How Could a Loving God Allow So Much Suffering?

The hobbits do not know how their story will end. If it ended in this moment, it would be bleak and hopeless. But the story goes on. Tolkien takes them through darkness and suffering and loss to a painful victory, as Gollum bites the ring off Frodo’s hand. The story leaves Frodo scarred in body and mind. But it is a victory nonetheless, and one of which he and Sam hear songs sung and stories told. Finally, changed and matured, Frodo goes with the elves to their land across the sea. Tolkien’s work was sculpted by his Christian faith, and that was a faith not just in Jesus’s death but also in his resurrected life. The journey of all the central characters is through darkness—even death—to new life. But tap them on the shoulder at the darkest moment, and none would know where they are in the story.

If you are in the midst of suffering now, hope of a happy ending may feel crass. A friend who lost his first child to miscarriage shared with me that for a long time, he and his wife could only pray Psalm 88, which ends with darkness. The panacea platitude “Everything happens for a reason” is often cold comfort to an anguished heart. But another friend, whose teenage son was brain damaged in a sport accident, shared his perspective on suffering like this: “People often think that the reality of suffering is an embarrassment to the Christian faith. But I think suffering is the greatest apologetic for Christianity there is.”

From an atheist perspective, not only is there no hope of a better end to the story; there is no ultimate story. There is nothing but blind, pitiless indifference [quoting from Richard Dawkins earlier in the chapter]. From a Christian perspective, there is not only hope for a better end; there is intimacy now with the One whose resurrected hands still bear the scars of the nails that pinned him to his cross. Suffering is not an embarrassment to the Christian faith. It is the thread with which Christ’s name is stitched into our lives.

Genesis to Revelation

This perspective on suffering helps us understand the grand sweep of the biblical narrative. The beginning of the Bible paints a picture of Paradise: human beings in relationship with God and with each other, unstained by sin or suffering or death. Many people conclude from this that the end point of Christianity is a return to Eden. But when we examine this idea, we realize that it renders the whole of human history a cosmic waste of time. God could just have stopped Adam and Eve from sinning in the first place. And even if there were reasons to allow sin—granting human free will, perhaps—one can imagine a much shorter, straighter line to draw between the beginning and the end than the Scriptures describe. But the Bible’s “new creation” is not just a return to the idyllic old. It is far better.

In the early Genesis narrative, Adam and Eve knew God as Creator and Lord—perhaps, even, as friend. But Christians know Jesus far more intimately: as Savior, Lover, Husband, Head, Brother, Fellow Sufferer, and their Resurrection and their Life. The first humans could not have dreamed of this earth-shattering intimacy with God. It was an intimacy best glimpsed in their experience of each other before they turned from their Maker. But the lack of that intimacy with God himself explains the strange declaration that it was “not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18). The original vision of humanity was very good. But it was not the best. The best, from a biblical perspective, was yet to come. And the way to get there would be through suffering.

My eight-year-old is an avid reader and an aspiring writer. Her vocabulary is broad, her imagination is wild, but her stories are dull. Why? Because she strives for happiness throughout. Without suffering, her characters cannot develop. Without fellowship in suffering, they cannot truly bond. The Bible begins and ends with happiness, but the meat of the story is raw. Christians are promised that one day, God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Rev. 21:4). But we are not promised that God will not allow us to cry in the first place. What end could possibly be worth all this pain? Jesus says he is.

Read More About This Topic

• Is Genesis Real History?
• Death & Pain In The Created Order
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Suffering and Christian Ethics

In Jesus, Christians have the promise of a lover who will never leave them or forsake them, who sits with them in suffering to the bitter end—and beyond. As Jesus’s “body” on earth, therefore, Christians must throw themselves into fellowship with sufferers. This is not a fellowship devoid of practical help. Christians were the first to found hospitals and—for all their moral failure—have done more in global terms to alleviate suffering than any other movement. We see this historically and we see it today.

In 2018, ISIS victim and humanitarian Nadia Murad shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Congolese physician Denis Mukwege. Dr. Mukwege, nicknamed “Doctor Miracle,” is a pioneering surgeon who has treated thousands of victims of sexual violence for the medical aftereffects of gang rape and brutality. Recognizing Jesus’s relentless call on Christians to serve the suffering, Mukwege urges fellow believers, “As long as our faith is defined by theory and not connected with practical realities, we shall not be able to fulfil the mission entrusted to us by Christ.” “If we are Christ’s,” Mukwege continues, “we have no choice but to be alongside the weak, the wounded, the refugees and women suffering discrimination.”[2]

Those living in the slums of Calcutta know this from Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa’s goal was profoundly theological—“seeing and adoring Jesus . . . in the distressing disguise of the poor”[3]—but not at all theoretical. It meant caring for people no one else cared for, touching people no one else would touch. Christians are not called to compassionate detachment. Christians truly following Jesus are deeply attached, and covered in tears—their own, and those of others—just like their Lord.