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How can a good God be in control when there’s so much suffering in the world?
Brianna McClean, 03rd September 2019 / City
In our second blog post answering the big questions of suffering, Brianna McClean and Brad Konemann look at an age-old question that Christians in every generation have wrestled with: How can a good God be in control when there’s so much suffering in the world?
This puzzle has plagued believers in every generation: How can a good God be in control when there’s so much suffering in the world?
At first glance, the question seems to offer two equally disturbing alternatives. Either:
A. God is good, but isn’t completely in control
or
B. God is completely in control, but isn’t good.
For those of us who believe in the God of the Bible, neither answer is an option. Let’s spend a few minutes thinking about why.
God’s Sovereign Control over All Things
The Bible leaves no room for doubt on this matter: God alone is completely in control of all things.
Genesis establishes God as the Creator of the universe: ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’.
As the story of God’s people unfolds through the Old Testament, his complete sovereignty is affirmed over and over again. God controls everything from the fate of nations (Deuteronomy 8:20) to the weather (Job 5:10). Pslam 115:3 says, ‘Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases’.
The New Testament assigns this divine attribute to Jesus Christ the Son of God, in whom ‘all the fulness of God dwells’ (Colossians 1:19) and who ‘upholds everything by the word of his power’ (Hebrews 1:3). Jesus has been given ‘all authority on heaven and earth’ by his Father in heaven (Matthew 28:18) and even now sits at his Father’s right hand ruling and reigning until he returns to establish his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
The God of the Bible is never taken by surprise or overwhelmed by suffering. There is not one moment of time which is outside of his control.
As we think about suffering, this might seem like bad news. If God is in control of everything, that must surely mean he ordains pain and is sovereign over every starving child, every broken heart, every abusive home, every crippling illness.
We’re left with a gut-wrenching question: ‘Is God really good?’
Good God, Broken World
The Bible outrightly rejects any suggestion that God is an accomplice in evil. He is blindingly holy and absolutely good. The Scriptures are clear that God hates evil.
When God created the world, he declared that everything was very good. The creation reflected the Creator’s goodness.
There was no death, pain, or injustice until sin entered our world. When Adam and Eve chose to disobey God’s loving rule and live their own way, sin came like a terrible poison, infecting everything with the curse of death. Every part of creation and human experience is now impacted by sin—our minds, bodies, emotions, relationships, work, even the physical world itself.
Each of us repeat this tragic choice. Just as the body cannot survive without oxygen, humanity cannot live without God. By cutting ourselves off from God the giver of life, we live under the curse of death, and experience the pain of suffering as a consequence of sin.
We suffer because we live in a broken sin-infected world.
Who Is Responsible for Suffering?
Does this then mean that suffering stands outside God’s control, that he is simply a cosmic bystander watching the world he loves destroy itself?
No. God remains sovereign over his world, and yet he allows humans free will and holds us responsibile for our actions. As scholar Don Carson puts it, ‘God stands behind evil in such a way that not even evil takes place outside the bounds of his sovereignty, yet the evil is not chargeable to him: it is always chargeable to secondary agents’.
We see this illustrated in the story of Joseph, who experiences unjust suffering at the hand of his family, and declares to his brothers that ‘you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good’ (Genesis 50:20). Thus both human and divine agents stand behind the one action in different ways. The sinful actions of Joseph’s brothers are not God’s actions, and yet mysteriously God was somehow working through their sin and Joseph’s suffering to accomplish his good purposes.
In the end, there is a certain mystery to how all this fits together that we cannot resolve.
As Henri Blocher writes, ‘evil is not there to be understood, but to be fought’. And this is where the story of the Bible really comes into its own and gives us a satisfactory answer to the problem of evil.
What is God Doing About Suffering?
God hates evil and is ‘grieved in his heart’ (Genesis 6:6) at the state of his sin-infected world. He loves us too much to leave us stuck in our mess of sin and suffering.
The Bible tells one big story of God’s promise to reverse the curse of the fall and rescue his creation from sin and suffering, bringing all things back under his loving rule to experience his blessing.
The rescue story of the Bible climaxes in Jesus’s death and resurrection, where we see God fighting evil and conquering it. As Blocher writes, ‘The cross demonstrates the evilness of evil, the sovereignty of God, and the goodness of God’.
As we live between Jesus’s resurrection and return, we continue to experience suffering as a consequence of sin. But the day will come when Jesus will bring his kingdom, defeating the final enemy of death, and establishing peace on earth. On that day, ‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away’ (Revelation 21:4).
This is the great hope we cling to as we continue to experience the pain and tears of life in a sin-infected world.
In conclusion, we can affirm that God is in control, he is good, and he is not responsible for evil. And yet we realise that even a correct theological answer may never fully satisfy a suffering heart.
As we continue to build our knowledge of God, let’s also bring our hearts to him in humble prayer, and ask that he would help us to trust in his sovereignty—even when we may not understand it.