Questions for Godনমুনা

If God is real, then why do evil and suffering exist? 

When we look at all the evil out there, it can be really hard to believe in the existence of an all-good, all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God. While the problem of evil and suffering does disprove most gods, it doesn’t disprove the Christian God. 

Why? Because of Jesus. Jesus is God in human form. Jesus entered into the evil and suffering of our world, faced it head on, and chose death on the cross so that we could have life with God. Jesus is the best picture we have of God. Jesus suffered. And Jesus died. Jesus is the God revealed through suffering.

Through His death on the cross, Jesus took the ultimate symbol of death and destruction and He used it to bring life and salvation to the world. 

The fact that we see evil and suffering as a problem is, surprisingly, evidence for God. Why? Because without God there would not be good and evil. Because if there is no God there is no objective morality. Without God, the universe is just atoms bumping up against atoms. Which means there is no good and bad, there are only things we personally like or don’t like. 

But deep down, when we see evil and suffering, we have this profound sense that it should not be that way. 

C.S. Lewis, a former atheist who became a Christian, said it this way: “The shadows prove the sunshine.” 

He’s telling us that the existence of evil (shadows) is evidence that there is such a thing as good (sunshine). Without objective morality, good and evil don’t exist. Objective morality cannot exist without God. 

In the Christian tradition, evil and suffering first entered the world in an event called the Fall. God, because His nature is loving, created humanity with the freedom to choose. Love cannot exist without choice. That freedom means humans can choose good or evil. The Fall was the moment when humanity took what God intended for good and used it for evil. That was when sin entered the picture. Sin is more than just a mistake. Sin is a disease that has infected humanity and corrupted creation. The evil and suffering we see in the world today are the effects of that disease. 

And since the beginning, God has been using evil and suffering for good. Nowhere is this more evident than the cross, where Jesus took the worst this world has to offer and used it to bring about God’s best: resurrection life. 

What God did then was just the beginning. Because of Jesus’s death and resurrection, there will come a day when every wrong is made right, when every hurt is healed, every broken thing is put back together, and evil and suffering are no more. 

Christianity is the story of what God has done, what God is doing, and what God will do about the problem of evil and suffering.