Article 1 of 14 | Honest Questions
By Dr. Timothy Mann
If God is good, why is there so much suffering? Suffering is not evidence that God is cruel; it is evidence that human freedom is real, and that a good world was broken by human choice, not by God's design. And God has not stood at a distance from that brokenness. He entered it Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ.
Honest Questions is a series built on one conviction: real questions deserve real answers, not rehearsed deflections or religious platitudes. It is honest engagement with the questions that keep people from the Christian faith, or that trouble people who are already in it. If you are skeptical, if you are doubting, if you have a question no one in church has ever answered to your satisfaction, this series is for you. Real questions are not a threat to real faith.
This first episode tackles what is probably the most common, the most personal, and in many ways the most difficult objection to the existence of a good God. It goes by several names in philosophy, the problem of evil, the problem of pain, but most people do not encounter it as a philosophical puzzle. They encounter it at a hospital bedside. At a graveside. In the aftermath of something that should never have happened. And it sounds like this: If God is good, why is there so much suffering?
If there is a God who is all-powerful and all-loving, why does He allow children to get cancer? Why does He allow genocide? Why does He allow the innocent to suffer and the guilty to prosper? Why does He sit silent while His world tears itself apart? Either He is not powerful enough to stop it, or He is not good enough to care. And either way, that is not the God the church claims to believe in.
That objection deserves to be taken seriously. It has driven people away from faith and kept people from finding it in the first place.
The anchor text for this question is Romans 8:18 and 28. Paul writes:
“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:18, 28, NKJV)
There is no answer to the problem of suffering that will make it stop hurting. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But there is an answer that is intellectually honest, that holds together under scrutiny, and that, if you let it, can carry you through the hardest seasons of your life. Here is the first half of that answer.
The World Was Not Made This Way
The first truth to establish is that the world was not made this way. Suffering, disease, death, violence, and grief are not features of the world God originally created. They are the consequences of something that went wrong, and that distinction matters enormously.
The Christian worldview does not say God made a world full of suffering and calls it good. It says God made a world that was genuinely, completely good, and that human beings, in an act of rebellion the Bible calls sin, broke it. Genesis 3 is the account of that breaking, and the consequences ripple through everything: through human relationships, through the natural world, through the human body, through history. The suffering we see is not the world as God designed it. It is the world as human beings have damaged it.
The immediate objection is obvious: but God knew this would happen. If He is all-knowing, He knew in advance that creating human beings with free will would result in this broken, suffering world. Why did He do it anyway?
That is a fair question, and the honest answer is that we do not have access to all of God’s reasoning. But here is what can be said: a world of genuine love requires freedom. Love that is coerced is not love. A relationship that is compelled is not a relationship. If God wanted human beings who genuinely loved Him and genuinely loved one another, not robots, not programmed responses, but real love freely given, then He had to create beings capable of choosing otherwise. And beings capable of choosing otherwise are beings capable of choosing catastrophically wrong. The freedom that makes love possible is the same freedom that makes suffering possible.
That does not make the suffering less painful, but it locates it accurately. The suffering in the world is not evidence that God is cruel. It is evidence that freedom is real, and that human choices carry consequences that extend far beyond the individual who makes them.
God Has Not Stood at a Distance
The second truth is that the Christian God is not a God who designed a suffering world and then retreated to a comfortable distance to watch it burn. He entered it.
This is the claim of the incarnation, a claim absolutely central to the Christian faith and absolutely unlike anything in any other religion. The Son of God, the second person of the eternal Trinity, became a human being. He was born in poverty. He grew up in an occupied territory under a foreign empire. He experienced hunger, exhaustion, grief, betrayal, abandonment, torture, and death, not as a performance, not as a simulation, but as a genuine human experience.
John 11 records the moment Jesus arrived at the tomb of His friend Lazarus. Lazarus was dead. The sisters who had sent for Jesus were grieving. And the text says something remarkable:
“Jesus wept.” (John 11:35, NKJV)
The Son of God, who knew He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, who held power over death itself in His hands, stood at the grave of His friend and wept. Not because He had lost hope, but because He was standing in the middle of a broken world and feeling the full weight of what sin had done to it.
The God of the Christian faith is not indifferent to suffering. He has suffered. He has wept. He has sat in the darkness that you have sat in. And He has done more than that: He has taken the full weight of the world’s suffering and sin upon Himself at the cross, absorbing in His own body the judgment that the brokenness of the world deserved. The cross is not God watching suffering from a distance. It is God entering suffering and transforming it from the inside.
If you want to know what God thinks of suffering, look at the cross. That is His answer, not an explanation but an entrance. He did not stand outside the problem and offer a theological solution. He walked into the middle of it and paid the price it cost.
APPLICATION & REFLECTION
Suffering is not proof that God is absent or unmoved. It is proof that a good world was broken by real freedom, and that God refused to stay at a safe distance from what that freedom cost. Where in your own life have you mistaken God's silence for God's indifference? What changes if the cross is His answer, not an explanation offered from a distance, but an entrance into the worst of it?
Next time: suffering is real, and it is not the end of the story. Part two looks at the promise still ahead, the one that makes grief honest without making it final.
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FAQ
Q: Why does God allow suffering if He is all-powerful?
A: Because genuine love requires genuine freedom, and freedom that can choose love can also choose to break things. The suffering we see is the cost of that freedom being real, not evidence that God stopped caring or lost control.
Q: Does the Bible say suffering is God's fault?
A: No. Genesis 3 traces suffering to human rebellion, not to God's original design. The world He made was good; the brokenness came from sin, and its effects ripple through relationships, bodies, and history.
Q: How is Jesus weeping at Lazarus's tomb relevant to my suffering?
A: It shows God is not distant from grief. Jesus, who had power to raise the dead, still wept at the grave of His friend. He enters suffering rather than explaining it from a distance, and the cross is the fullest expression of that.