Why Does God Allow Suffering?

One of the most common questions that I hear as a Christian is ‘If God is all powerful, all knowing and all loving, then why does he allow so much suffering to happen? 

Why is it that he allowed and didn’t stop someone I loved from dying? Or the child that was molested? The woman who was raped? 

If He was all powerful, all knowing and all loving then surely He would have known beforehand, used his power to stop these things from happening and this would show us His love for us.” 

I have heard many theologians attempt to answer this question, yet many people I come across still feel that this question is unanswered. I know this to be true because I encounter many who still use this argument to this very day. There is a growing resentment towards God and this can only be because many are unsatisfied with the answers they have been given. 

The Holy Bible has provided the case clearly as to why these things happen and in order to understand, then you are going to have to overcome a bit of ego and self righteousness. You are not going to like the answer. The fact of the matter is that despite God being all knowing, all powerful and all loving, we are to blame for all that is wrong in the world. 

Being all knowing, all powerful and all loving, we were warned not to commit the original sin and we did. The reason why we face death is due to the fact we rebelled against God. For example: 

The First time that death was even mentioned in the Bible can be found in Genesis 2:17 

“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” 

God being all knowing, all powerful and all loving, warned us not to eat from the tree of life. We did not even know what evil was, we had no knowledge of it. Not death, not rape, not pedophilia, not murder, we were sheltered from such things and living under God’s purity. 

The First Sin can be found in Genesis 3:6

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” 

The First Murder can be found in Genesis 4:8

“Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.”

The First Lie can be found in Genesis 4:9

“Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?”

The First Rape (Jacob’s daughter Dinah) can be found in Genesis 34:2

“And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land, saw her, he seized her and lay with her and humiliated her.”

The First case of incest can be found in Genesis 19:32

“Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve offspring from our father.”

As you can see, the list of faults go on and they all begin with us, not God. We are the ones responsible for sin because we bought into the knowledge of sin. Just as a baby does not know what rape or murder is, we were once innocent beings without knowledge of such things. 

It was our kind that openly defied our creator. We are responsible for all of it. We pass our sins down from generation to generation. We are responsible for cancer. We are responsible for respiratory illnesses. We are responsible for acts of violence. The question should not be posed towards God but why are we not asking ourselves why are we not all knowing, powerful and loving? Since we ate from the tree?

Just as those following Moses and Jesus could see the miracles of God before their own eyes, they still did not show faith and denied them publicly. We are capable of love, we are capable of having power, we are capable of knowing and yet every time we have possessed the opportunity to make a difference, how many truly do? 

If we are all human in essence, then the very worst of us is what we are capable of. Equally, Jesus came to show us, as a man, what the best of us could equally look like. Yet those who follow him are mocked, those who try to do good are labelled ‘do-gooders’, considering our polluted air causes many significant respiratory illnesses and deaths, anyone who attempts to protect a tree is labelled a ‘tree hugger’. 

Are you not the one drinking alcohol? Smoking cigarettes? Thinking badly of others? Gossiping behind closed doors and treating others as if they were strangers? How can anyone living in sin possess any moral high ground to point the finger at God?

You have the audacity to question why does God not stop all the evils yet it is us that are creating them! Day after day. It is as if God has not done enough by stopping Abraham from killing his son and sacrificing his only son instead, so that we might be saved in Him. 

If you are going to dismiss the deity of God based on the offered premise of him not being all knowing, all powerful and all loving, then your argument of atheism would still result in the same outcome, that being, all the wrong in the world are because of human beings. 

Although, without God, you could not possibly devise an objective moral code to which everyone agrees on. If you do not believe in God, then there is no good or evil, and so your moral code is merely subjective and lacking strong foundations. 

Sure, you might think killing someone is wrong but to someone else, they might like it and find it perfectly normal. Who are you to tell them different? What or who gives your moral code an authority or edge over theirs? And if there is no God then everyone will perish anyway so what’s the fuss? 

If you believe in a scientific explanation for the world like the Big Bang theory and all this being mere evolution and chance, then you will just have to accept the same for all the wrongs in the world. You cannot blame God. You can’t really blame anyone. It’s simply a case of ‘it is what it is’. They were just unlucky. In the wrong place at the wrong time. Better luck next time, maybe? 

However, for those of us who acknowledge and accept our roles in this sinful world, just as the true mature adult does not scapegoat or point the finger and instead taking ownership of our wrongs, then there is a chance for redemption through Jesus Christ. 

God did not force the apple into our mouths. Our brains are mapped out possessing the knowledge of both God and Evil because we thought we were better than God. And oh, how we have suffered since. 

Just as in Genesis 11:1-9 in the story of the Tower of Babel, we thought that we could build a tower so high that we would reach the heavens. It has always been an issue of ego and thinking that we are better than God that has always lead to our downfall. 

When you come to realise that our time on Earth is very minuscule compared to what an everlasting life looks like, then losing someone here is certainly nothing to grieve about. However, if you believe this is all there is and by someone losing their life is an injustice, then take it up with no one. It is what it is. 

You see, there has to be a God, otherwise none of this makes sense. God being all knowing, all powerful and all loving, gave us all a way to be saved. It’s up to you whether you accept it or not. 

John 3:16

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” 

The apologists are not Christian’s, the apologists are those who fail to take personal responsibility for their own sin.