The MRI results come back and they don’t look good. Your paycheck just won’t cover all the bills this month. Another negative pregnancy test. You get the midnight phone call no parent wants to get.
No human is immune to suffering, adversity, and the juggernaut of circumstance in a broken world. And, aside from our own personal bruises and heartaches, we live amid a flurry of larger-than-life tragedies: fires, famines, social injustices, war.
It is not uncommon to hear people ask, “Why would a good God let such bad things happen?”
On the surface, it may sound accusatory. It may even be intended to stir suspicion and doubt. But the question often comes from a place of hurt and frustration. And it’s easy to understand why it gets asked so often. Why would a good God allow evil and suffering?
What do we assume about our suffering?
The question is based on several assumptions, and the first is about our suffering. It assumes that our suffering is unnatural and wrong. But the only way for that to be true is if there was a natural, universal standard for human good and flourishing. That type of standard needs an explanation. It’s not found in the natural order. It’s not compatible with a survival of the fittest existence in which suffering and death eliminate the weak links in an environment and evil can’t really be weighed or assessed.
The fact that we register evil and wrongdoing at all points to the fact that there is something absolutely good to compare it against.
Christianity explains this. God made the world and he created it good (Gen. 1–2). Sin came in and corrupted it (Gen. 3).
So the assumption that our suffering is wrong is actually helpful in pointing us to what is right and true: God’s account of his creation revealed to us in his word. What’s more, it’s right to grieve the suffering we see and experience in the world—Jesus himself did when he wept at the death of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35). Throughout the Old and New Testaments, we see humans grieve death, disease, infertility, and injustice. It is good to mourn the broken things.
What do we assume about the character of God?
But it’s also important for us to consider what assumptions we’re making about God when we ask ourselves this question. What do we expect from a God who is good? And why?
Do you expect good things from God, and this current season of suffering falls outside what you normally receive from him—good health, good relationships, good food, and a good earth to live in? It’s easy to focus on the things God has withheld, or the suffering he has allowed, but doesn’t the assumption that he will give us good gifts rest on previous experiences of those gifts?
Let’s flip the question. What would you expect from a god who isn’t good? We can look to any number of pagan pantheons of quibbling, quarreling gods who lie and cheat, kidnap and murder—humans and other gods—and who live their eternal existences at the behest of their own ever-changing whims. When those gods are in charge, it’s easy to explain away natural disasters that devastate human life or the wars that consume our planet—it’s just the gods fighting again.
But the fact that suffering doesn’t seem to fit into a world that should be taken care of by a loving, tender Creator who is present and active, sustaining all of life and sending sweet rains to the deserving and undeserving alike is really further proof that God is good. Jesus tells us in his Sermon on the Mount that we are to love our enemies so that we may be more like our loving heavenly Father, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45).
Should we be asking this question at all?
So, do we have a right to question why a good God—a loving heavenly father—would allow sin and suffering in the world?
Yes.
The question finds iterations even in Scripture itself, with men like David and Job asking God, “Why?” Even Jesus cries out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46).
God usually does not answer the why in Scripture. When Job spends several chapters trying to defend himself from his friends who think some sin must be the cause of the mysterious tragedies plaguing him, God responds in a stunning display (Job 40:6–9):
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: “Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be in the right? Have you an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his?
It’s essentially several chapters of God detailing how he made the cosmos from galaxy to insect, and how small Job is in comparison, and how he wasn’t even there to see God making it all. It’s a humbling read.
Job responds as anyone would when being directly confronted by God himself: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted… Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42:2–3).
God doesn’t explain Job’s suffering—though we know his purposes in it as the readers of the whole story. His answer is simply that he is God.
And still, he does let Job ask. Job isn’t struck by lightning. He’s not immediately blotted out from this earth. No, he’s allowed to pour out his grief and confusion at the feet of God and be heard.
And so are you.
And although we may not know the why’s behind the suffering we see in the world—including our own—we do know that God is good. And we know that he takes what was meant for evil and uses it to preserve his beloved children (Rom. 8:28; cf Gen. 45:5–8). We know that he took the most unjustifiable suffering ever to take place—the gruesome murder of the only perfectly innocent human to ever live—and offered through it the redemption of sins, yours and mine. The death of his Son secures our eternal life. That is what we can expect from a good God.
So ask away, know that you are heard, and trust in this good God to take care of you—for this life, and the next.
