Suffering

It is the oldest and heaviest objection to faith, and it deserves to be stated at full strength, not dodged. If God is truly good, He would want to end suffering; if He is truly all-powerful, He could; and yet here it is, the cancer ward, the famine, the child who dies, the grief that does not lift. So either He is not good, or He is not able, or He is not there. This is not a trick question, and the Bible does not treat it as one. What Scripture refuses to do is two things people often want it to: it will not pretend the pain is unreal, and it will not hand us a tidy formula that makes it all add up. Instead it does something harder and, in the end, deeper. It gives us not an explanation but a Person.

The Bible never minimizes it

The first thing to notice is how unflinchingly honest Scripture is about suffering. It does not paper over it with slogans. A full third of the Psalms are laments, raw complaints flung at God; an entire book, Job, is given to a good man's agony and his refusal to accept easy answers; Jesus Himself wept, and sweat, and cried from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). The Bible gives you permission to grieve and even to protest, because it never asks you to call evil good. Suffering is real, and it is wrong, and Scripture says so on every page. Any "comfort" that needs you to pretend otherwise is not the Bible's comfort.

Where it came from, and Who did not

Scripture traces suffering to a world fractured by the fall, not to the design of a cruel God. Pain, death, and disorder are intruders into a creation God made good, the bitter fruit of a world in rebellion (see a fallen world). And it guards God's character carefully: He is not the author of evil. "God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man" (James 1:13, and he finishes the thought in the next verse rather than leaving the source of it unnamed: "But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed" (James 1:14)); He is "of purer eyes than to behold evil" (Habakkuk 1:13). This is the line the Bible will not cross: God is sovereign over a world that contains evil, and yet He is not its source and never its accomplice. Holding both is hard, but dropping either is worse, a God too weak to help, or a God too dark to trust (see sovereign and good, held together).

He brings good out of it

What the Bible claims, again and again, is not that suffering is good but that God is able to bring good out of it, to weave even the worst things into a purpose that redeems them. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, said it at the end: "ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good" (Genesis 50:20). Paul makes it a promise for all who love God: "all things work together for good" (Romans 8:28), and he insists the suffering itself is doing something, "our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" (2 Corinthians 4:17). Note the careful claim: not that the evil is good, but that God is great enough to make it serve a good it never intended. The brothers meant evil; God meant good; both are true, and the second does not excuse the first. Augustine put the whole principle in a single sentence the church has carried ever since:

Job, and the answer that is not an argument

The Bible's longest treatment of suffering is the book of Job, and its ending is famously not what we expect. Job demands an explanation, and God finally answers, but He gives no reasons at all. Instead He speaks out of a whirlwind and asks Job question after question about the wild grandeur of creation: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?" (Job 38:4). And astonishingly, it is enough. Job is not given the transcript of why; he is given God, and meeting Him he says, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee" (Job 42:5). The book's quiet wisdom is that what the sufferer most needs is not the reasons, which we could not bear or understand anyway, but the presence of the God who has them. We are not promised the explanation. We are promised Him.

Lewis wrote the same thought from the other side, as a senior devil warning a junior one what he is actually up against:

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

— C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

In the same letter Screwtape admits that God “relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.” That is not a consolation for the dry season. It is a claim that the dry season is where the work is done, and the words the sufferer is left with are the ones Christ Himself used: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Psalm 22:1).

The decisive answer: God suffered too

Here Christianity says something no other faith dares. Our God is not a remote spectator of human pain, issuing it from a safe distance. He entered it. In Jesus, God took on flesh and suffered hunger, betrayal, torture, and death, "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). Whatever the full answer to suffering is, it cannot be that God does not care or does not understand, because He has been here, in the worst of it, by His own choice (see the cross). The cross does not explain all suffering, but it forever silences the charge that God is indifferent to it. He did not keep His distance from our pain. He came and bled inside it.

Athanasius, writing in exile while his people were being hunted, draws the line the same way:

He is careful to separate two things the same word covers: trouble a man walks into by his own appetite, and trouble that comes to him because he would not deny the Lord. James addresses both, and they are not the same grief.

Where this lands

The Bible's answer to suffering is finally less an argument to be won than a hope to be held: that the God who is good and sovereign, who is not the author of evil, who brings good out of the worst things, who suffered in person, will one day end it altogether. The last chapter is not a theodicy; it is a promise. "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain" (Revelation 21:4). Until then, you are not asked to call the darkness light. You are asked to trust the One who walked into the darkness for you, and who said, "In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33) (see the hope that ends it).

Related: Is Any Sick Among You?, The Character of God, Providence, The Cross, Heaven, Hope, Born Fallen, and Prayer. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple.