Apologetics — facing the oldest and hardest objection to the Christian faith without flinching.
It is the oldest argument against the Christian faith, and it is still the strongest. You have heard some version of it, and if you are honest, you have probably felt it yourself. A good God would want to stop suffering. An all-powerful God would be able to stop suffering. And suffering plainly exists — a child in a cancer ward, a village under rubble, a grief that simply will not lift. Therefore, the argument concludes, the Christian God is either not good, or not powerful, or not there.
This is called the problem of evil, and Christians should never wave it away. It deserves a real answer, given slowly, because the people who raise it are usually not playing a game. More often than not, they are standing next to something that broke their hearts.
Two ways Christians get this wrong
The first wrong response is to dismiss the question — to meet a grieving person with a tidy slogan, everything happens for a reason, and move briskly on. That is not faith. It is cowardice wearing faith’s clothes, and the Bible never does it. The second wrong response is the opposite: to panic, as though the question might be unanswerable, as though the whole structure could collapse if a skeptic pushes hard enough. It will not. The honest path is the middle one — take the objection at full strength, and then answer it.
And the first thing to say is that the Bible arrived at this question long before the skeptic did.
Scripture does not hide from suffering
People sometimes imagine the Bible is a book of relentless cheerfulness that has never looked real pain in the face. The opposite is true. It contains the book of Job — forty-two chapters of a righteous man’s agony. It contains Lamentations, an entire book of weeping. A full third of the Psalms are complaints. And the prophet Habakkuk opens his book by saying to God’s face what every sufferer has wanted to say:
“How long, O LORD, will I call for help, and You will not hear? I cry out to You, ‘Violence!’ Yet You do not save.”
— Habakkuk 1:2 (NASB1995)
That is in the Bible. God did not edit it out. The Scriptures do not treat the problem of evil as an embarrassment to be hidden — they hand you the very language to raise it honestly. A faith that gave you those words is not a faith that is afraid of your question.
Why a good God might allow a world that can wound
Now to the argument itself. The skeptic’s strong version claims that God and evil are logically incompatible — that no good, all-powerful God could coexist with any suffering at all. But that claim is very hard to defend, because it secretly assumes there is no possible reason God could have for permitting it. And there is at least one.
God made creatures who can love. Love that is real has to be free; a love that is forced is not love at all. But the same freedom that makes love possible also makes cruelty possible. You cannot have the one without the genuine risk of the other. The overwhelming majority of the suffering in this world is not a mystery — it is the direct result of human beings using their freedom to wound one another. The skeptic asks why God does not simply stop it. He is, in effect, asking why God did not make puppets instead. The answer is that puppets cannot love Him — and could not have loved you either.
That accounts for moral evil. But there is also the suffering no one chose — the disease, the earthquake, the slowly failing body. Scripture does not pretend that away either. It says the created order itself is wounded, running under a curse it did not ask for.
“For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”
— Romans 8:20–21 (NASB1995)
A creation in slavery to corruption. That is the diagnosis. This is not the world as God first made it, and it is not the world as it will finally stay. It is a creation caught in between, groaning — and notice the image Paul reaches for to describe the groaning. Not the pains of death. The pains of childbirth. Pain with a direction. Pain that is going somewhere.
The objection borrows what it cannot afford
Here is the turn the skeptic rarely sees coming. To call the cancer evil, to call the cruelty wrong, you have to be standing on a real and binding moral standard — a line written into the universe itself that says this ought not to be. But if the universe is only matter and energy and time, with no God behind it, there is no such line. There are only events. Atoms doing what atoms do. A genuinely godless universe cannot be outraged by a dying child; it can only shrug.
So the argument quietly eats itself. The more deeply a person feels that suffering is truly, objectively wrong — not merely unpleasant, but wrong — the harder they are leaning on a moral law. And a moral law points to a moral Lawgiver. The problem of evil, pressed all the way down to the bottom, does not disprove God. It assumes Him. It turns out you need God in order to mean anything serious by the word evil in the first place.
God did not explain suffering. He entered it.
But even that is not the Christian answer. It clears the ground; it does not fill the ache. Because a hurting person does not finally need a theory of suffering. They need to know where God is in it.
And here Christianity says something no other worldview says. The Christian claim is not that God stands outside the wreckage offering commentary. The claim is that God came in. He took on flesh, and a name, and a body that could be broken. He stood at the grave of a friend and did not deliver a lecture — He wept. And then He walked to a cross.
“He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief… But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the chastening for our well-being fell upon Him, and by His scourging we are healed.”
— Isaiah 53:3, 5 (NASB1995)
Pierced. Crushed. A man of sorrows. Whatever else you decide to do with the Christian faith, you cannot accuse its God of staying safely distant from human pain. He has tasted more of it than you have. He met evil at full strength — betrayal, injustice, torture, death — and He did not meet it with an explanation. He met it with His own blood.
Evil is real. It is also dated.
And then the tomb was empty. The resurrection is the hinge of the entire Christian answer, because it means suffering does not get the last word. Evil is real — Christianity never blinks at that — but evil is now a defeated thing, living on borrowed time. There is a day already marked on the calendar of God when it ends.
“And 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)
No more death. No more mourning. No more pain. Not pain explained — pain abolished, wiped away by the hand of God Himself. The Christian does not say that suffering is good. The Christian says that suffering is conquered, and the receipt is an empty grave.
So if you are a skeptic, hear this plainly: you are not wrong to be troubled by suffering. That trouble is not a flaw in you. It is one of the truest things about you — a signal that you were made for a world without it, and you know in your bones that this one is broken. Do not take that ache and use it to walk away from God. Take it to Him. He is the only One who has answered it — not with a tidy reason, but with wounds still visible in His own hands.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist