“If anything goes wrong in your life, it’s because you have sinned.”
Bad things happening in our lives are not an automatic sign that God is mad at us and is punishing us into submission. Applying yet again commonsense, is this how we effectively raise children? Sadly, because of assorted evangelical “child psychology experts” who have inserted their voices into a church community eager to eat up anything they dish out, many Christians parent with punishment. And because they are inflexible, shortsighted, and harsh, they figure that God is, too.
The rain falls on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45), and indeed, much of what we suffer is not because God slapped our face, but because men, in the quest for unlimited power and money, hurt other men. Once we get done asking why this is happening to us (generally we stop asking because we can’t get a satisfactory answer), we turn to God, rely upon Him to walk us through it, and emerge a deeper, better, more compassionate person. But we won’t do this if we’re constantly assuming that God is out to get us.