.

So, now what?

Go into the sanctuary. Whatever form that takes for you, the point is to stop evaluating your life against the person you have been watching and start evaluating it in the presence of God.

Then be honest with Him about the envy. Asaph was, and he wrote it down for public use. God is not fragile, and a complaint brought to Him is halfway to being healed. The related question of Job is handled in the article on the suffering of Job.

And take the long view deliberately. The wicked prosper for a season, and the season is shorter than it looks. What would change in you this month if you actually believed that?

But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

Psalm 73:2-3 (ESV)