What Does God Owe Us?

   A friend of my wife's expressed a view that I don't think is all that uncommon among Christians.  The context is a difficulty in her life, and the pain that has come from it.  She is in a place where she believes that if God does not intervene and prevent a tragedy, then He tacitly approves it.  In her case, she seems to believe that God explicitly approved the tragedy because He didn't intervene.  Her words, in summary: "It's like God is sitting at His desk up there, and things come across, and He either approves or rejects them."
   My wife finds this view shocking, and for good reason.  The implication is not just that God allows bad things to happen, which is true, but that His inaction in preventing them is evidence of His de facto approval of them.  This perspective is not really any different than believing that God makes bad things happen, because if you believe that all of these bad things come by him for approval (i.e. no intervention) or rejection (i.e. intervention), then you believe that He essentially causes them to occur.
   I can't really blame my wife's friend for feeling this way.  She is hurt and she doesn't understand, and the thing she wants to understand is incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to understand anyway, even on a good day.  I've been asking myself questions she has probably asked, such as: Why do bad things happen to Believers?  Why does God intervene in some instances, but not others?  And when He doesn't intervene, does that somehow imply His approval?
   As Believers, we feel we should be protected against the bad things.  There's a belief within us that, now that we're saved, God is on our side and now we'll get His blessings.  With this belief there's a narrow vision of what His blessings are, usually restricted to A) delivery of the good things, and B) deliverance from the bad things.  While there is no doubt that these are blessings, a simplified set of expectations like this has the danger of breeding in us a sense of entitlement.  We feel entitled because we know that God can bless us in this way. But feeling entitled to God's blessings is dangerous.  We feel entitled to the blessings of God when we fail to consider or realize that, in reality, God doesn't owe us anything.
   Now, this is where I've butted up against my own understanding of who God is.  Not that I'm stuck, or that I have doubts about His goodness, but I'm reaching the limits of what I grasp about Him.  The fact is, He doesn't owe us anything, whether we're Believers or not.  In fact, if we assumed He did owe us something after we believed, then grace would cease to be grace, because it would become wages.  As Paul says in Romans 4:4,

"Now to the one who works, his wages are not counted as a gift but as his due."

That is, grace is a gift, not a wage, because we can't and don't work for it.  And the gift does not cease to be a gift after we believe; on the contrary.  By believing, we fully attain the gift.  We receive it and call it ours.
   This understanding of grace (that it is always a gift), this view of the blessings of God, does something in us if we receive it.  It supplants our expectation of getting what we believe we are owed.  It replaces our sense of entitlement with a proper fear, or reverence, of God: who He is, what He does, and (perhaps most importantly) peace with the probability that we will not know why He's done anything.  With God we have to be be content with knowing the who and the what, and not knowing the why.  That, perhaps, is a good definition of faith.
   Arguably we may have an idea of why God does things, but any intimation we have of the 'why' is really an interpretation of the 'who'.  God is love, so He loves.  The reason why He loves is because He is love.  But this interpretation of God's actions only goes so far in answering the 'why'.  God is also a healer, but He does not heal every time we ask.  So why does He heal sometimes, but at other times the illness or injury or disability remains?  That is a 'why' that may never be answered, and the health of your relationship with the Lord depends on your willingness to live without an answer.
  What we discover when we run into an unanswerable 'why' in our lives is revelatory of what we believe God owes us.  If during the trial we think God has run out on us, it probably means we felt entitled to His deliverance.  But if we find that God is there just as we knew He would be, and this even though we haven't been delivered from our difficulty, it probably means we understand the most important thing about God.  The most important thing about the Lord for us is not that He will always get us out of a jam, but that

"He will not leave you or forsake you." (Deut. 41:6)

   Entitlement is a precarious foundation for a relationship.  What draws us to God is not a promise of ease, but a promise of freedom.  He does not woo us with a vision of an easy life, but rather He woos us with the image of His son who bled and died to redeem us all.  It is tempting to conflate salvation with physical prosperity, but there is no guaranteed correlation.  Salvation does not equal deliverance from our worldly troubles.  Salvation equals adoption into the Father's heart, and that is more than we could ever have hoped for, worldly troubles or no.  Life is what God offers, and what He delivers, and we are never entitled to it.  But by grace He has given it, and that is good enough for me.  I don't want what I'm entitled to; I want grace.  I want the gift, the one that God doesn't owe me, but which He nevertheless willingly and extravagantly gives.