Why Does a Good God Allow Evil and Suffering?
We will now transition from talking about Gen Z’s key doctrinal discomforts with the Christian faith to the more broad topic of their overall doubt. This doubt may occur not from an unpalatable doctrine as much as it occurs from something that, in their eyes, does not quite add up when attempting to square Christianity with the actual reality in which they have spent their whole life living. Maybe God hasn’t seemed present in their day-to-day grind. Maybe they have had desperate prayers appear to go unanswered. Maybe the claims of scripture contradict what they have been taught in the school system, or the values of scripture clash with the ones espoused by popular culture.
Chief among these doubts, I believe, is the question of why we live in such a dysfunctional, painful mess of a world if there exists an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing God. This question is not uniquely asked by Gen Z, as every generation in history has lived in this same volatile world as us–but while it is not uniquely asked by Gen Z, it is at the very least profoundly asked. Gen Z has grown up in a divided, angry, and violent world largely characterized by human evil and the subsequent human suffering that comes with that.
We were born at the turn of the millennia. And while none of the horrors I am about to describe suddenly sprang into existence at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they were, in fact, intensified. Shortly before the year 2000, two despicably evil gunmen, filled with nihilistic resentment towards humanity and perhaps at the fact of their own existence, entered Columbine High School heavily armed and murdered thirteen innocent people before killing themselves. There had been incidents like this before, but one might look to this as the root of a horrific spike of school shootings that occurred in the 2000s and 2010s: since then, equally heinous massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Santa Fe High School, Robb Elementary School, and too many more to list have taken place.
The new millennium was not far along in its lifespan before the deadliest terror attack in American history happened on September 11, 2001, with 2,977 victims losing their lives that day. The United States was forever changed by this unbelievable act of wickedness.
Then there are natural disasters and disease, which seem to have ramped up from the 2000s onward. In 2010, there was a devastating earthquake in Haiti, claiming around three hundred thousand lives. Five years earlier, Category-Five Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast of the United States; nearly two thousand people died. More recently, in March of 2020, the COVID-19 virus inflicted itself upon the globe, shutting down the economy, keeping kids out of schools, contributing to a rising sense of loneliness and depression, and killing millions upon millions of people.
There is mass political unrest, social division, and vitriolic hate spewed between both sides of American politics (I am sure the same goes for other countries). Race relations appear to be in a fragile state. There is great anxiety about the climate. Need I go on?
It is easy for my generation to look at the state of the world, and the injustice and unfairness of it all, and come to a few negative conclusions about God. The presence of all this suffering and evil means one of three things. (1) God does not exist, or else He would intervene; (2) if God does exist and is not intervening, then He must not be a good God; or (3) if God exists, He is good, and He is not intervening, then He must be powerless to stop these catastrophes.
Each of these conclusions are compelling reasons for Gen Z to terminally deconstruct. The only options they leave on the table are that God is as real as Santa Claus, God is a malevolent and/or careless Being, or God is too weak to control His creation.
I want to present the alternative view: God does exist, He is completely good, and He is all-powerful. Moreover, one day, He will decisively defeat evil and permanently put an end to suffering, pain, and misery. The existence of these current-day atrocities do not negate His goodness, nor are they cause for terminal deconstruction.
So let’s set out to answer this question together, then: why does God allow evil and suffering?
Why Evil?
We will begin by discussing evil because it is more integral to our central question than suffering is, insofar as it is the source of the dilemma this question is attempting to solve. Essentially, I am saying that where evil is, suffering will ensue. Evil is horrible on its own, but it is also the cause of suffering.
Equally important to this conversation is the knowledge that evil is not God’s fault, despite this being the conviction of many who ask our question. He does not set it into motion. He does not force people to perform atrocious acts. He is not to blame for its existence or even partially to blame. This is an important distinction to make because one almost gets the impression, if they discuss this topic with skeptics often enough, that when push comes to shove they somehow view God as responsible for evil or perhaps they even view Him as its ultimate source. God is in no way responsible for evil. That comes from Satan and that comes from us.
“But evil does come from God,” one might protest. “He created mankind, which performs acts of evil on a routine basis. And since He created creatures who have the capacity to act wickedly, then evil can be traced back to Him. If He did not cause it directly, He at the very least has authorized it or been passively complicit in its spread.”
