Why does God let bad things happen?
No one who lives long on our planet remains unaffected by evil and suffering. As a boy of nine, my time came relatively early. Over the years my family had made a number of big driving holidays to visit family in another state. This time we were on our way home through thick fog in the mountains. Dad was driving, my mum and sisters were sleeping, and I was awake in the back. Then it happened. Out of nowhere, a truck pulled out in front of us on a single lane road, and what happened next is seared into my memory.
Our van smashed into the truck, spun out across the road, and came to a halt spanning both lanes. Oncoming vehicles broke and swerved, only just missing me. My sisters woke screaming. My dad’s hands were frozen on the wheel in shock, covered in butter that had broken free of the car fridge in the back when it hurtled forward. But mostly what I remember is my mum, whose head had collided not only with the back corner of the truck as it crushed her side of the van but also with the car fridge from behind. There she was, slumped over unconscious in her chair, her body eerily still, and her face covered in blood.
That was the end of my childhood. It was also the undoing, albeit unconsciously at the time, of my belief in a loving God. Because if God really existed, and if he cared, surely these sorts of things would not happen. My family and friends should not die from suicide, car accidents, and cancer. Our planet should not be ravaged by murder, greed, corruption, terror, injustice, sickness, and famine. This just does not look like a world that an all-loving, all-powerful God would create. And without knowing it, or even being able to clearly describe my thoughts and feelings, I had stumbled onto the most ancient and enduring objection to God.
THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND SUFFERING
You do not have to be an intellectual giant to understand the challenge that evil and suffering pose to belief in the Christian God. We intuitively feel the objection. And yet when you trace it back through history, the first thinker credited with putting pen to papyrus to clearly spell out the problem was the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270BC). Even though it may not be a correct attribution, as the argument is put onto his lips six centuries later by the Christian thinker Lactantius, modern memes are replete with the popularised form of the argument that was put forward by the 18th-century sceptic David Hume:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not all-powerful.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then why is there evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
At first glance, his argument seems watertight. As humans looking out at the world and within ourselves, we have this deep-seated belief that something has gone awry, that this is not the way the world should be. Evil exists. Suffering seems wrong. And Christianity, centred around a loving God, just cannot be easily squared with our real-world experience. At least that is what I felt as a boy, and what millions of people believe today.
DOES EVIL AND SUFFERING POINT AWAY FROM GOD?
Given evil and suffering it would seem that people are justified to walk away from belief in God. Suffering is a problem for Christians, no doubt. But rarely will a sceptic pause to consider their new footing, and whether it makes any more sense of the problem.
Consider atheism. The argument is made that atheism is not a belief system, merely the lack of belief in God(s). But even if this were true, this lack of belief in God still creates a giant vacuum of answers to life’s deepest questions that have traditionally been furnished by the Christian story. This is why atheists, when parsed out, tend to opt further for some form of philosophical naturalism and/or secular humanism. But in doing so they bump into an entirely new problem of evil. Namely, how do you account for the evilness of evil, as well as our intuition that suffering is not how things ought to be? How do you explain the very thing that made you reject Christianity in the first place?
It seems to me that atheism is profoundly inadequate to make sense of our human experience of evil and suffering. Consider the Cambodian killing fields, or the gas chambers of the Third Reich, or the hundreds of millions sent to their cruel deaths by despots. Transport yourself into these situations, whether through films, stories, memorials, or your imagination, and you come face to face with evil. But if atheism is true and our universe is orphaned of its Creator, then you saw off the moral branch upon which you sit to judge anything. For on atheism, morality is a social construct. It varies from time to time and place to place. One culture says love your neighbour, another says eat your neighbour. And on atheism, it’s all relative. Because the universe is amoral, and humans have no purpose or absolute moral goal, then no one is in a position to tell another what to do, and we cannot speak of moral progress or regress, only moral change. Ethics is reduced to a kind of cultural aesthetics or personal taste. So that when you stand in the presence of evil, you have no moral resources to call it by its name. At worst a tyrant is just dissenting from a social contract they never signed.
