The oldest objection to God deserves the oldest, hardest answer — not a slogan.
Let me state the objection at full strength, the way an honest skeptic states it, because a faith that can only answer the weak version of a question has not answered anything.
It goes like this. If God is all-powerful, He could stop suffering. If God is all-good, He would want to. Yet suffering is everywhere — the child’s cancer ward, the mass grave, the phone call at 2 a.m. So either He cannot, and He is not almighty, or He will not, and He is not good. That is the argument. It is old, it is sharp, and it has emptied more pews than any other single thought. If you have ever stood at a graveside and felt it, you are not a bad Christian. You are a human being.
So let us not wave it away. Let us walk into it.
The hidden assumption in the argument
The argument sounds airtight, but it smuggles in a premise it never states: that a good and powerful God would have no possible reason to permit any suffering. Strip that premise out and the logic collapses. For the objection to work, the skeptic has to know — not guess, know — that God could have no morally sufficient purpose for allowing what He allows.
That is an enormous claim. It requires the objector to see the whole board — every consequence, every ripple, every soul, across all of time. It is the one vantage point no human being has ever occupied. To say “there cannot be a reason” is to claim a God’s-eye view in the act of denying God. The most the evidence allows anyone to say is “I cannot see a reason.” And “I cannot see one” is a statement about the size of your sightline, not about the character of God.
Evil is a witness against naturalism, not against God
Press the objection further and it turns in the skeptic’s hand. To call the world’s suffering evil — not merely unpleasant, but wrong, an outrage that ought not to be — you have to be measuring it against a standard of how things ought to be. Where does that standard come from?
If the universe is only matter and energy grinding on with no author, then a tsunami is not evil; it is physics. A murder is not wrong; it is chemistry doing what chemistry does. In a purely material world there is no “ought,” only “is.” So the very moment you are most sure something is genuinely, cosmically wrong, you are reaching for a moral law that a godless universe cannot supply. C. S. Lewis walked this road himself: he had built his atheism on the injustice of the world, and then had to ask where he got the idea of justice to begin with. A crooked line only proves there is such a thing as straight.
So the problem of evil does not disprove God. It presupposes Him. Take God away and you do not solve the problem of suffering — you lose the right to call it a problem.
What the Bible does and does not say
Scripture never pretends suffering is small. The Bible has an entire book — Job — that is one long refusal to give a tidy answer. When God finally speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, He does not hand him a syllogism. He gives him Himself. Job’s comfort is not an explanation; it is a Person he can now trust in the dark.
But the Bible does say two things clearly. First, this is not the world as God made it. Suffering and death entered through the fracture of a good creation, not from the hand of a cruel Maker. Second — and this is the sentence the whole Bible turns on — God is able to weave even genuine evil toward a good He intends, without ever calling the evil good. Joseph, sold by his brothers and left for dead, says it to their faces years later:
“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.” (Genesis 50:20)
Read it carefully. He does not say the betrayal was not evil. He says it was evil — you meant evil — and that God, over the same event, meant good. That is not a God defeated by suffering. That is a God sovereign over it, bending even the worst of it toward rescue.
“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)
Not “all things are good.” Not “all things feel good.” All things work together — under the hand of a God who has not lost the thread.
The answer God gave was not an argument
Here is where Christianity stops being one more philosophy of suffering and becomes something no other worldview offers. Every other system asks you to look at suffering from a safe distance and reason about it. Christianity says God did not stay at a distance.
He entered it. He took on flesh, wore our skin, and walked straight into the worst of it — betrayal, torture, injustice, a state execution, the silence of the Father. On the cross, God in Christ did not explain human agony from the outside. He absorbed it from the inside.
“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 53:5)
Whatever else you say about the God of the Bible, you cannot say He does not know what your pain feels like. He has a body that remembers the nails. When you ask, “God, where were You when it hurt?” the Christian answer is startling: on a cross, bleeding, next to you. And then out of the grave — because the cross was not the end of the story, and neither is yours.
Two ways to hold the same wound
So you are left with a decision, and it is not a decision about whether suffering hurts. It always will. The decision is which story you will carry it inside of.
In one story, your pain is meaningless — a blind collision of atoms, signifying nothing, headed nowhere. In the other, your pain is real, it is not the last word, it is held by a God who entered it Himself, and it is being bent toward a good you cannot yet see. Neither story makes the wound stop aching today. Only one of them gives you a reason to get up tomorrow.
Christianity does not hand the sufferer a tidy explanation. It hands him a crucified and risen God, and a promise:
“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)
That is not a slogan for the graveside. It is a promise with a scarred hand behind it. The God who was willing to suffer with you is the God who has sworn to end suffering forever — and He has already walked out of one grave to prove He can do it.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist