Why Does God Allow Suffering? The Real Biblical Answer, and What God Never Explains

Scripture makes two claims about God and holds them both at full strength. He is good all the way through, with nothing in him that wants your ruin. And there is nothing he lacks the power to stop.

Then something arrives that will not sit in the same room as either claim. A scan comes back wrong. A phone rings at two in the morning. A pregnancy ends, or a year of praying ends at a graveside, or a mind wakes up on the eleventh straight morning to the same fight it lost yesterday.

That is where most people ask why does God allow suffering, and it is a fair question. Prophets asked it. Apostles asked it. God’s own Son asked it from a cross.

Scripture speaks to this at length and speaks about it honestly, including about the part it refuses to explain.

Why Does God Allow Suffering?

God made a world and called it finished and good. “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). He gave the people in it a real choice, with one boundary and one warning attached to it (Genesis 2:16-17).

That choice was used against him, and the damage got into the ground under our feet and the cells in our bodies (Genesis 3:17; Romans 8:20-22).

God is not the source of the evil in it. He tempts no man and there is no darkness in him at all (James 1:13; 1 John 1:5).

He works good out of it without ever calling it good. What Joseph’s brothers did to him stayed evil, and God was still at work in it (Genesis 50:20).

And he has set an end to it, a day with no more death, sorrow, crying or pain in it (Revelation 21:4).

That is the answer to why suffering exists, and it holds. It is also not the whole of what most people came here carrying.

You Are Really Asking One of Two Questions

Read the question again and you will hear two of them inside it.

The first is the wide one. Why is there suffering at all? Why does a good and all-powerful God run a world with childhood cancer in it? That question has an address, and the Bible answers it from Genesis through Revelation.

The second is narrow, and it is the one that hurts. Why this? Why now? Why me, or why her, or why a child who never did anything to anybody? To that question Scripture gives something other than a reason. It gives a Person.

Confusing the two can do real damage. Someone carrying the second question gets handed answers built for the first, and the answers are true, and they can land like gravel. The sections that follow answer the wide question properly, and then the rest of this article belongs to the narrow one.

Where Suffering Came From

The World Was Made Good

Before anything else, the Bible plants a flag over the world God made and calls it very good (Genesis 1:31).

That changes the shape of the whole question. The starting point becomes what happened to a good world, rather than why God built a miserable one. Suffering is a wound in creation.

What the First Rebellion Cost

God gave the first man one boundary and one warning (Genesis 2:16-17). He crossed it. And the consequences reached further than a single act should ever reach.

“Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12).

Say that plainly and then stop. There is a way of preaching Genesis 3 that turns into an accusation, and Scripture never uses it that way against a sufferer. The verse explains why there is death in the world. It does not tell you why there is death in your house this month.

Why Creation Itself Groans

Paul takes the damage further than people. It reached the world they were given.

“For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope… For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:20, 22).

Travail is the word the King James uses for labour pains. Creation is straining, the way a body strains toward a birth.

That is where earthquakes and tumours and dementia belong. They are a damaged world behaving like a damaged world, rather than messages addressed to you personally, and reading them as messages can send you hunting for a sin that may not be there.

Jesus shut that door twice. His disciples looked at a blind man and went straight to the arithmetic, asking whose sin had caused it, and he answered, “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:2-3). Then he raised a case nobody had put to him, eighteen people crushed when a tower fell in Siloam, and asked whether they were worse sinners than everyone else in Jerusalem. “I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:4-5). The refusal stands, and it comes with a warning to the living rather than a verdict on the dead.

Some suffering does trace straight back to what we did, and Scripture says so without apologising for it (Galatians 6:7). What Scripture never does is run that logic backwards, from a person’s pain to a hidden sin. You cannot do it to a grieving friend, and you cannot do it to yourself.

The Objection Deserves Its Strongest Form

The objection to God’s goodness has an easy version and a hard one. Both are worth stating at full strength.

The Version Most Answers Are Built For, and Where It Runs Out

Stated at full strength, the argument runs like this. A God with all power could prevent evil. A God who is all good would want to prevent evil. Evil is here. So one of those two claims about God has to go.

The usual Christian answer is love and freedom, and it carries real weight. Many read the freedom God gave as the room love needs in order to be love at all, since a love that could never be refused would be closer to machinery than to love. God made creatures who could choose him, which meant creatures who could refuse him and wound each other, and a great deal of the suffering in this world traces straight back to that. The same freedom that lets one person lay down a life for a friend lets another take one.

Two limits sit on that answer. Freedom does not account for a tumour or a fault line. Nobody chose those, and no human freedom is protected by leaving a child’s leukaemia in place.

And none of us actually treats freedom as untouchable. Almost all of us would grab the arm of a man swinging at a stranger, and would not think we had damaged anything precious by doing it. So the argument that God must leave human choices alone does less work than it looks like it does.

The Version That Keeps People Awake

The objection is narrower than a demand for a world with no suffering in it, and much harder to answer. It is suffering that appears to accomplish nothing at all.

An animal dies alone over several days in a forest fire, where no person sees it, no lesson is learned, and nothing at all comes of it. A child dies at four, before any of the character that answer depends on could be formed in her, and before anyone around her learns a thing except how to survive the loss. An illness takes a man apart over years and leaves nothing anyone can point to as the gain.

Take any one of those out of the world and nothing else changes. No freedom is lost. No one is robbed of a chance to grow. Philosophers press this as the evidential problem of evil, and the plain-English version is the one people ask at two in the morning: what was the point of that.

Answering the first version of the objection leaves this one standing. And it is this version that can cost a person their faith.

Where the Growth Answer Runs Out

The second stock answer is that suffering builds character, and Scripture does say something along those lines.

That answer collapses over a four-year-old’s bed. It has nothing at all to offer for an animal dying in a fire. And it fits badly over the person whom suffering broke rather than refined, which does happen, often enough that most of us can name someone.

An answer is worth having where it is true. Stretched past the ground it covers, it can become one of the fastest ways to lose a sufferer’s trust.

What It Means That You Call This Wrong

Hold on to one thing before moving on. You called the world crooked, and you could only do that if you had some idea of straight.

If the universe is only matter working itself out, a child dying is neither right nor wrong, it is just an event, and outrage at it is a chemical accident with no one to address. If something in you insists that this should not be, that is one of the strongest hints you have that you were never built for it.

What Scripture Says That Those Two Answers Do Not

Some Suffering Has No Reason You Will Be Given

Ecclesiastes says the thing almost nobody says in church. “I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11).

Outcomes in this life get handed out on something other than merit, and that sentence is in your Bible.

There is a moment in 1 Kings that says the same thing in narrative. Ahab went into the battle disguised, and the enemy chariot captains had orders to fight with nobody but the king of Israel, and they could not find him (1 Kings 22:30-33). Then this: “And a certain man drew a bow at a venture, and smote the king of Israel between the joints of the harness” (1 Kings 22:34). At a venture means without aiming at anything. An arrow loosed at nobody in particular found the one gap in a king’s armour.

The book of Job never records Job being told about the conversation in chapter one. The reader is handed that explanation on page two. As far as the text shows, Job never receives it.

Some suffering has no explanation you will be given in this life. You may hunt for a reason for years and find nothing, and that will not mean you missed it or that you lacked the faith to see it.

He Does Not Afflict Willingly

Underneath the question people ask is a question they usually do not ask. Is God enjoying this?

Lamentations answers it from the ruins of a besieged city. “But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men” (Lamentations 3:32-33).

He does not afflict willingly. Whatever else you conclude tonight, do not conclude that God is enjoying this.

Evil Runs on a Leash, and the Leash Is Held

God is never the author of evil. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man” (James 1:13). Whatever is happening, its source is not a defect in God’s character.

