“If God is good, why does He allow suffering?”

Answer: This is a common and difficult question for many people.  Suffering is rampant in our world.  Suffering can have different causes, such as:
  • Logical, natural consequences of our own sins.  Example: Someone drives after drinking too much alcohol, and gets hurt in an accident. 
  • Sins of others.  Example: Someone else drinks and drives and hurts us, or someone we love.
  • Avoidable disasters.
  • Unavoidable physical disasters.
Much of the discussion centers on the concept of free will.  God did not create us as puppets.  He wants to have relationships with us.  He loves us and wants us to love Him.  But He won’t make us love him.  That would be violating our free will.  God doesn’t step in and violate the free will of others when they are about to do something bad to us.  As C.S. Lewis said, “Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.  The happiness God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and woman on this earth is mere milk and water.  And for that they must be free.”

Some people ask, “Why doesn’t God intervene to stop evil?”  First, if he intervened every time someone was going to perform an evil act, we would have no free will to do good or evil.  Second, keep in mind that God DID intervene by sending His Son, Jesus, to take the punishment for all the evil deeds ever committed or to be committed.  And Jesus will intervene again at some point and wipe out evil completely.   Third, He still intervenes and performs miracles in His creation, but sometimes He lets evil things happen for a greater good to come out of them. 

Allowing suffering doesn’t mean that God isn’t perfectly good.  Letting something happen is different than making it happen.  God can reach us in our pain.  As C.S. Lewis said, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscious, but shouts in our pains.  It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”  My goal is to listen carefully so He doesn’t have to shout at me!  :-)

Many people assume that God is indifferent to suffering.  Yet God so loved the world that He gave his only Son to experience unimaginable suffering and to die as a victim of evil and cruelty.  He endured this to overcome sin, so that we might be reconciled to God and eventually live a perfect life with him in heaven.  Jesus endured all manner of unjust suffering, including being rejected by family members and others, mocked, abandoned by friends, beaten, given 40 lashes and crucified, so it is unfair to say that He is indifferent to pain.  Also, read all the stories of how compassionate Jesus was when encountering suffering people. He was not aloof. He cared about and shared their pain, just like He cares about your pain and problems now.

The Case for Faith, by Lee Strobel, provides some solid answers to this question, as do many other books and web sites.  An “admittedly imperfect but nevertheless helpful illustration” Mr. Strobel used in a Christian Research Journal article (“Handling Christianity’s Toughest Challenge”) also helps put suffering in perspective.  Imagine having an absolutely horrible day on January 1 – you crash your new car, lose lots of money, have health problems, etc.- then having the remaining 364 days of the year filled with pure joy and success.  How would you respond when someone asks how the year went?  Most likely, you would say it was a great year.  Our earthly lives might be like the first bad day, but heaven will be like the perfect, joyful 364 days, and beyond (provided we have accepted God’s free gift of grace).

Having said all this, keep in mind that there are no easy answers for people who are suffering.  They generally need love and compassion instead of a lot of theories.  So before answering, be careful to determine why someone is asking this question.  Is it purely theoretical?  Is it because they are suffering?  Or is it a smokescreen because it makes a convenient excuse? 

(Adapted from GotQuestions.org)