And if this is the way things have always been, with suffering being a brute fact, and evolutionary history being written in the blood of countless generations, then why on earth did we develop this intuition that something has gone wrong? If atheism is true, then this intuition is another casualty, explained away as nothing more than a figment of our evolutionary imagination.
The problem for this footing is that we don’t live as though ethics are relative. We live as though some things are truly evil, even if no one else believes you and everyone else is doing it. And I think C.S. Lewis was onto something in Mere Christianity when he mused how strange it would be for creatures baptised in a system of suffering to have developed such a deep intuitional aversion to the system itself.
This is why running away from God in the face of evil and suffering is more complex than you might imagine. For although the problem of evil is one of internal consistency within the Christian story, if you eject that story to get away from the problem you merely bump into a new one. Namely, the internal inconsistency between the human mind and heart in how you make sense of evil and suffering. That we apprehend evil as a moral reality, and that we feel as though the train of this world is off its tracks, far from disproving God, ends up perhaps pointing back towards God’s existence and an ancient story that speaks of this world going wrong. Evil is a bigger problem for the non-Christian than it is for the Christian.
But the question remains as to whether Christianity can answer Epicurus’ argument. Can an all-loving and all-powerful God have good reasons for allowing evil and suffering?
HOW DOES THE BIBLE EXPLAIN EVIL AND SUFFERING?
The Christian story is not shy when it comes to the mega themes of evil and suffering. Entire books of the Bible are devoted to trying to make sense of this dark side of human experience, and when you zoom out to get the big picture, some complementary answers to the problem of evil begin to emerge.
These are far from exhaustive. Anyone who claims to have a silver bullet explanation to all of the why questions in Christianity likely denies their complexity. But the answers you do find in Scripture go a long way to resolving Epicurus’ dilemma in a way that gels with our experience.
In Genesis, the Christian story begins not with a world gone wrong but with a world made right. Formed from the chaos of our created cosmos, God sets about to cultivate a garden paradise in a small corner of our planet, and welcome in our first parents at the dawn of the human race to be his divine image-bearers. We were made to know and be known, to love and be loved, and were given the responsibility to subdue and cultivate the rest of Earth’s untamed capacity, building cultures that reveal God’s own creativity. This state of affairs God described as very good, meaning all was fulfilling its created purpose.
God wove natural and moral laws into the very fabric of our universe, governing matter and moral creatures respectively with a sort of cause and effect structure. The natural laws we were commanded to discover, but as a loving Father to his earthy kids, God revealed his moral laws to us, granting humanity a choice. We could either trust God’s moral boundaries will be for our best, or we could break faith with God and seek to define good and evil on our own terms, embracing the consequences of that decision.
Now this might seem like an odd or unnecessary choice in the story of Genesis. Why put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden in the first place? But on this choice given to us by God rests the dignity of what it means to be human. For choice is an inalienable component, not only of being morally responsible for your actions, but of treasured realities like love.
Imagine if instead of seeking to win over the affections of my now wife, instead I merely forced my love upon her, and coerced her into making marriage vows under threat of death. No one attending that wedding ceremony would be filled with warm and fuzzy feelings, because we instantly recognise that for those sacred words to mean anything they must be freely uttered.
For love to mean anything it must be freely given. And this explains why a loving God might choose to make this world. Not a world of robots or automata who blindly follow orders, nor a world of oppressive coercion, where people reluctantly obey. No. God created a world where love was possible. A world where humans were free to love God and love others, or to do otherwise, which is the very definition of evil.
Epicurus is wrong because he assumes that an all-powerful God can create free creatures who only ever do what he wants them to do. But that is an intrinsic impossibility on the same nonsensical level as the creation of a square circle or a married bachelor. Simply define what you’re talking about and a self-contradiction appears. And since the logic of God’s mind shapes the boundaries of his omnipotence, and since God’s loving nature shapes the exercise of his omnipotence, God chooses to create free humans with the capacity to love over robots or slaves that cannot love at all. And wrapped up in this freedom is the possibility that we might choose evil, and as a result experience suffering.
Now if God exists then the moral laws that govern moral creatures are as real as the natural laws that govern matter and energy. If I attempted to break the law of gravity by jumping off a building, then we all know what would happen. I wouldn’t break the law of gravity; I would be broken by the law of gravity. And the same is true of God’s moral laws. When our first parents broke faith with God, humanity fell from our high calling as image bearers of God and crashed into the moral fabric of reality, whereby we became broken. Suffering and death followed on as the consequences of evil.
But although sin leads to suffering, the reverse is not always true. The Bible does not endorse Karma, where you can trace back any instance of suffering to some evil committed by the one now suffering. The picture is more complex. Because we live now in a broken world, suffering happens to the most unlikely of people, and we can feel a sense of cosmic injustice. But even this kind of suffering, the kind we haven’t brought upon ourselves, can still serve a purpose, becoming a symptom that points all people to diagnose a much deeper problem. Namely, that not all is right between Creator and creation.
This is but one of the various plausible answers that the Bible offers in answer to the problem of evil. A loving God allows evil and suffering because he wants us to be free to choose and free to experience love. And although there are several others, this alone at least weakens Epicurus’ argument. We can see some plausible reasons why a good God may allow evil and suffering in the general sense. But for many, the general answers aren’t enough. They want a specific answer for why God allowed something to happen to them. And maybe we are reaching here for answers we cannot know, at least not now.
SHOULD WE EXPECT TO HAVE ALL THE ANSWERS?
Across the story of Scripture, a number of big names ask questions of God when it comes to their suffering. Chief among them is a man named Job, a relatively good guy who loves God but whose life is ripped apart. His family crushed by a collapsing house, his wealth stolen or destroyed by natural disasters, and his health ravaged by skin disease. Naturally, he begins to wonder why, and starts to question God’s justice. When God eventually steps into Job’s story, rather than answering his questions, God asks 64 of his own
“Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! (Job 28:2-5)
The point of God’s questions is to help Job get some perspective on the enormity of what it means to govern a universe from God’s chair, and how by comparison, there are a ton of things that Job just does not, indeed cannot, know.
I remember when my son Josiah was 18 months old and I had to take him for a round of immunisations. The doctor and nurse told me he required two needles, which they would simultaneously inject, one in each arm. They had me sit Josiah on my lap, and as he stared up at me lovingly, they swiftly stabbed him. As his little body winced with pain and his eyes filled with tears, and like Job he looked up at me confused and feeling betrayed. I was his daddy. He knew that I was strong; I could stop them from hurting him if I wanted. And he knew that I loved him. So he couldn’t comprehend why I would let him suffer.
Now as a reasonably educated adult, having a working knowledge of immunology and the dangers of viral or bacterial infection and disease, I have good reasons for allowing him to suffer. But there is no way I could relate those reasons to him as a toddler. He simply cannot now understand those reasons. And if that is true of an 18 month old boy to his 30 year old dad, how much more true is that of a finite human being when compared to an infinite and all-wise God, who doesn’t just know the movement of every atom in the universe or the number of hairs on my head, but can even look through the corridors of time to see how every action reverberates like the butterfly effect as it ripples outwards through history.
n addressing our particular why questions, God doesn’t give us exhaustive answers but instead invites us to recognise and lean into his bigness. But whether you will or will not do so depends on whether, like my son, you come to trust God’s goodness, which is where Christianity offers the most hope. For although a loving God may in the big picture allow evil and suffering as the cost of creating free creatures, that is not a cost a loving God leaves us to bear alone.
HOW DOES HEAVEN RESPOND TO OUR SUFFERING?
Whilst philosophers continue to speculate as to why God may allow bad things, what Jesus offers is different. He doesn’t bypass the mind, but he takes aim for the heart, addressing the felt need we all have in the face of evil and suffering. For far more than a mere explanation, the four gospels of the New Testament as biographies of Jesus give us a window into God’s response to our pain. And it is here that I have found Christianity to offer more meaningful answers and substantial hope than any other religious or secular story. For rather than simply explaining our condition, Jesus steps in to do something about it.
For Jesus grieves over our suffering. In John’s gospel, one of Jesus’ friends named Lazarus dies (John 11:1-44). Upon hearing the news, Jesus takes his followers to Bethany, and upon being greeted by Lazarus’ two grieving sisters, Mary and Martha, God bears his heart in the face of our suffering. Jesus wept. A grown Jewish man, dignified in position, breaks down and sobs before the gathered crowd. You see we are tempted to think that our compassion runs deeper than the God in whose image we are made, but this story reveals God’s love. As a heavenly Father to his earthly kids, God feels for us. He is grieved by our suffering. One day we will realise that every tear we have shed for the suffering of this world was borrowed from God’s divine eye.
And here Jesus promises the eradication of evil and eclipse of suffering. Jesus’ first round on the stage of planet earth was to deal with the evil in the human heart, making it possible for us to be reconciled to God and changed from within. This is why God allows evil to continue for a time, granting opportunity for none to be lost but all to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). But Jesus promised to return, mentioned some 300 times in the New Testament, on a day where enough is enough, to bring an end to evil and to reverse the curse of suffering. The Bible’s answer to suffering calls into vision the future hope of a new creation where God himself will wipe away all the tears from this world. For all who have been changed to become like Jesus, this promised future is one where mourning, pain, and death are done. Evil’s sickness and its suffering have been wiped out, and the promise of the everlasting joy of being with God in this place far outweighs any experience of pain we have here (2 Corinthians 4:17). Jesus puts our pain in perspective of what God wants and will make the world to be.
And this perspective is why Jesus stood against evil and suffering. The ministry of Jesus in the gospels was characterised by the announcement that God is coming near to make things return to their rightful order, inviting us to fall in line. How this played out was through miracles of supernatural physical healing, or rebukes to the powers that be for their abuse of position to cheat others, or sacrificial service to those no one regarded as worthy. The gospels portray God’s response as one of a war against evil and injustice, where Jesus treated suffering, sickness, and death as enemies to our human flourishing. To Jesus, evil and suffering wasn’t just something to be ignored or endured, but something to be confronted and alleviated as part of God’s kingdom coming to earth. This was Jesus’ legacy to his followers.
But to say that evil and suffering are not part of God’s original design or future world does not mean that they are beyond his reach to use for some present purpose. Even though God doesn’t stand behind my actions nor the suffering that results, he can redeem them to serve a momentary purpose. The dominant image of the New Testament when it comes to suffering is that of a fire; a thing used to forge or destroy (1 Peter 1:6-11). And if we cooperate with God in our suffering, leaning into his promises, God works together even our pain in the pursuit to make us more like Jesus; a heavenly rather than a hellish person (Romans 8:28). Perhaps above all, God uses suffering to get our attention. As a pastor who walks with people through various situations in life, I’ve come to see that people rarely ask life’s deep questions when all is going well. But when entertainment and distraction are stripped back, and when life and death are in the balance, then the truly important comes to the fore. These are often the moments of profound spiritual and personal growth. So evil and suffering are not meaningless within the Christian story. In God’s hands, Jesus’ suffering meant something.
This is where Jesus stands head and shoulders above the other gods and heroes of the religious and secular stories. For in the Christian story, God is not untouched by our pain. He entered into it, choosing to forsake the safety of Heaven to write Himself into our story and suffering alongside us. The passion of the Christ, the suffering of Jesus, when you wade through the gory details of what he endured through His trials, flogging, and crucifixion, is a profound declaration, a demonstration, of God’s love for us. God’s answer to our suffering, at least in part, is to come and suffer with us. To experience our pain. To identify with us. And to show that, even when we don’t have all the answers, if God is willing to suffer in this way for us, then surely we can trust him. At the very least, Calvary’s cross may not tell us what our suffering means, but it tells us what it cannot mean; it cannot mean that God doesn’t love us.
Jesus is a God who has scars. He knows your pain. He is a God who has endured evil. And if God the Father is able to take the worst evil committed against Jesus the Son and turn it around to extend salvation for whosoever believes, then perhaps God can do something with your scars.
So in Christianity, we have a God who is big enough to have reasons for allowing suffering that we cannot know, and a God who is good enough for us to trust even without all the answers. To me the Christian story offers the best answer to the problem of evil and suffering, making sense of our moral aversion to it in the book of Genesis, offering a charter for confronting it in the life of Jesus, and promising God’s presence with us in our pain until its final eclipse in God’s future world.
To me that sounds like good news in a world plagued by pain.
