Why Does God Allow Suffering?

The Bible says God is love.

Not simply that God loves people, or that love is one of the things he does. Love is God’s nature.

The Bible also describes God as having power without limit. Nothing in creation is stronger than him or beyond his ability to act.

That makes suffering a serious question. If God is love, and God has the power to intervene, why does he allow people to suffer? Why can one person destroy another person’s life? Why do children get sick? Why do earthquakes, disease and death exist at all?

I don’t think there is an answer that makes those things feel acceptable. But I do think the Bible gives us a coherent explanation for why suffering exists — and, more importantly, why suffering does not get the final word.

Some suffering will never feel okay

When I was a pastor in Sydney, our church worked closely with a local high school. One day the school rang to say their librarian was missing from home and had not arrived at work.

A few days later he was found. He had taken his own life while away camping in the bush.

It was a tragedy for him and his family, for our team whose office was in the library and knew him personally, and for the students, teachers and wider school community.

No explanation of suffering makes something like that feel okay. Even if I can explain why suffering exists, the explanation does not remove the grief or make the death acceptable.

And I don’t think it should.

But it raises another question: is tragedy all there is?

If there is no God and the universe is ultimately impersonal, suffering can still matter enormously to us. We can grieve, comfort each other, learn, change and try to prevent the same thing happening again.

But there is no larger promise that anything will finally be put right. No final justice. No resurrection. No guarantee that a life cut short has a future beyond death.

God gives us a very different hope. The person who suffers matters to him. What happened matters to him. Jesus entered human suffering, Jesus rose from the dead, and God promises that suffering and death will not have the final word.

Love requires freedom

The Bible says:

If love is God’s nature, then creating people capable of real love is consistent with who he is. But love cannot be forced. If another person has no possibility of saying no, their yes does not mean very much.

God created human beings for relationship with him and with each other. He did not create us as machines programmed to give him the response he wanted.

He gave us real freedom.

That freedom allows us to choose faithfulness, generosity, sacrifice, kindness and love.

But the same freedom means we can choose selfishness, betrayal, cruelty and violence.

Love can only be chosen if it can also be rejected.

Sin turns freedom against us

The Bible calls humanity’s rejection of God sin.

Sin includes the wrong things we do, but it goes deeper than individual mistakes. At its centre is our desire to decide for ourselves what is ultimately right and wrong — to live in God’s world while claiming the final say over how we live in it.

That has consequences. People lie, betray, exploit, abuse power and become violent. Nations go to war. Sometimes the reason someone suffers is painfully straightforward: another person chose to hurt them.

God did not make that person do it. Human beings are capable of doing terrible things with the freedom we have been given.

Suffering caused by people is what happens when real freedom and our capacity for sin come together.

But people don’t cause cancer or earthquakes

Free will explains a great deal of human cruelty. It does not immediately explain disease, disability, natural disasters or death.

The Bible says the effects of sin reach further than individual behaviour. God created the world good, but humanity’s separation from God brought death, disorder and brokenness into creation itself.

Paul describes creation as “groaning” and waiting to be set free from decay in Romans 8.

The world we experience now is not creation functioning exactly as God designed it to function. It is a good creation that has been broken.

Bodies become sick. Cells mutate. Natural systems that sustain life can also become destructive. We age and die.

This is not because one particular person sinned enough to deserve what happened to them. Jesus rejected that assumption when his disciples tried to explain a man’s blindness by asking whose sin had caused it.

Some suffering is caused by broken people. Some comes from living in a broken creation.

Neither means every terrible event is an act of God.

So why doesn’t God stop it?

God has the power to intervene. The Bible records moments when he does, and I believe God still heals, protects and intervenes today.

But plainly, he does not prevent every terrible thing.

I don’t know why God stops one event and allows another to continue. I don’t know why one person survives and another dies. The Bible does not give us enough information to explain every individual case.

What it does give us is the larger picture: God allows genuine human freedom; humanity has rejected him; sin has entered the world; and we now live as broken people within a broken creation.

That is not the same as saying God wanted the suffering itself.

God entered our suffering

God has not watched this world from somewhere safely removed from it.

In Jesus, God entered human life. Jesus knew rejection, betrayal, grief, injustice, physical pain and death. At the cross, God entered the worst of what human beings can do to each other.

That does not tell me why every individual tragedy happens. But it tells me God is not indifferent to suffering. He has not asked us to endure something he was unwilling to enter himself.

God redeems suffering without calling it good

Suffering changes us. Sometimes it makes us frightened, angry or guarded. Sometimes it produces compassion, courage and perseverance. Often it does both.

Paul writes that suffering can produce perseverance, character and hope in Romans 5. That does not mean God sends suffering because we need a lesson. It means suffering does not get to decide by itself what we become.

God can bring good out of something that was not good. Loss can deepen compassion. Pain can make us more aware of another person’s pain. What wounded us can become part of how we help somebody else.

Sometimes we see that redemption in this life.

Sometimes we don’t.

And that is why hope has to be bigger than personal growth.

God will also bring justice

Some suffering will never be properly resolved in this lifetime. People die without seeing justice. Some things cannot be repaired here. Some losses cannot be replaced.

But this life is not all there is.

Jesus died, and Jesus rose from the dead.

His resurrection is the beginning of God restoring what sin and death have broken. Death did not defeat Jesus, and it will not have the final word over us.

The Bible ends with God promising a restored creation:

The hope God offers is not that we eventually become very good at coping with a broken world.

It is that he will put the world right.

God has entered our suffering in this life. He can redeem what suffering does to us without pretending the suffering was good. And where justice or restoration does not come here, he promises it will still come.

God has acted. God is acting. God will act.

Suffering is real.

But it is not permanent.

And it does not get the final word.