The oldest objection to God is also the most honest. It deserves an honest answer.
If God is all-good, He would want to end suffering. If God is all-powerful, He could end suffering. Suffering has not ended. Therefore, the skeptic concludes, the God of the Bible either does not care or does not exist. It is called the problem of evil, and it is the objection thrown at faith more than any other. It is also the objection standing behind a thousand quieter ones, the ones whispered at hospital beds and funerals, where nobody is trying to win a debate at all.
Christianity does not flinch from this question. It answers it more directly, and more personally, than any worldview on the market. But we have to take the argument apart first.
The Hidden Assumption in the Objection
Notice what the argument smuggles in. To call something evil, you must have a fixed standard of good to measure it against. A bent stick is only bent if a straight one exists. When the atheist points at a cancer ward and says, “This is wrong,” he is standing on a moral law he cannot account for on his own terms.
C. S. Lewis walked this road himself. As an atheist, his argument against God was that the universe was cruel and unjust. Then it struck him: where had he gotten this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. His very outrage at evil depended on a standard that atheism could not supply. The problem of evil, pressed hard enough, becomes an argument for the God it was aimed at. Evil is real. That is precisely why you need God to make sense of the word.
“Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness.”
Isaiah 5:20 (NASB1995)Where the Bible Locates the Wound
Scripture does not pretend the world is fine. It opens with a good creation, God calling it “very good,” and then it tells you honestly what broke it. Evil entered through a real choice by real people who were made free enough to love and therefore free enough to rebel. A world of robots could not sin. It also could not love. God made creatures, not machinery, and creatures can turn.
So the groaning you feel is not the way it was made. It is the way it fell.
“For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now.”
Romans 8:22 (NASB1995)Paul chooses the image of childbirth on purpose. Labor pains are real agony, but they are not meaningless agony and they are not permanent. They are pointed at something. That is the Bible’s frame for the whole present age.
A God Who Does Not Explain, But Enters
When Job lost everything and demanded an explanation, God answered from the whirlwind, and He never gave Job the itemized reason. Instead He gave Job Himself, question after question that reminded a suffering man how small his vantage point really was. And it was enough. Not because the pain was explained, but because the Person was revealed.
Here is where Christianity stops sounding like every other religion and philosophy. The other systems offer a God who explains suffering from a safe distance, or a God who is above it, untouched. The Bible offers a God who climbed down into it.
“Jesus wept.”
John 11:35 (NASB1995)Two words, at a grave, from the God who was about to raise the dead man. He knew resurrection was minutes away and He still wept. God is not a stranger to your loss. At the cross He took the full weight of evil into Himself, absorbed it, and did not let it have the last word. You do not worship a deity who watches suffering from the balcony. You worship the One who was nailed to it.
The Promise That Nothing Is Wasted
Christianity does not promise you a reason for every wound in this life. It promises something harder to believe and better to have: that no wound is wasted, and that a day is coming when the account is settled in full.
“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
Romans 8:28 (NASB1995)Read it carefully. It does not say all things are good. Cancer is not good. Betrayal is not good. It says God causes all things to work together for good, which means He is able to take the very worst that happens to you and weave it into a purpose you cannot yet see. Joseph said it to the brothers who sold him into slavery: what you meant for evil, God meant for good. Both clauses are true at once. The evil was real. So was the redemption.
And then there is the end of the story, which the skeptic’s argument never accounts for.
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
Revelation 21:4 (NASB1995)The Decision the Question Forces
So here is where the objection actually leaves you. Every worldview has to do something with suffering. Atheism says it is meaningless molecules in motion, which means your grief is a chemical accident and your outrage has no ground to stand on. Eastern thought says it is illusion to be transcended. Christianity alone says your suffering is real, that it is an intruder and not the design, that God Himself entered it, and that He has both the power and the intention to end it forever.
That does not make the ache stop tonight. But it changes what the ache means. You are not screaming into a void. You are groaning in a fallen world alongside a God who groaned first, on a cross, for you. The question “why the pain?” is answered not by a formula but by a Person, and a wounded hand held out in the dark.
“For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.”
2 Corinthians 4:17 (NASB1995)Paul had been beaten, stoned, and shipwrecked when he wrote that. He was not minimizing pain. He was weighing it. And on the scale of eternity, held next to what Christ secured, he found it lighter than it felt. So can you.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist