Whatever the Lord pleases, that has He done in the heavens and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.
Psalm 135:6 (AMPC)
One might say, “I don’t believe God causes suffering and tragedy. I don’t believe He is the author of it, but does He allow it? If He does allow it, what is the purpose, and what is the difference between Him allowing it and Him doing it? How can I trust a God who might allow me to suffer evil and tragedy?” I know these questions exist, because people have asked me to answer them.
I have also heard someone say, “It is not science that has caused me not to believe in the existence of a supreme being, it is all the suffering and evil in the world.” This man could not reconcile the evil he saw with the existence of a God who is said to be good. For some of us, faith transcends all of these questions, but many other people require an answer in order to believe.
It was the pain I experienced from an evil father that drove me to faith in God. The pain and suffering was more than I could live with, and I found peace, hope, and healing through my relationship with God. The benefits I have received from knowing and believing in God have far outweighed the questions I’ve had, and now I’m able to set them aside until the day comes when I either receive answers from God or I am with Him in Heaven where the answer to every question will become clear.
However, I understand the questions people ask, and I don’t think it is wrong to ask them. God is not offended by our questions, but He doesn’t always see fit to answer them. No matter how many questions are answered for us, there will always be others that require us to decide whether or not we’ll trust God even when life doesn’t seem to make any sense.
I will do my best to try and answer the question of whether or not God “allows” suffering, but I want to state ahead of time that my answers will be imperfect, especially for the person who is looking for an excuse not to believe in God. They will also be unsatisfactory to the person who feels they must be able to mentally understand all things. Our search for knowledge is good, but it can also be our undoing if it is carried too far. A lifetime Scripture for me is found in Proverbs:
Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind and do not rely on your own insight or understanding.
In all your ways know, recognize, and acknowledge Him, and He will direct and make straight and plain your paths.
Be not wise in your own eyes…
Proverbs 3:5–7 (AMPC)
Peace is never found in relying on our own understanding. Why did this or that happen, and why did it happen to me? is the first deceptive thought our enemy, Satan, whispers to us in his efforts to draw us away from relationship with God. We can go all the way back to the Garden of Eden and read how he whispered questions to Eve that eventually led Adam and her into sin that changed the course of God’s desired plan for man. Satan said to her, “Can it really be that God has said, ‘You shall not eat from every tree of the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1 [AMPC]). The question opened the way for another question that Satan did not even need to ask—If all the fruit of the trees in the garden is good, why would God want to withhold any of it from me? Eve then began to reason, and her reasoning led to deception that altered the course of her life.
God created a world that was perfect and without suffering and tragedy. He wanted Adam and Eve to function with authority and subdue the earth, using all of its vast resources in the service of God and man (see Genesis 1:28). It was not God who invited suffering into the world; it was the man and woman He created. As soon as they listened to Satan instead of God and ate the fruit God had told them not to eat, their suffering began. With one decision, they went from freely living in and enjoying the love and fellowship of God to hiding from Him in fear (see Genesis 3:8).
God is sovereign, and of course He can do anything, anytime, anywhere, and to anyone He chooses. We pray, and those prayers are dependent on the sovereignty of God. We depend on the promise that with God, all things are possible (see Matthew 19:26). However, God made a choice to give man free will, and that changes the dynamics of whether or not we will suffer evil. Will we obey God, or will we go our own way?
God loves us and wants us to love Him, but love is not true love if it is forced. It must be freely given to have any meaning. We always give freedom to those we truly love. I heard it put like this: Love demands free choice, and where there is free will, there will always be evil, but where there is evil, there can be a Savior, and where there is a Savior, there can be redemption, and where there is redemption, there can be restoration.
God gave man free choice with the foreknowledge that he would choose poorly and that his choice would open the door for pain and suffering, but God did not leave us without an option and without help. From this viewpoint, God allowed suffering to enter the world, but even that was better than creating a man who was a puppet with no choice as to whether or not he would love or how he would behave.
God never has a problem in which there is no answer! Knowing what would happen, He planned from the very beginning of time to send His only Son, Jesus, to pay for sin and open a way for God to have relationship with His children once again. God has not provided an escape from suffering, because sin is still present in the world and as long as there is sin, there will be suffering. But through Jesus, God has provided forgiveness for sin, comfort, grace, strength, and all the help we need to bear with suffering patiently when we must do so. He has gone even further and said that if we trust in Him, He will cause even our greatest suffering to work for our good:
We are assured and know that [God being a partner in their labor] all things work together and are [fitting into a plan] for good to and for those who love God and are called according to [His] design and purpose.
Romans 8:28
A thing doesn’t have to be good in order for good to be worked from it. This, in itself, is proof that God is good and that His goodness can swallow up all the ill effects of injustice and personal suffering. If for no other reason than this, we should make the choice to trust God. With or without faith in God, we will experience suffering in this life. Jesus told us that in the world we will have tribulation, but He followed that fact with this amazing promise: He has overcome the world (see John 16:33). Sin caused suffering, and Jesus is the answer to it! God has not left us helpless!
If we will suffer without God, then why not suffer with Him, trusting Him to either deliver us from it at the right time or to work good out of it? To me, it only makes sense to trust God. Trusting God opens the possibility of our receiving help, whereas not trusting or believing in God dooms us to suffering without the hope of deliverance or healing.
God works all things together for good to those who love Him, trust Him, and want His will! We are born with free choice, and when we suffer, we also have the choice to trust God or not to trust Him.
If there were no sin, there would be no suffering. All suffering and evil is the result of sin. It may be a direct result of our own sin or someone else’s, or an indirect result of living in a fallen world. Satan is the author of sin. He is the tempter and the deceiver, so we can rightly say that Satan is the source of our problems, but we must also take some responsibility by realizing that whom we listen to and follow still comes down to our free will. Will we believe in and obediently listen to God’s instructions for our lives, or will we let sensuality rule us through the lies of Satan? Satan offers us temporary pleasure that appeals to our emotions, just as he did with Eve, but God offers us a life that goes far beyond a bit of temporary pleasure. He offers us right relationship with Him, peace, joy, and a meaningful life through participation and fellowship with Him.
Let me caution you not to try too hard to link up your suffering with some personal sin. Many a sick person has increased their misery by falling prey to guilt over what they may have done wrong to open the door for their sickness. Although we may open the door for sickness through personal sin, it is also quite possible that we did nothing wrong to cause the problem and that it is simply the result of living in a sinful world where sickness and disease are some of the resulting effects. Don’t persecute yourself with guilt when you are already suffering from some other tragic or painful event. Even when God chooses to show us that we have done something wrong, He doesn’t make us feel guilty in the process. God convicts us; He offers an opportunity for us to repent and receive His forgiveness. God does not condemn us; that is the work of the devil.
Even more than wanting to know why people suffer and why the world is filled with evil, people want to know what their purpose is in life. They want to feel that they have value. The problem with man is not suffering, but such excessive pleasure that it no longer satisfies him in any way. A country like India, for example, is filled with every kind of suffering, and it is very religious. Even though it is filled with false religions, its people seek for God. They believe in worshipping something other than themselves. But the Western world, which was birthed out of a great faith in God, has enjoyed every kind of pleasure, and yet it seems to be moving farther and farther away from Him. In essence, the Western world has told God that He is no longer welcome. As nations, we are turning to humanism, which is man in control without God. And the more sin abounds, the more suffering and evil will abound. But no matter how much a nation turns away from God, any individual who will turn to Him, trusting Him in all things, will experience the beauty of receiving God’s help in their difficulties. That person will also experience deliverance and a great deal of protection from evil, but Scripture never makes the promise that we can avoid it altogether. We are in the world and the world is filled with sin; therefore, we cannot avoid all of its effects.
Suffering can be divided into two categories. The first is suffering that results from moral decisions, and the second is natural suffering, which includes natural disasters like floods, fires, storms, and the like. Are these disasters from God or allowed by God? Some theologians think they are, and others think they are not. Rather than enter into a theological debate over that, I prefer to see disasters as the earth groaning under the weight of sin.
There are always good and innocent people who are devastated by loss and suffer as a result of natural disasters. I prefer to try and help those people, rather than debate why the disasters happened in the first place. There are people who believe in and trust God, and yet they are affected adversely by natural disasters just as evil people are, and these are things that we cannot explain—at least I can’t. But those who trust God can have the hope of help and restoration. Mercy and kindness always triumph over judgment.
It seems that God helps me sometimes and at other times He doesn’t. Although it may seem that way to me, it is not the case. When God doesn’t give me the help I want, the way I want it, knowing God’s character helps me to trust that He always helps me in the way that’s best for me when I ask Him to. We are often so intent on getting what we want that we may feel that if God is not giving it to us, then He is not helping us at all. Too much preoccupation with self-will may cause us not to see what God is doing to help us.
Then we have the issue of timing. Sometimes we pray and God helps and delivers us right away, but at other times His help comes on a timetable we do not understand. If I am going through something that causes me to suffer, and God is going to deliver me, then why wait for months or even years before doing so? He always has His reasons, but He rarely shares them with us. He uses our suffering at times to work something in us that we would not allow Him to do during our good times.
C. S. Lewis said, “Pain insists on being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”8
When we do hear from God, it is not necessarily the first time He has spoken to us. I have found that sometimes my own thoughts on a matter prevented me from receiving the thoughts of God, which were quite different from mine. I mentioned earlier that God’s answer to my dry eyes was for me to drink more water, but since I already thought I drank a lot of water, I wasn’t receiving His answer. I look back now and realize that He used several people to say, “Perhaps you need to drink more water,” but I was quick to answer, “I already drink a lot of water; that is not the answer!”
There is a man in 2 Kings chapter 5 named Naaman. He was commander of the Syrian army, a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper. A message came to him through a maid that the prophet Elisha could heal him, so they took Naaman to Elisha with a letter from the king of Syria asking him to help the commander. When Naaman arrived, Elisha did not personally talk with him but sent a message to him that he should go and wash in the Jordan River seven times and he would be healed. Naaman became angry and left because he “thought” the man of God would come out to him and, with great ceremony, heal him. It seems that because he was a great commander, he was accustomed to being treated royally, but that was not to be the case this time.
The Bible says that Naaman went away in a rage, stating that if he had wanted to wash in a river, he had no need to travel that far to do so because there were better rivers where he lived. But one of his servants said to him, “My father, if the prophet had bid you to do some great thing, would you not have done it?” (2 Kings 5:13 [AMPC]). God used this lowly servant to challenge Naaman’s pride, which was the very thing preventing him from receiving the healing he desperately needed. How often do we “think” something should be a certain way and when God offers us another way (His way) we dismiss it because we don’t understand it or may even be offended by it?
God’s Word says, “…Let every man be quick to hear [a ready listener], slow to speak, slow to take offense and to get angry” (James 1:19 [AMPC]). I think we might receive some of the answers we need if we will listen a little better than we usually do. At least I know that is the case for me.
I frustrated myself a great deal as a younger and more immature Christian because I always wanted to know the “why” behind everything I didn’t like or understand. God, why is it taking so long for my ministry to grow? Lord, I’m praying, so why aren’t You changing Dave and my children? The answer is obvious to me now: He wasn’t changing my ministry or my family because I was the one who needed to change; I just wasn’t mature enough to realize it at the time. These experiences taught me that God sometimes waits to answer because we are asking the wrong question, and sometimes we are not ready to receive what we are asking for. The bottom line is, no matter what the question may be, the answer is always the same: Trust God!