Why Does God Allow So Much Pain and Suffering in the World?
The short answer is that God gave us the freedom to make our own moral choices so that, for one thing, we have the ability to love. But this freedom is misused all the time, causing so much harm upon each other. Nevertheless, God doesn’t interfere, because our freedom is that important to him.
Pain and Suffering Are Real
The reality of pain and suffering all throughout the world is a terrible, terrible thing. If we look carefully enough, we see heartbreak, hurt, and destruction everywhere around us. Everyone is affected eventually. Some, sadly, at younger ages than others.
When crushed by heartbreak and loss we look to God and ask, “Why?” So often the answer seems to be silence. Then, the pain and sense of betrayal deep inside the heart becomes one of the biggest barriers toward belief in God today.
If God is good, then how can he allow so much pain and suffering in the world? Either he is not good, or he doesn’t have the power to stop it. Either way the Christian God doesn’t exist and we might as well walk away. This line of argument is known as the logical problem of evil.
Yet as difficult as it may seem, Christianity has an answer.
A Good But Powerful Gift
The Bible is abundantly clear that God loves us. And all he ever really wanted was for us to love him in return… and each other.
But God won’t force anybody to love him. If you think about it, love by its very nature must be a choice. A forced love is no love at all. So when God created us he gave us a very good but powerful gift: the freedom to choose. He gave us moral freedom.
Unfortunately, many people use this freedom to terribly hurt and harm other people, and even themselves. Unspeakable damage is done by those who would wreak havoc in the lives of other people.
God knew this could happen. He actually knew it would happen. But it was a risk he was willing to take because our freedom was that important to him.
British scholar C.S. Lewis described it this way:
God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can’t. If a thing is free to be good it’s also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.[1]
Moral Evil
So a lot of the pain and suffering we endure is due to the misuse of our own moral freedom. This is called Moral Evil. God does not create evil, but he created the potential for evil when he gave us free will.
We are the cause of the evil that we do to each other, and ourselves. Honestly, we can’t blame God for this. Our freedom was originally a good gift from him.
My heart breaks knowing that many people have turned away from God because of the pain they’ve experienced from other people. Tragically, and incredibly to me, we hear too many stories of so called Christians and even Christian leaders being responsible for so much destruction in peoples’ lives.
I want to say that if you feel you’ve been hurt by God in this way, please don’t let the horrible things that someone else has done in your past keep you from knowing God. God is good, and perfectly just. Those who have hurt you will one day have to answer to God for what they’ve done.
And God can bring healing. If you turn toward him with all your heart, you will find him (Deut. 4:29). That’s a promise for you.
Conclusion
There is so much more to say on why God allows evil. In follow-on posts we’ll discuss seven more common questions that many people ask. For example: what about natural disasters and diseases that don’t seem to be anybody’s fault?
This is called Natural Evil, and we’ll discuss that in our next post.
[1]C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, as included in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics(New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2002), 47-48.
This is outstanding Greg. I’m certainly looking forward to your next post.
Elaine