At the same time, nothing operates outside his permission. In Job 1 and 2, Satan can move against Job only within limits God sets and never past them. “All that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand” (Job 1:12), and then later, “he is in thine hand; but save his life” (Job 2:6).

Both halves are in the text, and Scripture does not resolve them any further than that. Neither will this article.

Why Doesn’t God Stop It Right Now?

The World You Are Picturing

Picture the world where nothing hurts. It has no cancer in it. It also has no consequence, because a world where nothing hurts is a world where nothing you do can hurt anybody, and that means nothing you do matters much either.

Every act of cruelty would have to be intercepted in the air. Every drunk driver’s engine would have to refuse to start. What you would have at the end of that is permanent infancy, run by a God who never once let anyone be responsible for anything.

The argument carries weight, and it is worth saying what it does not cover. It explains why God has not abolished all consequence everywhere. It does not explain the child, and it does not explain the fire. Keep both facts.

Why He Waits

The delay is doing something. “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

Ending the world’s evil means ending the people who do it, and “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Every day that God has not closed the account is another day somebody can still be rescued.

And from inside the pain, mercy extended to someone else can feel like abandonment of you. Scripture does not ask you to pretend otherwise. It asks you to hold on while the account stays open, which is a harder thing than it sounds.

Job’s Friends Said True Things and God Was Angry

There is a verdict at the end of the book of Job that changes how you read everything before it.

Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar sat with Job and then started talking. Much of what they said was accurate. “Doth God pervert judgment?” asked Bildad (Job 8:3). “Happy is the man whom God correcteth,” said Eliphaz (Job 5:17). You could set sentences from their speeches beside verses from Proverbs and not see the seam.

God’s verdict on all of it: “My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42:7).

True sentences, wrongly aimed, at a man on an ash heap. And God had already answered Job out of the whirlwind, and Job had already said, “I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). Even after all that, the man God says spoke rightly of him is the one who spent the book complaining.

Keep that verdict in your hand for everything that follows. All of it is true about what God does in suffering, and none of it is a script to recite to a person whose child died last week, or to yourself at three in the morning. A true sentence and a kind sentence are not always the same sentence, and Scripture is the one that draws that line.

The best thing Job’s friends ever did came before they opened their mouths. “So they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great” (Job 2:13).

The Question God Does Not Answer

Now the narrow question, the one that actually brought most people here, and the one Scripture meets with something other than a reason.

Job wanted a reason. He asked for one for most of the book, and when God finally spoke out of the whirlwind, God answered with question after question and gave no reason at all. “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4).

At the end Job says, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5). He asked for an explanation and received God himself, and the sight of God ended his demand.

Moses puts the limit kindly. “The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever” (Deuteronomy 29:29). That is a statement about the limits of our knowledge. It is not a statement that God has no reason.

Asaph reached the same place from a different direction. He watched people with no interest in God prosper while his own obedience seemed wasted, and it nearly took him down, until “I went into the sanctuary of God; then understood I their end” (Psalm 73:17). He got God’s presence rather than an accounting, and it held him.

Peter tried the comparison on Jesus directly. Told how his own life would end, he looked over at John and asked what would happen to him, and Jesus said, “what is that to thee? follow thou me” (John 21:21-22). The answer explains nothing and hands him back his own life to live.

Part of why we hunt so hard is that a reason feels like a lever. If there is a why, there is something to work with, something to fix, something to hold. What God offers instead is himself in the room, which is not what anyone asked for and turns out to be what holds.

What God Does in Suffering, and Where Each Answer Stops

Hold this frame the whole way through: God works good out of evil without ever being the author of the evil. “Ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good” (Genesis 50:20). What Joseph’s brothers did stayed evil, and God was still at work in it.

