That suffering is a consequence of sin is easy to understand. But why does God allow us to suffer so much? If he truly loves us, would it not please him to minimize our hardships?
The answer to these questions has five facets.
God Is Active
The first facet is that God does limit suffering, just not as much as we want. He works both directly and indirectly through his agents.
If we could see everything God does each day to restrain evil globally and curtail the consequences of sin in the lives of individuals worldwide, we would realize that he is continuously active.
Without his constant mitigation, life would be much more difficult for us and everyone else.
God Constrains Suffering
The second facet of the answer is that God has made several arrangements to reduce suffering, both generally and individually.
God has set intensity limits. He ensures we never face afflictions we cannot endure if we walk in harmony with him.
The severity of our distress never exceeds the sufficiency of his aid.
God has ordained temptation escapes. He provides us with the means to avoid or withstand every temptation.
God’s primary provision in this regard is the Holy Spirit, who illuminates the Bible, enlightens our mind, renews our heart, and strengthens our self-control.
God also gives us opportunities to physically or mentally remove ourselves from immoral situations.
If we use these resources, we avoid the suffering our moral failures would otherwise cause us and others.
God restricts legacy damage. He limits the extent to which our moral failures harm our future generations.
This constraint minimizes the compounding effect of evil, which would ultimately destroy civilization if left unchecked.
God’s goodness overcomes the effects of evil in the same way new grass sprouts after a prairie fire. His intervention enables civilization to advance.
God has equipped us with benevolence. He built this feature into our nature to compel us to act on his behalf.
Although diminished by sin, our innate empathy motivates us to comfort those around us who are hurting and to ease their suffering.
It prompts some of us to develop products and services that alleviate global suffering and improve lives worldwide.
God has given us a moral code to guide our relationships with him and with one another.
Commonly known as the Ten Commandments, this code and its principles prioritize life, liberty, justice, honesty, equality, and dignity. Several of these precepts are so intuitively true that even unbelievers regard them as natural laws.
Adhering to God’s moral code, both individually and collectively, even for secular reasons, fosters healthy relationships, strong families, just governments, and compassionate societies.
These outcomes reduce overall suffering for everyone.
God has provided the means for us to be truly content. He enables us to experience and emit his natural contentment as we walk in harmony with him.
God’s contentment never wavers. It remains steadfast and continuous despite changes in our circumstances. Therefore, we can be truly content in any situation, even amid affliction.
The more diligently we cultivate our relationship with God, the more consistently we manifest his natural contentment.
God has made permanent relief available to everyone. He established a salvation plan that includes an end to all suffering for those who comply with it on his terms, i.e., eternal life in heaven.
Goodness From Affliction
The third facet of the answer is that God often uses suffering to produce the kinds and levels of goodness that might otherwise be unattainable if life were always easy.
For example, God often allows us to endure affliction to diminish our self-sufficiency. He knows that distress will motivate us to seek his aid, creating an opportunity for him to deepen our understanding of his excellence and to make us more useful in his service.
God may also allow us to suffer to prepare us for the future. He knows we will eventually need the knowledge, wisdom, skills, and tenacity that we can acquire only by working through our adversity.
God may allow us to suffer so he can draw others to himself. He knows our affliction will help us relate to the hurting people in our orbit, and vice versa. As a result, they will be more receptive to the message he wants to convey to them through us, and we will be able to deliver it more effectively.
God sometimes lets us suffer while he produces manifold good through the temporary ascendance of evil. The death of Jesus is the premier example of his allowing evil to prevail temporarily for this purpose.
Volitional Freedom
The fourth facet of the answer regarding suffering arises from the reality that many of our hardships are unfortunate consequences of decisions we and others, near and far, have made.
God is unwilling to restrict our volitional freedom, even if doing so would mean we experience less distress. He considers our will sacrosanct because we cannot be spiritually reborn without it.
Thus, God allows what he dislikes, our suffering, to enable what he cherishes, our decision to be reborn spiritually and thereby qualify for heaven.
We can hypothesize many scenarios in which God could intervene in world affairs to minimize suffering without jeopardizing our volitional freedom. For example, he could prevent natural disasters from occurring in populated areas.
However, for reasons only he understands, God does not always intervene in these situations, at least from our earthly perspective.
This brings us to the final and least satisfying facet of the answer to our “why” questions about suffering.
Incomplete Disclosure
Sometimes God never explains why he allows us to suffer so intensely. In such cases, we must wait until heaven for his personalized answer.
His silence is a deal-breaker for some of us. In the absence of a satisfactory explanation for our distress, we assume God is either mean, aloof, powerless, or nonexistent.
However, he has deemed his current level of disclosure sufficient for us to trust him amid every affliction.
For us to demand that God answer all our “why” questions to our satisfaction before we decide to trust him suggests that his current revelation is inadequate and that his determination to the contrary is mistaken. This implies that our judgment is better than his.
If that were true, he would not be God. We would be God.
God Recognizes Our Dilemma
God understands our dissatisfaction with this multifaceted answer about suffering. He is not offended by our dismay.
In his written argument for why we should trust him—the Bible—God highlights the bewilderment about suffering expressed by the saints he cites as our role models.
But he goes on to describe the goodness he produced in and through these people as they walked in harmony with him amid affliction. He reveals the insights into his excellence they came to understand.
The experiences of these saints assure us that we can indeed trust God by faith, even when distress raises doubts about his character, compassion, and capabilities.
