Human Suffering: How Can a Compassionate God Allow It?

May 12, 2008

By Jennifer McClure

There is no short, easy, exhaustive response to this question, and by no means do I claim to fully understand this. But I’d like to share some ideas I’ve encountered while trying to understand this issue.

1. God’s original design for life, for creation, did not include suffering. Adam, Eve and creation were perfect when first created. Through disobedience and sin, death and sickness entered the world, breaking perfection and causing separation between God and mankind.

2. Part of God’s design for life is free will, and as such, mankind has the capacity to choose good or evil. So in the same way that the earth — its natural beauty and resources — have been tainted, damaged or even depleted as a result of the choices made by man, the choices of mankind over the course of all time have impacted the conditions of life.

3. God is at work in the midst of suffering. Naturally, that leads the question of what He is doing. I propose He uses different methods than what we think we would choose if we were God.

• God acts through our choice to ask for help. By asking for God’s help, we admit a need for Him and begin to trust and believe He can and will answer our request.

• God acts through His command for us to love one another. A New Testament writer wrote that all the commandments were summed up in this one statement: Love your neighbor as yourself (Galatians 5:14). Love for one another should spur us to take action toward helping those who suffer and continuing to seek solutions.

• God acts through knowledge He gives to mankind. Medicines and other helpful technologies are made possible by the knowledge, understanding and wisdom God endowed to those individuals who made those discoveries or designs.

The following are a couple additional thoughts as to why God allows suffering though He is all-powerful.

• That we might gain wisdom. God sometimes sees it necessary for us to work through a problem and learn something, gain some ounce of wisdom, knowledge or understanding.

• That we might seek a relationship with God. Suffering can cause us to seek something greater upon which to depend and from which to draw strength, hope and love. God loves us and wants us to seek a relationship, a friendship, with Him.

God’s ultimate goal is to restore things to the way they were designed to be — without suffering, death or disease and nothing separating man and God. And God did not remove himself from human suffering, but rather became human. Jesus experienced pain, suffering and separation from God. Through Jesus, God has provided an answer to suffering – an eternal answer, not always the surface change or answer we may expect.

— Jennifer McClure is assistant editor of Today’s Pentecostal Evangel and blogs at Going Up? (jmcclure.agblogger.org).