Day 6 — Why Does God Allow Suffering?

“I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us… We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until the present time.”

— Romans 8:18, 22 (BSB)

A flood sweeps through a village. A friend’s mum is diagnosed with cancer. You scroll past footage of a war and can’t get the faces out of your head. Sooner or later almost everyone asks it: If God is good and powerful, why does He let this happen?

It’s a fair question, and the Bible doesn’t run from it. Whole books of the Bible, like Job and Lamentations, are spent wrestling with it. Christianity doesn’t give a neat answer that makes the pain disappear. But it gives more to hold on to than any other view of the world.

The world is broken, and it knows it. Paul says the whole creation is “groaning”. Things are not the way they were meant to be. The Bible traces that back to humanity turning away from God. Much suffering comes directly from human choices: greed, violence, cruelty. God made us able to love, and love requires real freedom, which means freedom to do real harm. Other suffering, like disease and disaster, comes from living in a world that has been knocked off its axis.

Your outrage points somewhere. When you see injustice and something in you says, This is wrong, you’re measuring the world against a standard of how things ought to be. Where does that standard come from? If there is no God, suffering is just what happens. But you don’t feel that it’s just what happens. You feel it’s wrong, and that feeling fits a world made by a good God and then spoiled.

God didn’t stay out of it. This is the heart of it. God’s answer to suffering is not mainly an explanation. It’s Himself. Standing at the grave of His friend Lazarus, knowing He was about to raise him, “Jesus wept.” Then He went to the cross and took the worst that evil could do. Whatever you’re going through, you’re not praying to a God who has never suffered.

It won’t last forever. Paul had been beaten, shipwrecked and imprisoned, and he still said that “our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us.” Groaning, he says, is like the pains of childbirth: real pain, but pain that leads to new life. The Bible ends with God wiping away every tear and death being no more.

And even now, God is not idle. Paul wrote in the same chapter, “God works all things together for the good of those who love Him.” That doesn’t mean bad things are secretly good. It means God can bring good even out of them.

If you’re carrying something heavy right now, a loss or a sadness that won’t lift, please don’t carry it alone. Tell God honestly, and tell a parent or a trusted adult too.

Think about it: Is there a time you’ve seen God bring something good out of something painful, in your life or someone else’s?

Try this: Think of someone you know who is going through a hard time. Pray for them by name today, then send them a short message or do one kind thing for them.

Go deeper: The God of All Comfort by Hannah Whitall Smith — after a life marked by real grief, Smith writes that the simple words “The Lord is good” stopped her short every time appearances tempted her to think God had been unkind or careless. Start with chapter 7, “The Lord is Good”.

God of all comfort, I don’t understand why there is so much pain in the world. Thank You that You aren’t far from it, and that Jesus wept and suffered too. Be close to everyone who is hurting today, especially the people I’m thinking of now. Help me trust that You are good, even when I can’t see it. In Jesus’ name, Amen.