When a pregnancy ends in loss, two questions usually arrive together. Where was God? And what did I do? Scripture answers the second one more directly than many grieving parents expect. It refuses to let anyone read a loss backward into a verdict on the parents’ sin or the size of their faith. It answers the first with nearness, not an explanation. God stays close to the brokenhearted. In Jesus he weeps at a grave, even one he is about to open.
That answer does not shrink the grief. It removes a weight that does not belong on top of the grief. To see why, it helps to look closely at the explanations people reach for, and then at what the biblical text actually says.
Where Does the Fear of Punishment Come From?
Lance Asper and his wife, Meredith, got pregnant in 2022 after years of job losses and new starts. Early bleeding turned into weeks of worry, and an early visit confirmed a miscarriage. The doctor tried to reassure them that it was not their fault and that this is common. Lance remembers driving straight to a work appointment and breaking down in front of a friend he had known for years. “I’ve never really cried like that before,” he said.
What came next was not only sorrow. It was suspicion. He asked himself, “Did I do something wrong?” He wondered whether God was dangling a reward and pulling it back. He is candid about where that picture came from. In his words, it was like telling a pet, “You don’t get the reward.” Then he names the source: “I love my dog. That’s how I think.”
That is an unusually honest admission, and it gets to the root of the problem. Many of us carry a training model of God without noticing it. Good behavior earns the treat. Failure costs it. Lance had also been formed by a season of church life focused on God’s power. He describes believing that God “was all powerful, strong and he can do anything and he’s real.” Put those two ideas together and the logic becomes brutal: if God can do anything and he did not stop this, then I must have done something to deserve it. Lance even felt he had been serving God faithfully: “I thought I was helping you. And then this happened to us.”
The question is not whether that logic feels natural. It clearly does. The question is whether the Bible teaches it.
What Did Jesus Say When His Disciples Asked Who Sinned?
John 9 opens with a man blind from birth, and the disciples ask Jesus the exact question grieving parents ask themselves. John 9:2 records it in the KJV: “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?” The question assumes there are only two options. Either the sufferer caused it, or the parents did.
Jesus rejects both:
“Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3).
Notice what Jesus does and does not say. He does not say the man and his parents were sinless people in general. He says the blindness is not the result of their sin. He breaks the link the disciples took for granted. He does not give them a general theory of suffering. Instead he turns their attention to what God will do next.
Luke 13 makes a similar move on a larger scale. People bring Jesus news of Galileans killed by Pilate, and Jesus mentions eighteen people killed when a tower fell in Siloam. He asks whether those victims were worse sinners than everyone else in Jerusalem, and in Luke 13:4–5 he answers his own question: “I tell you, Nay.” Then he turns the warning on the listeners: they too need to repent. In other words, Jesus will not let bystanders explain a disaster by pointing at the people it struck. The call to repentance applies to everyone. The tragedy does not single anyone out as uniquely guilty.
These are two different scenes with two different kinds of suffering, a congenital condition and a sudden accident. In both, Jesus is asked to connect a specific loss to a specific sin. In both, he refuses.
Why Does the Book of Job Matter Here?
The book of Job is the Bible’s long argument against the reward-and-punishment model of suffering. It is mostly poetry, and it should be read as a debate, not as a list of correct statements. Job’s friends say many things that sound pious. Eliphaz puts their position plainly in Job 4:7: “Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off?” His point is that innocent people do not suffer like this, so Job must be hiding something.
Genre matters here. The book quotes Eliphaz accurately, but it does not endorse him. At the end, God renders a verdict on the friends:
“Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7).
The friends defended God with a tidy system, and God says they got him wrong. Job questioned, protested and demanded a hearing, and God says Job spoke rightly.
That has two direct implications for a parent after a miscarriage. First, the voice that says you must have caused this sounds a lot like the friends, and the book of Job rejects their theology. Second, the anguished questions are not the problem. Job’s protests are recorded in Scripture at length, and he is not condemned for them.
Doesn’t the Bible Sometimes Connect a Child’s Death to Sin?
It does, and an honest reading has to face it. In 2 Samuel 12, the prophet Nathan confronts David over his adultery with Bathsheba and the killing of her husband. In 2 Samuel 12:14, Nathan announces that the child born to them will die, and the narrative connects that death to David’s sin. A parent searching the Bible in grief may find this passage and feel it confirms the worst fear.
Look closely at what kind of text this is. It is narrative about one king, one specific and public crime, and one prophetic word spoken by name to the person involved. The connection between sin and loss is not something David deduced from the child’s illness. A prophet announced it in advance, explicitly. Nothing in the passage turns that case into a general rule that every child’s death reveals a parent’s hidden sin. Reading it that way would be making a description into a principle, which is exactly what the disciples did in John 9 and what Jesus corrected.
The same caution applies to covenant blessings in the law. In Exodus 23:26, God promises Israel that in their land none would miscarry or be barren. This promise is part of the covenant God made with the nation at Sinai, described as a picture of a blessed land. Christians read how those covenant promises apply today in different faithful ways. But even within the Hebrew Scriptures, faithful women experienced barrenness without any accusation of sin, and the book of Job exists precisely because blessing and righteousness do not line up neatly in individual lives. A national covenant promise cannot be turned into an individual guarantee or a test of whether a mother prayed hard enough.
So the Bible does contain a case where a child’s death was tied to sin. It does not authorize anyone, including a grieving parent, to read that connection into their own loss without a word from God that says so. And Jesus explicitly warns against doing it.
If Not an Explanation, What Does Scripture Give Instead?
It gives a God who comes close and grieves. John 11 is the clearest place to see it. Lazarus has died, and Jesus has already told his disciples in John 11:11, “I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.” Jesus knows how the story will end. Yet when he sees Mary weeping, John 11:33 says “he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled,” and John 11:35 records the shortest verse in the KJV: “Jesus wept.”
The order of events matters. Jesus does not weep because he is surprised or helpless. He weeps knowing he is about to raise Lazarus. His tears are not a lack of information. They show that death is something God grieves, even when he has power over it. Both Martha and Mary say to him, in John 11:21 and 11:32, “Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.” That is a complaint, close to the one Lance raised in his car. Jesus does not rebuke either sister for saying it. He answers Martha with a promise and Mary with tears.
Psalm 34 fills in the same picture in the language of prayer:
“The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:18).
The next verse, Psalm 34:19, is just as important: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the LORD delivereth him out of them all.” This is poetry, and it should not be read as a timeline for when the pain will end. But it says something plainly: the righteous have many afflictions. Suffering is not evidence that someone is not righteous. The psalm assumes faithful people will be brokenhearted and promises that God draws near when they are.
That is the answer to the question of where God is. Scripture does not show him watching from a distance, waiting to see if the parents pass a test. It shows him near the broken heart and weeping at the grave.
What About the Peace That Seemed to Promise a Good Ending?
The hardest part of Lance’s story is not the loss alone. The night before the appointment, he felt that God was telling him it was okay to be happy about becoming a father. He let himself feel it. The next morning the miscarriage was confirmed, and his anger centered on that night: why give peace and then take it away?
Scripture does not give us a way to verify what Lance felt that night, and this article will not claim to. But it does make an important distinction. The promises God has given in his Word, his nearness to the brokenhearted and his grief over death, are different from an inner impression about a specific outcome. When an impression seems to fail, the written promises remain. Losing confidence in what you felt that night does not mean losing God.
Lance did not resolve the question neatly, and he does not pretend he has. Later, he and Meredith had a son, Will. He says the joy he feels when he sees his son smile is what he felt that night before the appointment. He also says, “I still question why did you make us go through that.” Both statements are true for him at once. He did not need to settle the question in order to keep trusting.
Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, who interviewed him, adds an important limit from her own life. She believes God fulfills some promises on earth, but she is careful: “There’s several things I prayed for God to do that I haven’t seen manifested on earth.” Any honest reading of the Bible leaves room for that. Prayers that seem unanswered do not mean God is absent or that faith was too small.
Does Joy Come Back, and What If It Does Not Look Like This?
Fields recalls a therapist telling her during a hard season, “We get stuck on the cross, but we forget there’s a resurrection.” That fits the shape of John 11. The tears at the tomb are real, and so is the voice that calls Lazarus out. Christian hope does not deny the cross. It refuses to treat the cross as the end of the story.
But that hope cannot become a formula. Lance Asper knows many people whose story has not turned the way his did, and he guards against making his own experience a promise: “I don’t wanna ever make it sound like this is how it happens for everybody.” That caution matches the Bible. Nowhere does Scripture promise every grieving parent a later child, and nowhere does it treat a later child as the explanation for the earlier loss. Some couples’ arms stay empty. They did not fail a test. They are among the brokenhearted the psalm says God is near.
Fields also names why Christians can hold grief and hope together without forcing a resolution: “The reason we long for a life to come is because of the pains of this life.” The longing is not a sign of weak faith. It is what faith looks like in a world where babies are lost.
There is practical wisdom here too. Lance found it freeing to hear teachers and scholars admit their struggles, because it told him “I’m allowed to struggle with things too and know that I don’t have to be like perfect.” Grief after a pregnancy loss can be heavy and long. Talking with a pastor, a trusted friend, a doctor or a counselor is not a failure of faith. God works through people trained to care for the mind and the body, and a grieving parent should not have to carry this alone.
The punitive explanation offers a reason in exchange for blame. Scripture refuses that deal. It takes away the verdict and gives you a God who weeps. That may feel like less than an answer. In John 11, it is the answer Mary received, and she was standing nearest to the one who wept.
