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Bad events can be good teachers. When I was twenty-years-old, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded in the old Soviet Union. Although the Russians tried to keep it secret for days, a huge cloud of radioactive particles was released and began to spread over Europe.
Experts predicted hundreds of thousands of cancer deaths over the coming years. It was a scary time, especially for me. A few days after the explosion, I got soaked in an unexpected rain shower on the way to catch a bus to work. Dripping wet, I got on the bus and opened my morning paper, to be met with a government warning: Stay indoors and avoid rain!
I wasn’t a Christian at the time, but this tragic event got me thinking seriously about my life and my death, which I was sure was imminent. I thought a lot about what would happen to me after death. This bad event was a good teacher for me.
But bad events can also be bad teachers, as we’ll discover in Luke 13:1-5. How do we use bad events as good teachers instead of bad teachers? Let Jesus teach us how.