(SEE 9:21)

When an innocent person suddenly dies, God laughs.

I am old now; I have lived a long time, but I have never seen good people abandoned by the LORD or their children begging for food.

My life has been useless, but in it I have seen everything. Some good people may die while others live on, even though they are evil.

I thought long and hard about all this and saw that God controls the actions of wise and righteous people, even their love and their hate. No one knows anything about what lies ahead.

It makes no difference. The same fate comes to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the bad, to those who are religious and those who are not, to those who offer sacrifices and those who do not. A good person is no better off than a sinner; one who takes an oath is no better off than one who does not.

The natives saw the snake hanging on Paul's hand and said to one another, "This man must be a murderer, but Fate will not let him live, even though he escaped from the sea."

And so the Lord knows how to rescue godly people from their trials and how to keep the wicked under punishment for the Day of Judgment,