Why Is There Evil and Suffering?
A Christian Response to the Question That Echoes in Hospital Rooms, at Gravesides, and in the Quiet of Sleepless Nights
If there is one question that haunts both skeptics and faithful believers alike, it is this: if God is good, why is there so much evil and suffering in the world?
We ask it in hospital rooms. At gravesides. In the wake of disasters. During long, sleepless nights when the pain is fresh and the silence feels like an answer in itself. The pain behind the question is real. The confusion is real. And the Christian faith does not sidestep it — it confronts it with honesty, with Scripture, and with the kind of hope that has been tested against the worst life can produce.
Let’s walk through it together.
“In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” — John 16:33
Seven Biblical Responses to Evil and Suffering
Response One
Evil Was Not Part of God’s Original Design
The Bible begins not with suffering but with goodness. God created a world of order, beauty, and unbroken relationship between Himself and the people He made. The repeated refrain of Genesis 1 is that what God made was good — and at the end, when humanity was in place, it was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). There was no pain, no death, no fractured relationship.
That changes in Genesis 3. Adam and Eve chose to act against God’s clear instruction, and that one act sent ripples of brokenness through all of creation. Sin did not enter the world because God designed it — it entered because human beings chose it.
Think of a mirror crafted to reflect the brilliance of the sun. When it shatters, light still reflects from the fragments — but it is distorted and sometimes dangerous. That is what sin did to creation. The world still bears signs of God’s goodness, but it is broken. Evil is not something God built in; it is something that broke in.
Response Two
Free Will Makes Both Love and Evil Possible
Why would God allow the choice that brought all this suffering in? The answer lies in the nature of love itself. Real love cannot be coerced or programmed. A God who created beings capable of genuine relationship — capable of genuinely loving Him and one another — necessarily created beings capable of genuine refusal.
God didn’t want obedient automatons performing programmed worship. He wanted people who could truly love Him — which required giving them the freedom to choose otherwise. That freedom was the necessary condition for everything good about human existence. It was also the door through which evil entered when we chose to walk through it.
God did not cause evil. He permitted the conditions that made genuine love possible — and those same conditions made genuine rebellion possible. We chose the latter.
Response Three
A World Groaning for Redemption
The brokenness that sin introduced is not limited to human hearts and human choices. Creation itself bears the consequences. Natural disasters, disease, decay, the grinding entropy of a physical world in disorder — these are not God’s design for His creation. They are what a world looks like after the relationship at the center of it has been fractured.
Paul’s word choice matters: groaning, as in labor. Creation is not simply dying — it is straining toward something. The suffering is not purposeless. It is the anguish of a world that was made for more than this, and knows it, and is waiting for the restoration that God has promised. The groaning is forward-facing, not final.
Response Four
God Uses Even the Worst Suffering for His Purposes
This is one of the most difficult truths in Scripture — not because it is false, but because it demands trust that goes beyond our ability to see how it could be true in the specific situation in front of us.
That verse does not say that all things are good. It says that God works in all things — including the terrible ones — for the good of those who love Him. Nothing is wasted in God’s hands. He is capable of redemptive purposes in suffering that no human being could have imagined or engineered.
The story of Joseph is the clearest Old Testament demonstration. Sold into slavery by his own brothers, falsely accused by his employer’s wife, forgotten in a foreign prison for years — Joseph had more reason for bitterness than most people will ever accumulate. But at the end, looking back at the whole arc: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good, to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20).
That doesn’t explain every instance of suffering or make any specific pain easier to bear in the moment. But it does tell us something about the kind of God we are trusting — One whose redemptive purposes are not thwarted by the worst that human beings and a broken world can produce.
Response Five
Jesus Stepped Into Our Suffering
Here is what makes Christianity unlike any other response to the problem of evil: God did not remain distant from suffering and issue theological explanations. He entered it.
Jesus wept at a graveside. He was betrayed by a close friend. He was falsely accused, publicly humiliated, beaten, and executed by crucifixion. On the cross, He quoted Psalm 22 from memory — a psalm of profound abandonment: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). He knew the experience of crying out to God in agony and hearing silence.
This is not incidental to the Christian faith. It is central to it. Because of what Jesus endured, the God we bring our suffering to is not a God who has theorized about pain from a safe distance. He is a God who has been in it — who walked into death and walked back out the other side. And because of that, He walks with us through ours.
Response Six
Suffering Is Not the End of the Story
Christians are not people who have resolved the problem of evil philosophically. They are people who have been given a promise about where the story ends — and that promise changes how the middle chapters are endured.
Evil and suffering are real — but they are not permanent. The world as it currently is has an expiration date. Jesus came not only to bear our pain but to conquer the death that is its final expression. The resurrection is the proof that what He promises is not wishful thinking. He walked out of the worst that death could do — which is the only basis anyone has ever had for genuine hope about what lies on the other side of it.
Most stories have a middle that is messy, painful, and confusing. The ending often redeems what came before it — makes sense of it, gives it meaning. We are living in the middle of God’s story. The ending has already been written, and it is not tragedy. It is restoration.
Response Seven
Our Calling: Be the Presence of Christ in a Hurting World
While we wait for the final restoration, God has not left His people as passive observers of suffering. He has made them participants in His response to it.
We do not need to have answered all the theological questions about evil in order to show up for someone in pain. We can sit with them, listen, feed, clothe, pray, and refuse to leave. The comfort we have received from God in our own hard seasons is the specific resource we are equipped to extend to others in theirs.
Christians are not called to explain suffering to people who are in the middle of it. They are called to be present in it — the way Jesus was present in ours.
A paramedic runs toward pain rather than away from it. That is the vocation — because Jesus ran into our suffering first, and we go in His name.
Scripture Reference Summary
| Scripture | Theme |
|---|---|
| Genesis 1:31 | God created everything good — evil is not part of the original design |
| Romans 5:12 | Death entered through sin — the human choice that fractured everything |
| Romans 8:22 | Creation itself groans, straining toward the restoration God has promised |
| Romans 8:28 | God works in all things — including terrible ones — for His redemptive purposes |
| Genesis 50:20 | Joseph: what humans intended for harm, God redirected for good |
| Isaiah 53:3 | Jesus, a man of sorrows — acquainted with grief from the inside |
| Matthew 27:46 | Jesus cried out in abandonment — He knows what that feels like |
| Hebrews 4:15 | A high priest who can fully sympathize with our weakness |
| Revelation 21:4–5 | No more death, mourning, crying, or pain — all things made new |
| 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 | The comfort we receive equips us to comfort others in their suffering |
Why is there evil and suffering? Because we live in a world marred by the consequences of human sin. Because God gave us genuine freedom, and we used it to rebel. And because creation, caught in the wake of that rebellion, groans under a curse it did not choose.
But also: because God is working behind the scenes — redeeming, restoring, moving toward the day when He will make all things new. And because He did not stand at a safe distance from our suffering. He entered it. He bore it. He conquered the worst of it — and He walks through the rest of it with us.
We may not understand why this particular pain, in this particular life, at this particular moment. But we know who we can trust with it. And we hold on to His word: He has overcome the world.
“The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever.” — Isaiah 40:8
Key Scriptures: Genesis 1:31; 3; 50:20 · Romans 5:12; 8:22, 28 · Isaiah 53:3; 40:8 · Matthew 27:46 · Hebrews 4:15 · Revelation 21:4–5 · 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 · John 16:33 · Psalm 22
Want to Go Deeper?
This post on evil and suffering connects to several others in MVM’s apologetics and pastoral series:
- How Can a Loving God Send People to Hell? — the companion post on divine justice and mercy — the same tension that makes the problem of evil so difficult
- Does God Exist? Ten Thinkers, Ten Arguments — including Plantinga’s Free Will Defense, the most rigorous philosophical response to the problem of evil
- Why Did Jesus Have to Die? — how the cross is God’s most direct answer to the problem of suffering: He absorbed the worst of it Himself
- Faith and Reason — why the problem of evil is not a defeater for Christian faith but a question that Christian theology engages more honestly than any alternative worldview
- The Problem of Pain — C.S. Lewis; written before Lewis had personally suffered the losses that would test every argument in it — profound and honest
- Subscribe to get new posts delivered straight to your inbox — gospel-rooted, plain-spoken truth for the week ahead.
“For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” — 2 Corinthians 4:17
