Why does God allow suffering and evil?

‘Believers have turned into atheists over death and suffering.’ NBA superstar Kobe Bryant attended church two hours before his death.

So how do you justify God in this when he was a believer?

When you have been granted free will evil creeps in. To eliminate evil you have to eliminate free will. Mankind is his own worst enemy. God allows suffering to remind us we are mortal and not divine beings.

When you question God first look at your own sin, can you point the finger at Him when you defy Him to His face?

Who are you?

God is love and all-powerful, yet suffering in the world many believe He can’t exist and allow this to happen.

Why did God allow Adam and Eve to make sinful choices?

So if God is not responsible are angels responsible for the mess we are in?

We mustn’t forget the animal kingdom as they suffer greatly too?

Evil is understood to encompass both moral evils caused by free human actions and natural evil caused by natural phenomena such as disease, earthquakes, and floods. Evil is a dominating factor in our lives and the animal kingdom. Considering all the evil in the world, does God really care about us?

He cares enough to have sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to suffer and die for us. Because of God’s great love and sacrifice, we now have a way to be reconciled with Him through Christ. This does not mean that suffering will stop, but it does mean that the saved will spend eternity with God. There will come a time when God will wipe every tear from our eyes:

Revelation 21:4
“There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things” will pass away.”

Scripture tells us that God exists and He is the only God in three co-equal persons. The earth is enduring evil:

Romans 8:22
“We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

Genesis 8:22
“As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.”

When we firmly lay hold of this promise from God, we can begin to view our current troubles as light and momentary compared to the far greater eternal weight of glory. God exists as a kingdom ruler allowing evil. He has proven that He will take action against the wicked by Noah’s flood that wiped out millions of people. God gets blamed for all the bad things that happen in the world, yet generally, man is at fault for everything. God leaves the dominion or stewardship of evil for a short time in the hands of humanity and the devil. God is Master Weaver. He stretches the yarn and convolutes the colours, the ragged twine with the velvet strings, the pains with the pleasures. Nothing escapes His divine outward reach. Every ruler, weather pattern, and iota are at His direction. He passes the baton back and forth across the generations, and as He does, a blueprint emerges. Satan weaves; God reweaves. God takes full responsibility for evil as He is the universal Sovereign. 2000 years ago the people excepted the fact evil exists and so does God.

Now we live in a world where evil exists and God can’t exist because of evil if He is love?

Man has reinvented God in their image and likeness while others have gone on to unbelief. Love has been reinvented to now conflict with Gods love, and His moral sovereignty. With a deranged mindset, man has come to the conclusion if God exists He has limited power, so humanity has to discover the answer to all the problems we face. Or others digest that God has the power but is somehow limited in knowledge to act therefore He permits a man to gain as much knowledge as possible through technology. However, more than three-quarters also agreed that a crisis will create significant new opportunities, while others come to the Lord through suffering.

So actually here evil can be used for good. Others say God can’t know the future as it hasn’t happened yet. This is the most ludicrous argument considering we have the Bible with Revelation, prophesy and events recorded by God. Psalm 22 foreshadowed the crucifixion of Jesus, written by King David 1000 years before Jesus was crucified. Isiah 53 reveals the plan that God implemented for Jesus Christ to die on the cross. This was also written 700 years before the event. The nature of God and the scripture have been reinvented by society to fit manmade ideas and conceptions not in the will of God. The Creator allowed evil and patterned it into the universe without being responsible for it. We can see this in the garden of Eden, he gave Adam and Eve a command not to eat, yet they took the responsibility to disobey the regulation.

The problem of evil is you can never get away from the fact of God unless you reinvent another God to meet your ideology of Him.

Another thing to consider is from the famous quote ‘bad things happen to good people.’ Well, Jesus tells us no one is good except God alone. Jesus’ constitutional teaching here is that goodness flows not from a man’s deeds, but rather from God Himself. Jesus invites man to follow Him, the only means of doing good by God’s ultimate high standard. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. This is just another way of saying that man’s nature is only evil continually.

How do we defend the justice of God?

Well, the authority of scripture, as humans are made in the image of God and likeness. As we experience the wholeness that Jesus offers, we are to carry his justice forward in the world. Evil is something that goes against his authority and reflects rebellion against His image and likeness. Humans have to have free will to act, if God addresses evil this would violate mankind’s will. God ordained evil for His glory so mankind would cling to Him in times of hardship and trouble. We praise Him for defeating evil at the cross. Jesus has disarmed the powers. He has taken away Satan’s power to hold sinners to the debt of their sins and trespasses. The power of sin is the law, and Satan attempted to use the demands of the law to destroy God’s people. But Christ, in taking the law’s curse on himself has wrested this weapon from Satan. The devil hasn’t yet been so utterly destroyed that he can’t do battle against the disciple. But he cannot hurt us spiritually or bring a successful charge against us. We’re now free to wrestle against the spiritual forces of evil knowing we will get the victory if we repent, believe, water baptism and receive the Holy Spirit. The death of Christ was the greatest victory over evil. We could summarise that the satisfaction of divine justice shames the powers and shows Christ to be our victor.