To this, I would ask if the protestor has a proposed alternative. Would they rather God had created nobody at all? Would they rather that He, in His divine foreknowledge, gazed upon the evil that humanity would produce throughout the world’s history and decided it would be best not to bother with making us? Do the world’s negative aspects justify the eradication of its existence entirely?
Think about applying such a view to your own life: I will take a shot in the dark and assume your life consists of both good and bad elements: a loving romantic relationship, family conflicts, the hobby you enjoy, traffic on the way to work, the lovely scent of the cinnamon latte you order each morning before your commute, a demanding boss, your tiring but rewarding fitness regime, the health problem that is a constant thorn in your side, and every good and bad thing in between. The presence of these less-than-enjoyable elements in your life do not justify wiping it from existence. Would you rather that you had never been born to experience anything, so long as you were guaranteed to encounter some suffering? Of course not. There is still beauty and value to life despite its negative elements–which is why it’s better that God created humans who are capable of evil rather than creating no humans.
At this point, the skeptic may then say that God, since He is supposedly all-powerful and all-loving, could have created a world that retained the good without any of the evil. Well, He did do this. He called the world good after He initially made it. There was no wickedness or suffering in sight–and then we made a mess of things with our sin. The protestor would say that God should not have allowed us to sin; perhaps He should have created us without the ability to do so. All right then. Take this train of thought to its logical conclusion. For God to create us without the capacity to sin would require Him creating us without the capacity to rebel against Him. Remember what sin/evil is–it is rebelling against God’s perfect law, refusing to adhere to the objective standard of virtue set by God’s character.
If God created us without the option to make these choices, we would have no free will. No ability to choose to love or despise Him. The only available pathway would be the one leading to a life of loving and honoring Him. Consequently, this would cheapen our relationship with Him, which is our most important source of purpose and meaning, making us much closer to robots with no choice but to obey Him than to a created people who willingly enters into an intimate and life-changing relationship with Him. Without our free will, something crucial to our dignity, value, and humanity is forever lost.
I once debated with someone who, when I told him these things, stated “well, couldn’t God have just made it so that we still have a chance to freely choose or reject Him, but we just short-circuit and freeze whenever we have an impulse to do something truly heinous, like rape or murder?” This is incoherent. If God were to let us do as we please except when we are about to commit the worst kinds of evil, then we would still be forced to enter into relationship with Him. There is no sin greater in its wickedness than rejecting Jesus Christ, so in this hypothetical world that prevents us from carrying out the worst moral atrocities, we would be physically and mentally unable to reject God.
I will end this matter on a positive note, so allow me to (hopefully) encourage you. If you find yourself dismayed about the overwhelming presence of evil in today’s world, know that a day of reckoning is coming. God is a just judge, and He will not allow injustice to go unpunished. There will come a day when the “chickens come home to roost” and He gives evil the retribution it deserves.
Ecclesiastes 12:14
For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
Why Suffering?
I mentioned in the last section that suffering always occurs as a result of sin, so as long as sin is around, there suffering will be also. When taking a moment to ponder on why this is the case, the reasons become fairly straightforward.
Firstly, a large portion of human suffering stems from a direct act of wickedness–in other words, one individual wronging another individual. This is where we get violence, rape, emotional abuse, some forms of poverty (if a government or ruler is refusing to take care of the citizens whose care with which they have been entrusted), and the like. We have already discussed the rationale for evil’s existence, and we know that God will one day avenge these injustices in full, so I will say no more on this subset of suffering.
The other subset of suffering derives from what I call the physical breakdown of creation, which is what this section intends to address. The physical breakdown of creation refers to humanitarian tragedies that occur because the physical world we live in is marred by sin. This refers to natural disasters, mental problems, viruses, plagues, pestilences, physical ailments, death, etc. It’s perfectly understandable to ask why God “allows” this kind of suffering–it is, I think, a question that any believer must wrestle with at some point in their faith.
Answering this question requires looking to scripture. We will return once more to the Garden of Eden and read of the events that transpired shortly after Adam and Eve listened to the serpent and sinned. God approaches them in the garden, and this is what He has to say:
Genesis 3:14-19
So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life. 15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman he said, “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. 18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. 19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
Before sin, there was no death. There was no pain or suffering. No hurricanes, earthquakes, or other natural disasters. Even thorns and thistles had yet to spring from the ground and terrify rose-garden enthusiasts! Upon reading that passage, it may seem that it is indeed God’s fault these horrible things entered creation. He’s the one bringing them into existence in response to what Adam and Eve did, is He not? In response, I say we need to be far more precise with our words here. Reading what happens next shines some needed light on this issue:
Genesis 3:23-24
So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
It is no inconsequential detail that Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden after they sinned. Their departure from paradise demonstrates how sin separates us from God. Eden was the place in which they physically dwelled with their Creator. In forcing them to leave, God shows us the relational wedge sin places between Himself and mankind. He is so perfect and so holy that sin cannot even be in His presence–for such a thing to happen would be an abomination beyond words. It is hard for us to fully grasp this, and I suppose it is a mystery, the fullness of which we will never unlock on this side of eternity.
In humanity’s sin, the closeness between mankind and God has been fractured. To some degree, He had to withdraw His presence from the world. And when the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe withdraws from the creation He is keeping together–the creation made perfect because of His Truth and Beauty–then at least some degradation and breakdown will occur within that creation, by merit of losing the Perfection with which it once enjoyed a direct and physical connection. A simple, albeit flawed, illustration from life to help understand this is the example of the mother who lovingly cares for her child’s every need; take her out of the picture for a work trip, make her available to the child only by phone, and leave the child in the care of a less-than-capable sitter who pales in comparison to the tender care of mom, and suddenly you have an emotionally distressed, dirty, smelly, and underfed child who desperately misses his mother.
This world of death, disease, and destruction is the natural consequence of having a weakened connection with a good God and a heightened presence of sin. Sin, in its corrosive nature, necessitates death. That is why the two are so frequently mentioned together in the Bible. There is some sort of metaphysical link between the two. In its essence, down to its rotted core, sin is death because it is the unalignment of the individual from God, Who is the source of life and abundant living. If you step away from the pathway to life, the only thing waiting for you off the road is death. In this same way, if a world, en masse, distances itself through its sin from the Being Who sustains it–from the Being Who holds it together–then this world will begin to fall apart.
In the Mess, There Is a Mission
Even amidst this talk of chaos and destruction, there is cause for hope. Everlasting hope. Here is a key detail from Genesis 3. This takes place after God tells Adam and Eve what will happen to creation.
Genesis 3:21
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
After they sinned, Adam and Eve realized their nakedness, and they hid so it could not be seen. Knowing this, God takes some animal skins, fashions them into clothing, and gives the clothing to Adam and Eve so their nakedness may be covered up.
At first glance, this might seem to be a throwaway detail that is unimportant to the larger story. Not so. In my mind, this is one of the most important things that happens in Genesis 3. Think about what is really occurring here. After they disobey God, Adam and Eve discover they are completely exposed, and they are filled with great shame over their indecency. God then slays an animal and covers their shame with its skins.
This is what is called a “type” of Christ, which is an event that happens in the Old Testament that points to the Person of Jesus Christ, along with what He would do on the cross, in the New Testament. Just as an animal died to cover the shame of Adam and Eve, Christ would die on the cross as the perfect sacrifice to cover the shame of humanity. Not even a day after man brought evil into the world, there was a sign pointing to our redemption.
That brings to mind an extremely encouraging truth first introduced to me by my Senior Pastor. “In the mess,” he will sometimes say, “there is a mission.” The idea behind this statement is no matter what kind of dysfunction and suffering you are currently wading through, there is a higher purpose towards which God is working–and that purpose is His master plan to restore the brokenness of creation through Jesus Christ. Whenever God acts, as far as my Senior Pastor can deduce (and I am inclined to agree with him), He acts to further this master plan.
During a natural disaster, perhaps God will use a horrible situation to draw people to the comfort of His Son. When someone suffers from a debilitating mental illness, perhaps their dire circumstances will bring them to their knees and make them call upon the Lord for their salvation. Maybe a health problem that arises in the life of a believer will allow them to testify the hope of Jesus Christ as others see them trusting in God.
Maybe God is using a hopeless situation in your life to bring you to salvation right now–or maybe he wants to enable you to live well through a difficult situation so others might be drawn to Jesus Christ. In this way, God makes tragedy and suffering work for our good. Only someone as marvelous as God Himself can pull hope from hopelessness.
