How could God allow suffering and evil?

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This is a classic question. When it’s a challenge to the Christian faith, trying to prove that God doesn’t exist, it’s usually phrased like this: “If God is truly omniscient (all-knowing) and omnipotent (all-powerful) and loving, how could he allow suffering and evil?”

Here is a classic answer.

God exists. Jesus said he does, and he rose from the dead to show that he could be trusted to tell the truth.

God is all-knowing. That trustworthy Jesus said so. And since God knows everything, he is smarter than we are. So he may do or say things that are perfectly right, but we don’t understand them, because we’re not as smart. We have that experience every day with people who are smarter than we are.

God is all-powerful. In philosophical terms, that doesn’t mean that he can do anything; that would lead to internal contradictions, as in, “Can God make a rock so big that he can’t lift it?” In philosophical terms, all-powerful means that he can do whatever he wants. He can always put his will into action. See the difference?

God is loving. God showed his love for all people by sending a Savior (John 3:16).

Does God allow evil to occur? That depends on how you define evil. Sometimes what seems bad or evil to one person seems good to another person.

But let’s grant that God does allow evil to occur. It’s only temporary. Death intervenes. Since God is smarter, perhaps that temporary evil actually turns out to be for some good in the end. For example, the Bible tells the story of a man whose brothers sold him into slavery. That was evil. But it turned out for good. The man himself said so (Genesis 50:20).

Since God is smarter than I am, I trust that when he allows evil or suffering in my life, it will work out for my good (Romans 8:28). Since he’s loving, I trust that everything really will work out for the best in my life. And since he’s all-powerful, I can ask him to get rid of the evil, and trust that if that’s he wants at that time, he can and he will (Matthew 7:7).

The church just wants my money

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You hear it expressed all the time. “All they talk about in church is money!” Usually the person who says that has other issues with churches and this one just happens to be the one that most often surfaces. And for sure, there may well be churches where money is all they talk about.

It generally makes people angry when they suspect that all the church wants from them is their money. For people who love Jesus and their Heavenly Father, however, it is just the opposite. They would get angry if the church would not talk about money! Money given in church is one way believers tell their God, “I love you!” Offerings are considered an opportunity and not an offense.

It is like a young man who buys his sweetheart a Christmas present. He spends the money because he wants to. He spends as much as he can…maybe even more than he thinks he should. He insists on it. It’s for “her” and he loves her. Don’t you get between that young man and his billfold when it comes to the present he wants to purchase to show his fiancée his love.

A long time ago some very poor people in Macedonia understood completely that their church was not just trying to get their money. We hear about them, “Entirely on their own, they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the saints.” We also hear that “out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity” (2 Corinthians 8:1-4) The church was just the place they wanted to be. It gave them the chance to say to their God, “I love you…We love you!”

The cattle on a thousand hills are the Lords. All of the gold at Fort Knox is his. Every dollar bill in your billfold is already his. But he gives you the chance to use the dollar bill to say to him, “I love you.” And it delights his heart when you do it because you are not giving him money but love. That is the currency that God who owns everything does not have until you give it to him.

The church doesn’t just want your money.

God wants your love.

Past Experience

What if my past church experience was bad?

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What do I do?

Let’s try the naively optimistic answer: “Bad things don’t happen at church!” We could say that, but it just wouldn’t be true. I counseled a young woman who felt she was being run out of the church choir on purpose. I didn’t believe it could happen. Not at church! Turns out, that is exactly what was happening on purpose and in the church. Ouch!

Let’s try a more “Christian” response: “You will just have to forgive and forget.” We could say that, too, but know too well that it is “easier said than done.” When a man or a woman finds out their spouse has been unfaithful, forgiving and forgetting might be a lifetime struggle.

So what do I do? Try another popular approach; maybe someone has it worse than we do. It seems that somehow we find comfort knowing others have experienced worse pain than we have.

Normally I wouldn’t recommend this approach, but I will make one exceptional exception. Let’s go to “church” with Jesus and see what he did when confronted with a bad experience.

In the Luke 4, we see Jesus in his hometown of Nazareth. On the Sabbath Day Jesus read from Isaiah and declared himself to be the “anointed” one. Initially the town folks liked what they heard, but when Jesus told how they would reject him, we are told that they were “furious” and they “took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built in order to throw him down the cliff.” This is a bad church experience.

Or go to the gospel of Matthew 26. Here Jesus is called before the elders of the church in Jerusalem. When he declares that he is the “Christ, the Son of God” they “spit in his face . . . struck him with their fists . . . and slapped him.” Subsequently they turned him over to Roman authorities, lied about him, and pleaded that he be executed—which is what happened. This is a bad church experience.

So what did Jesus do? He kept going to church! That is, he kept striving to fulfill the will of God his Father. A bad church experience did not deter his worship, which was most clearly shown in His sacrificial and unconditional love for the sinners he came to save and in his obedience to the will of his Father.

Jesus had a better answer to our question. His answer is reconciliation. In 2 Corinthians 5:19we read: “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.”

What do I do if my past church experience was bad? I look past sinners to Jesus, the Savior of sinners. I look at and embrace the message of reconciliation. Jesus will not hurt me, he has healed me—completely and forever. He has forgiven my sins, and he has forgotten them too. That radically changes my attitude and outlook.