Why does good god allow suffering

Well, one day he will. Evil was defeated on that first Easter, and one day it will be removed altogether. How do you fix a story that is broken? We all have our stories. Some of them seem beyond fixing. The Christian faith says you fix a broken story by embedding it in a much bigger story in which good wins, and evil loses.

One day there will be justice. One day all suffering will end. One day there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. This is an extraordinary description of the tenderness of God and of his plans to put right all the wrongs in this world.

God does not always offer us answers. In this life, we might never really understand why some things have happened. But God always offers us himself. He offers us friendship. He longs for us to come to him, talk to him, bring our suffering to him. Whatever you face, you can choose to go through it without God or with him.

What will you choose? God loves you anyway. And as the greatest parent we could know, He cares about your suffering, whether or not it is self-inflicted. People often think of God as distant and immune to suffering.

But the God of the Bible is not above suffering Himself. In the book of Genesis, we first encounter God as a loving parent. He creates in a way, gives birth to humanity in the form of Adam and Eve, and He sets loving boundaries for them. But they choose to reject Him. They cut to the heart. God experienced this pain first.

It is extremely frustrating when kids rebel against you and ignore the rules you established for their protection. Throughout the Bible, we see people turning their backs on God and ignoring what He says. Sometimes they turn back to Him, only to reject Him again.

If you are a parent, you can understand how deep and painful it is to have your children reject you repeatedly. He actually became a human in the person of Jesus and went through profound relational, physical and mental suffering. Jesus was rejected by the people He showed love to. He was abandoned by His closest friends when He needed them most. He was given an unfair trial and accused of crimes He did not commit. And ultimately He was tortured and executed by His enemies, with His own mother as a witness, having done nothing wrong Himself.

Jesus experienced intense suffering, and Jesus is God in the flesh, so we cannot think of God as being distant from suffering. Jesus actually chose to suffer so that He could one day bring an end to suffering for the rest of us and offer us comfort right now. Therefore, it was necessary for Him to be made in every respect like us, His brothers and sisters, so that He could be our merciful and faithful High Priest before God.

Then He could offer a sacrifice that would take away the sins of the people. Since He Himself has gone through suffering and testing, He is able to help us when we are being tested. Hebrews So then, since we have a great High Priest who has entered heaven, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to what we believe.

This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses, for He faced all of the same testings we do, yet He did not sin. So let us come boldly to the throne of our gracious God.

There we will receive His mercy, and we will find grace to help us when we need it most. The truth is that God hates to see people suffer. God does not want people to suffer, and He will end suffering.

He just has not done it yet. His endgame involves a joyful eternity with no more suffering. Find out more about how you can understand the will of God. Knowing that the human story will reach a good ending can give you hope in a world that sometimes feels hopeless.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared. And the sea was also gone. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven like a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.

He will live with them, and they will be His people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever. This is what our hearts long for when we are grieved by the suffering around us and in our own lives.

God gave you the Bible so you could know Him. Clearly, He wants you to know that He has a plan to end suffering, but it has not yet been completed, as another passage from the Bible teaches:. But you must not forget this one thing, dear friends: A day is like a thousand years to the Lord, and a thousand years is like a day.

No, He is being patient for your sake. He does not want anyone to be destroyed, but wants everyone to repent. Not only does God care when you suffer, He cares so much that He chose to suffer for you so that one day you can spend eternity with Him in a world without suffering. God chose to save you rather than spare Himself pain.

Jesus chose to become a human and suffer and die so you could be forgiven and live forever with God. For only as a human being could He die, and only by dying could He break the power of the devil, who had the power of death. Only in this way could He set free all who have lived their lives as slaves to the fear of dying. When Christians describe this truth about God, they call God the Trinity. This aspect of God can be difficult to understand and is impossible to fully comprehend, but it is both true and reasonable.

Any loving parent will tell you that sacrificing your own life is not the worst type of suffering. Parents would much rather sacrifice themselves if it spared their children.

In this sense, God not only sacrificed Himself in the person of Jesus, but He accepted the deeper pain of sacrificing His beloved child.

If God is for us, who can ever be against us? God cares when people suffer in this life. The Bible makes this clear. King David was the second king of Israel. David was well acquainted with suffering. Before becoming king, he spent long periods of time on the run because the first king of Israel, Saul, was trying to kill him.

He rescues them from all their troubles. They frequently contain his pleas to God for deliverance from suffering. Psalm 13 is a great example of this:.

How long will You look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die. But I trust in Your unfailing love. I will rejoice because You have rescued me. I will sing to the Lord because He is good to me. We can also see how much God cares for our suffering in John Even though He was about to raise Lazarus back to life, He became very emotional when He saw their grief.

This simple statement, famous for being the shortest verse in the Bible, is profound. Jesus did not tell the people to stop crying. He did not say there was no need to mourn because He was about to raise Lazarus.

He paused and wept with them. God knows that one day He will eliminate all suffering. But rather than tell us to stop grieving because our suffering will end, He grieves with us for His suffering people and His broken world.

We see this in the description of the first time Jesus performs a miracle in John Jesus was at a wedding, and the host ran out of wine. This is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Instead, Jesus used His divine power to change ordinary water into excellent wine for the guests.

By doing this, Jesus saved the host from social embarrassment and shame. Though God will not always take away problems and hardships, we see from this miracle that He cares about the details of our lives.

Not only does God care and empathize with us in our suffering, but He can also bring good out of it. God is the master of redeeming bad situations. In times of deep, personal pain, those who have gone through a similar experience and can offer empathy in the moment and hope for the future are often the best source of comfort.

God knows exactly when to bring those people into your life and remind you whom you should reach out to. If you have experienced the pain of depression , struggled with infertility or battled addiction , you know that talking to someone who has been there helps you feel heard and not alone.

Even a stranger who has walked the path before you can offer something that a friend who is sympathetic but has no personal experience cannot. No matter how bad a situation is, God can still bring good out of it. We see this in the story of Joseph in Genesis Once there, Joseph suffered more misfortunes, including being imprisoned for a crime He did not commit. But God intervened, and Joseph was eventually elevated to a powerful position.

He ended up saving the whole region, including his family, from a terrible famine. After his brothers came to Egypt seeking food during the famine, Joseph revealed himself to them, and the family was reunited. God used something that seems purely evil — people selling their brother into slavery — to save countless lives. Only a God who is truly good could bring good out of something truly bad. However, just because God uses something for good, that does not mean that He caused the suffering.

Natural disasters, death, murder, depression, betrayal and injustice are not good. Because she strives for happiness throughout. Without suffering, her characters cannot develop. Without fellowship in suffering, they cannot truly bond.

The Bible begins and ends with happiness, but the meat of the story is raw. But we are not promised that God will not allow us to cry in the first place. What end could possibly be worth all this pain? Jesus says he is. In Jesus, Christians have the promise of a lover who will never leave them or forsake them, who sits with them in suffering to the bitter end—and beyond.

This is not a fellowship devoid of practical help. Christians were the first to found hospitals and—for all their moral failure—have done more in global terms to alleviate suffering than any other movement. We see this historically and we see it today.

It meant caring for people no one else cared for, touching people no one else would touch. Christians are not called to compassionate detachment. Christians truly following Jesus are deeply attached, and covered in tears—their own, and those of others—just like their Lord. Believing that Jesus is the resurrection and the life is not a one-time posture of the mind.

Rather, it is a daily battle of the heart. As with a kid riding a rollercoaster, all our senses scream otherwise. I look to the things I desire to fill me up.

And those things, those people, can feel so real compared with this impossible God who calls me to crucify my desires and throw myself into his arms. Her heart yearned for her brother.

His restoration felt like life to her. Sometimes I lose. At other times I cling on for dear life, not knowing the end of the story. But I must stake my life on this claim: that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Join us to receive the latest articles, podcasts, videos, and more, and help us show how science and faith work hand in hand. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings , 50th anniversary ed. Boston: Mariner, , — A look at four reasons that Darwin's approach to evolution does not complicate the Problem of Evil discussion.

If God is good, how can we account for the enormous amount of suffering caused by predation, disease, and natural disasters? Jim Stump is joined by Dr. Bethany Sollereder to wrestle with the problems of natural evil and the origin of death. They delve into the traditional answers to these questions, probing their strengths and deficiencies, and grapple with challenging Biblical passages on these issues. Humans appear very late in the history of life. The fossil record clearly shows that many creatures died before humans appeared.

Jim takes a look at natural evil, and what perspective it can give us when faced with it in our everyday lives, like during a pandemic. Suffering and Sin Recognizing the role of suffering in our relationship with Christ helps us see through a common misconception about suffering from a Christian perspective. Suffering and Love From a biblical perspective, we must also reject the idea that if God loves us, he cannot intend for us to suffer.

Suffering and Story. Genesis to Revelation This perspective on suffering helps us understand the grand sweep of the biblical narrative.

Suffering and Christian Ethics In Jesus, Christians have the promise of a lover who will never leave them or forsake them, who sits with them in suffering to the bitter end—and beyond. What is BioLogos? Subscribe Now What is BioLogos?