I was once asked to field a range of questions from students at a Christian high school. They were doing research assignment for their religious education class. One of them asked about why God doesn’t stop evil and suffering from happening. Here is what the student asked, followed by what I answered.

---

“If God is so powerful, why doesn’t he stop bad things from happening?”

Sub Questions:

1. Does God even want to stop bad things from happening?
2. Can God know if bad things are happening?
3. How can you recognise God’s power – when He does do things? How do you know its him?
4. Can he stop bad things from happening?
5. Does God have control over all things?
6. What powers does God have?

---

Hello [———]. You have asked one of the trickiest questions that could be asked in theology! What makes it more complicated is that it’s often a very personal question that people ask in relation to their own suffering.

Since I heard from your teacher that you are meant to be exploring a biblical worldview on your questions, I will give some brief remarks to your questions and then fuller answers in response to what the Bible has to say about the topic of suffering.

As it happens, the Bible doesn’t say a lot about WHY God permits suffering, but more about HOW to live while suffering. This is important because if we are going to listen to what God says through his word, we must be prepared to pay attention to the things that he considers important and what he has chosen to tell us about any given topic.

What God hasn’t Told Us

Answering questions that the Bible doesn’t seek to answer isn’t wrong, but it is harder to find clear answers for them.

An important text on this is Deuteronomy 29:29, where Moses says: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” This tells us several things:

1. There are some things God hasn’t told us. This includes the reasons why a lot of people’s suffering happens.
2. But there are other things that God has chosen to tell us. These things are what we should be prepared to listen to, rather than focusing on what he isn’t going to tell us.
3. These “revealed things” should be passed on to the next generation, and practiced. What God reveals is meant to be practical, in contrast to the speculative theorizing that people wanting to understand the “secret things” can be prone to do! It’s not wrong to think hard about these things (that’s part of doing theology!), but it should not be at the expense of passing on and practicing what God has actually chosen to tell us.

Anyway – back to your question on Why does God allow suffering.

Potential Reasons for Ongoing Suffering and Evil

As far as the straightforward answer to the initial question goes it could be said that God permits or even causes bad things to happen because it serves some purpose that is more important than our comfort.

Some Christian thinkers will argue that God values human responsibility and that humanity must bear the consequences of the Fall (due to human sin) which we read about in Genesis 3. Others can point out that God often allows or causes hard things to happen because he has some specific outcome that he wants to see happen through the hard suffering.

These reasons might not be satisfying for people who have suffered terrible things. But the biblical authors do not tend to dwell on the reasons for why bad things have happened. Instead, they focus on how to respond and live through them.

There are different kinds of suffering – these are worth considering separately.

• Some is due to humans doing bad things to each other.
• Other times it is due to our own mistakes or bad choices.
• Sometimes it is due to “random” events or natural disasters.
• Sometimes it could be due to God punishing people, but that is something that I would be very careful to consider unless there is very good reason to expect in a particular case (people have done awful things to each other on the basis of that idea, when they do not really know).

A lot of the time it must be remembered that suffering is to be expected as part of our existence of living in a “fallen” world (cf. again Genesis 3) – remember, what is “normal” to us is not necessarily “natural” in the sense of how God initially made things to be (I think here of disease, birth defects, weather disasters, societal brokenness, etc.). Much has changed between Genesis 1–2 and Genesis 4 and beyond up to today!

People thinking about Christian faith tend to forget that human existence is colored by the fact that what we experience today is not as God made it in the beginning.

Regardless of the origin of any given instance of evil, it is true that God could intervene and stop things, but often does not (although we may not notice what he does prevent!). Some Christians hold that God causes bad things to happen (through the willing choices of people) for his purposes. Others (understandably) find that hard to stomach and prefer to believe that God simply makes use of bad things and chooses to allow them to happen – which is perhaps no better than the first option. This issue is embedded in the larger topic called “Providence”, which discusses how God is in control of all things and the related questions coming out of that – one of the trickier topics of systematic theology. More can be read about Providence in systematic theology textbooks, and they usually would deal with the topic of suffering.

A Neglected Question on Suffering

What is worth asking is why some people suffer terrible things and still remain faithful to God even though they know he could have made life easier for them.

