Suffering and Evil: The Biblical view.

Turn on the news. Open a newspaper or magazine. What are the majority of the headlines about? Pain, suffering, evil, death and destruction on both a personal and global level. No one in their right mind will tell you this is how the world is supposed to be. Even Atheists strive for peace and a better life for themselves and others. So why do all these bad things happen? How come a loving God (as the Christianity claims God to be) allows evil in the world? Why do Christians seem to suffer just as bad if not worse then the average non-Christian?

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen 1:1). It is only a few chapters later that we learn that everything is not well in paradise. For some reason this one creature was not happy with his servant role to God. He wanted to be God. So God threw him out of heaven and let him roam the earth (Rev 12:7-9). His name is Satan, the accuser or adversary. We are told that he was one of the most beautiful of all of God’s creation and one third of the angels in heaven followed him instead of following God.

When God created men, He gave them a free will. That is, He gave them the ability to chose between good and evil, between believing that what God had said was the truth or believing that there were things that God had not told them. Satan offers Adam and Eve the opportunity to become “like God” (Gen 3:5). That was the first time Satan dangled that choice before human and it is one of his favorite line to use on mankind because it works so often. Satan takes what God has made and twists it so that we believe that we are still getting the best, but are actually going further away from what God has set as the ideal.

So if this is reality on earth, why did God not destroy Satan before he would corrupt mankind and create the need for God to sacrifice His own Son. The reason is both simple and very complex at the same time. God created mankind with free will which means that humans have to have something to chose between. If God did not give us a choice then we would be robots, unable to do anything but the thing we were told to do. Since God is not looking for robots, He had to give us the option to choose to disobey His command. As C. S. Lewis puts it in The Problem of Pain, “the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between. A creature with no environment would have no choices to make: so that freedom ... demands the presence to the self of something other than the self” (26).

The question then becomes, if God is loving, how can He allow the suffering and evil to happen. The problem with that question is not the fact that God is loving, but our misunderstanding of what his love looks like. God knew, before He even created mankind, that He would also need to send His Son to die for our sins. Paul makes it very clear in his letter to the Roman church that God sent Jesus to die for us because He loved us and wanted us to be with Him for all eternity in heaven. “We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest ‘well pleased’” (Lewis 43). This may be a shocking way to define the love of God, but it is an accurate one. By human definition God has a selfish love for humans, except that God cannot be selfish and if you take a close look at the definition for selfish love you will find that God’s love does not fit into that definition at all. God does not like to see us suffering, but He can use that suffering for his good.

The book of Job is an excellent example of this principle. Satan comes to God and God tells him that he can do whatever he wants to Job except kill him because God knows that Job will not sin and reject God as Satan has insinuated. Job’s friends believe that Job must have some hidden sin that he has not confessed for God to have sent this much suffering at one time. Yet Job maintains his innocence while continuing to proclaim that he trusts in God and his deliverance. Though Job also wants to know why God would allow such misery to occur in his life. When God shows up near the end of the book, He never answers any on Job’s questions. Instead He tells of how He is in control to the whole universe and that He knows what Job has suffered. He richly rewards Job for his faithfulness.

Many Christians struggle with two seemingly opposites in the Bible along the lines of pain and suffering. On one hand we are told that “he who trust in the Lord will prosper (Proverbs 28:25), and that “[God] will protect me from trouble” (Ps 32:7). Jesus prays to the Father just before His crucifixion for His disciples that God would “protect them by the power of your name” (Jn 17:11). However we are also told many times that the Messiah, Jesus, would suffer many things including death, and that we as His followers should not be surprised that we also suffer (Is 53:3, 2 Ti 1:8, Php 3:10). There is also a lot of evidence that the wicked prosper at the cost of the righteous and God does not seem to do anything about that (Ps 73:3, Jer 12:1)

Still, we are given various reasons for the suffering and evil that God allows by other writers of the Bible. Paul, a man who suffered greatly for the gospel (2 Cor 11:24-26), writes in Romans 5:3-4 “that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” This hope is given by God because of the Holy Spirit whom he has sent to live in every believer and who fills us with his love. His love was demonstrated though the death of his son, Jesus, for sinners who were at odds with God. (Romans 5:5-10). The apostle James similarly writes “Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything” (James 1:2-4). It is for our own good that God allows believers to go through trials and tribulations so that we will be refined into the men and women that He wants us to become. As the prophet Isaiah writes, “See, I have refined you, though not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction (Is 48:10).

The whole of the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews is filled the stories of men and women of great faith who also suffered greatly for God, but never “received what had been promised” (Hebrews 11:39). That promise that each one was look forward to was Jesus Christ. Moses writes that God had allowed the Israelites to suffer wandering in the wilderness for forty years “to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands” (Dt 8:2). The book of Judges is a long list of stories of how Israel would turn away from worshiping the Lord their God and He would hand them over to their enemies to be punished until they returned to God. This was a vicious cycle that Israel would suffer for many hundreds of years and it continued all the way through their history of self-government until they were finally taken into captivity by the Assyrian and Babylonian people about 600 years before the Messiah came. God’s people never learned their lesson in Old Testament times and it is warning to all others who would seek to worship God with one hand and still be part of the world with the other hand.

The apostle Paul gives another reason in his second letter to the Corinthian church saying, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor 12:9). That God wants us to rely on Him for our strength and not on ourselves. Jesus says that "This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God's glory so that God's Son may be glorified through it” (Jn 11:4) in talking about Lazarus. When we continue to worship God through our pain, we show the world that God is bigger than our troubles and that we know and trust that He is still in control of our lives.

One of the biggest reason Christians suffer great persecution is because the world does not like Jesus and wants to be God on its own terms, not on God’s terms. The world “hated [Jesus] first” (Jn 15:18) so we should not be surprised that it hates those who follow Him. The author of Hebrew writes concerning Jesus suffering, “In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering” (Heb 2:10). We may not like that statement, but we need to know that God in His infinite wisdom has chosen to use the evil and suffering in the world for His good and that we can accept that or reject that, but to reject His plan, is also to reject His Son, our Saviour.





All Scripture verses are from the New International Version of the Bible.
Lewis, C.S. The Problem of Pain. Simon & Schuster, New York. 1996