Endurance, and Where the Word Runs Out

Paul sets out an order. “We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope” (Romans 5:3-4). James says the same of testing: “the trying of your faith worketh patience” (James 1:3).

Hebrews grounds correction in love rather than in anger, and does not soften what it costs. “For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth” (Hebrews 12:6). The same passage grants what everyone already knows: “no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness” (Hebrews 12:11).

All of that is true, and each of those verses describes what a trial can produce over time. Some suffering does not get time.

Paul had one that did not lift. “For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Corinthians 12:8-9). He asked three times and was given grace to carry the thing rather than release from it. For anyone whose trial has outlasted every season, a diagnosis that stays, a body that will not recover, a mind that fights the same fight every morning, what Scripture offers is a different kind of arithmetic: “though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Corinthians 4:16). Something can still be built when nothing is improving, and it does not require the pain to stop first.

Comfort That Travels

There is one thing a trial gives you that you can hand to somebody else. “Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God” (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).

Endurance stays with you. Comfort travels.

Purpose That Is Not About You

We usually go looking for the purpose of a person’s suffering inside that person. Paul opens a door that goes the other way.

Writing about the church as a body, he says the parts that look least useful are the ones you cannot do without. “Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary” (1 Corinthians 12:22). And, “whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).

And his instruction to the church about its weakest members is to carry them: “comfort the feebleminded, support the weak, be patient toward all men” (1 Thessalonians 5:14). The feebleminded there are the fainthearted, the ones whose courage has run out. Paul does not say why God leaves anyone weak. He says what the rest of the body is to do about it.

Which leaves a door open for anyone whose suffering is visibly accomplishing nothing in them. A body that will not recover, a mind that is going, a person who can no longer give anything back. Nobody can hand you your own reason out of those verses. What they do show is a church in which the members who look least useful are called necessary, and in which what one of them suffers is felt by everybody.

What Romans 8:28 Actually Says

This verse turns up at a great many funerals, and it often turns up misquoted.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Read it again. It promises that all things are being worked together toward good for those who love God. It does not say that all things are good, and it does not say that each thing which happens to you is good.

Search the Bible for “everything happens for a reason” and you will come up empty. The same goes for “God needed another angel.” Romans 8:28 asks nothing of the sort. It is a promise about where God is taking the wreckage.

The evil in your story stays evil. God is still working.

Read also: 26 Essential Lessons from Romans 8: No Condemnation, Real Suffering, and the Love Nothing Can Separate You From

You Are Allowed to Tell God the Truth About It

If anyone has told you the answer is more faith, the Bible is less squeamish about grief than that.

Psalm 88 runs eighteen verses and never turns the corner. It ends here: “Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness” (Psalm 88:18). That is the last line. No resolution, no upswing, and God put it in the book anyway.

Habakkuk opened his prophecy with a complaint. “O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear!” (Habakkuk 1:2). The answer he got was harder than the question he asked, and he kept talking to God anyway.

And in Psalm 62 that honesty becomes an instruction. “Pour out your heart before him” (Psalm 62:8). There is no required tone attached to it, and pouring out is a different act from reporting.

Read also: Psalm 88: The Darkest Psalm

God Came Into It Himself

He Asked for the Cup to Pass

In the garden, hours before it happened, Jesus prayed, “Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14:36).

He asked to be spared. He asked the Father directly and he meant it. Wanting your suffering to stop puts you in the company of the Son of God on the worst night of his life, and so does asking him plainly to end it.

Jesus Asked Why and Was Not Answered in the Moment

“And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

The words are the opening line of Psalm 22, a psalm that begins in abandonment and ends in vindication. And it is still a why, cried at the top of his voice by the Son of God, and the Gospels record no answer given him in that moment. Whatever your own unanswered why is doing to you, it is not evidence that you have fallen out of God’s favour. His own Son asked one.

He Wept at a Grave He Was About to Empty

Jesus arrived at Lazarus’s tomb knowing exactly what he was about to do. He had already told the disciples he was going to wake Lazarus (John 11:11), and had already told Martha her brother would rise again (John 11:23). He was about to call a dead man out into the daylight.

“Jesus wept” (John 11:35).

He had the solution in his hands and he cried anyway. That settles a question a lot of grieving Christians carry, about whether tears are a failure to trust God’s timing. God stood at a grave he was about to open and wept with the people standing there.

Read also: 31 Essential Lessons from Isaiah 53: The Suffering Servant, the Sins He Carried, and the Silence That Broke at the End

When Suffering Ends

The Bible does not leave the question open. It gives an end, and a description of the day it arrives.

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away” (Revelation 21:4).

Read what that verse promises and what it does not. It promises the end of suffering in the world to come. It makes no promise that your particular suffering ends this year, and importing it into this week can set you up to feel betrayed by God twice.

What it does give you is a horizon. “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). Paul is not calling your pain small. He is weighing it against something enormous and telling you the scales come down on the other side.

What to Do Tonight

If You Are the One Suffering

Bring God the real question rather than the tidy one. Pouring out your heart before him is something he tells you to do (Psalm 62:8).

Read a psalm of complaint before you reach for a psalm of praise. A great many of the Psalms are complaints brought straight to God, and they were put in the Bible on purpose.

Let one person carry part of this with you. Isolation can make a weight heavier than it has to be, and it is very good at convincing you that it is helping.

And if the load is in your body or your mind as well as your spirit, see a doctor or a counsellor. Scripture does not set that against faith. Paul told Timothy to use a little wine for his stomach and his frequent infirmities (1 Timothy 5:23), and one of Paul’s own travelling companions is introduced as “Luke, the beloved physician” (Colossians 4:14).

If You Are Sitting With Someone Who Is

“Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15). That is the whole instruction, and it is shorter than what most of us try to do.

Things worth leaving unsaid: everything happens for a reason, God needed another angel, at least it was quick, at least you have other children, God will not give you more than you can handle. That last one is usually borrowed from 1 Corinthians 10:13, which is a promise about temptation and says nothing about grief. Every one of those tries to make the loss smaller so the room feels easier, and the person in the room can hear you doing it.

It is not your job to explain someone else’s suffering to them. You almost certainly do not know. Say you are sorry, say you love them, and stay.

Read also: Lessons from the Life of Job: 36 Truths for Suffering

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Articles to Read Next

If you want to sit with the man who asked this question hardest and lived, start with The Story of Job in the Bible: Faith Without an Answer.

For what comes out of that account once the dust settles, read Lessons from the Life of Job: 36 Truths for Suffering.

When your prayers feel like they are landing on the ceiling, Psalm 88: The Darkest Psalm is the passage the Bible gives you for exactly that night.

If the harder part is that heaven has gone silent, Reasons Why Our Prayers Are Not Answered takes that question on its own terms.

For the fullest treatment in the New Testament of suffering, groaning creation, and a love nothing can cut you off from, read 26 Essential Lessons from Romans 8.

And to see the Saviour who walked into all of it ahead of you, read 31 Essential Lessons from Isaiah 53.

You came here holding two claims about God that would not fit in the same room as your pain. He is good, and he is able. Both are still true, and now you have some idea of how they sit together.

Scripture answered the wide question honestly. Suffering entered a good world through us, spread into everything, and is on a clock God himself set. And it was honest about the narrow one too. As far as the book records, Job never got his reason. Paul asked three times and was given grace instead of release. You may not get yours.

What you get instead is a God who came down into it, wept at a grave, asked his Father for a way out, cried a why of his own from a cross, and went through anyway. He does not afflict willingly, and he is not enjoying a minute of this.

So bring him the actual thing tonight, in the words you have, the way Job did and Habakkuk did and Asaph did and David did. Bring the version you would edit before saying it in front of the church. You will not be the first, and you will not be turned away.