There is a collection of three books within the Bible known as “wisdom literature.” Together these address the topic of evil and suffering.

• Proverbs tells us that if we live a good life and make wise choices, life will work out well for us. On the whole this tends to be true, but not true enough for real life—we know that bad things happen to good people even though God appears to have promised otherwise.
• The book of Job (rhymes with “robe”) wrestles with this through the story of a very good and godly man who lost everything and then argued with his friends about it before God came and said his piece to them all but didn’t really answer Job’s question, but instead gave a perspective on the problem that they should adopt.
• The third book, called “Ecclesiastes”, gives a more cynical view on the value of doing good but ends up concluding it is the best way to live.
• A fourth “wisdom literature” that could be included is Psalm 73. This wrestles with the same problem – the author wonders why it’s worth doing the right thing when bad people have it so good, and works through this throughout this poem.

A helpful online resource is The Bible Project. I would watch their short animated videos on Proverbs,  Ecclesiastes, and Job (click these for the website links), which explore how these books look at the problem of suffering. The Bible Project makes great short videos that helpfully explain things in a simple way without sacrificing too much important depth.

Some other key biblical texts:

• Genesis 50:20. Jacob’s brothers did something bad with a bad intention, but God made it happen for his good intentions. This shows God at work in people’s choices (which are both free and bad) for his own purposes. It is an interesting text – does it tell us that God is always at work in people’s bad choices? Or only sometimes?
• Romans 8:18–25. This is a rather dense passage that talks about how Christians should think about the hardships they experience. It mentions the fact that all of creation has been subjected to futility (a form of suffering), and that it waits for a time when things will be made right. God’s people should likewise look forward to that time, and have confidence that it is coming because Jesus’ suffering and subsequent glory in the resurrection functions as a promise that God will fix everything and give his people a place in that.
• Luke 13:1–5 tells of an episode where Jesus responds to some disasters—both natural and man-made. People wondered if God was punishing the people who had died. Jesus points out that these people were no worse sinners than anyone else (and so we should not presume that God was punishing them). But Jesus also gives a warning that his hearers should nonetheless repent of anything wrong they have done otherwise they will ultimately “perish” as well.
• John 9 tells the story of a man who had been born blind. There was a common idea that people who suffered misfortunes had sinned. Jesus says that this is not the case, but that (in this case at least) it had happened for the purpose of God’s awesomeness being shown through the healing of his blindness.

There are numerous other passages that could be looked at, but these are a few highlights that come to mind.

A few further resources you could look at:

1. There is a chapter on God and Suffering from a book by Timothy Keller called The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. The book was a bestseller and looks at a variety of topics that arguably make it hard to believe in God. [this chapter was scanned and sent as an attachment to the student]

• An older book but still very popular is The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis. It is written for non-academic audiences, first written in 1940. It’s a shortish book at 148 pages—not something you would read in an hour, but not too long if you were committed to it. You can read it online here, or simply read about it here.

• There is a very short chapter on “Providence” by a well-regarded Anglican theologian called J. I. Packer called Concise Theology. Might be helpful for you to read, and look up some more biblical texts. [this chapter was scanned and sent as an attachment to the student]

• There is a longer but not too long book called How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil, by Don Carson. It’s a good 200 pages but not too hard (as far as theology books go) on the biblical and pastoral issues for this topic. It’s a useful book – if you could get hold of a copy it would have plenty of helpful discussion.

Wrapping Up

So – that is plenty of material, but it may not have answered your question in the way you might have liked. As I said, some things God has not revealed, and so all we will know will be by stitching together hints from around the Bible and thinking hard about what we pull together there, which is what you can find in good systematic theology textbooks. If you want to dig deeper, I could find some reading for you.

“Take Another Look” is a West Auckland-based ministry that aims to commend Jesus to people’s hearts and minds, and promote the way of life that the good news of Jesus invites us into. If you would like to discover the widely-held beliefs and practices and aspirations for good-character among Christians, please visit and explore www.TakeAnotherLook.nz. Or, if you have questions you would like discussed, please get in touch through the contact page.

Explore