Why does God allow death and suffering?

Suffering comes to us from different quarters and for various reasons, but that which is testing the greatest number now, and causing the most suffering at this time is the war, and many are asking why it should be? Why, if God is good, should there be any war at all? That is a question that calls for an answer. God is good, ten thousand times ten thousand voices bear witness to His goodness, but the world as such has rejected God, and despised the riches of His goodness and forbearance and long-suffering not knowing that His goodness would lead them to repentance (Rom. 2:4) and has chosen to follow Satan, the adversary instead of God. In Eden Adam listened to the voice of Satan and turned his back upon God and by that act of disobedience sin entered into the world and death by sin (Rom. 5:13) and when sin came in, peace spread its wings and flew away. “There is no peace, says the Lord, unto the wicked” (Isa. 48:22). The world has been Satan’s world since that day and “suffering and sweat and tears and blood” are the result, they are part of sin’s foul brood.

"Bewildered." — Yes, thousands are bewildered at the unparalleled destruction of human life of which we are the witnesses — unparalleled not merely as to numbers, but as to the hatred that inspires it, the callous ingenuity with which it is planned, the ferocity with which it is done, and the unspeakable misery and tears that accompany it. They are bewildered because they know that God is good, and also almighty; and they cannot understand why He does not intervene in power and punish the instigators and perpetrators of such crimson deeds, and establish a reign of righteousness on the earth. The scoffer also says, "Why does God allow such things to happen, if He is what you claim for Him?" And in the taunt the blame for all man's misery is cast upon God.

The woes of the human race are beyond the possibility of exaggeration, and seem to rise up at every turn as a witness against the notion of infinite goodness, for if God be all powerful, how is it that for so many millenniums His creature has been left in this corner of His creation to welter unpitied in his wretchedness? Can the Creator be indifferent to the woes of His creature! Who can tell us? Is there no voice from Him?

The Bible alone accounts for the presence of evil, and its resultant misery and death. By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin. It is a righteous thing that misery and death, with all their concomitant evils, should be the lot of man — the righteous dealings of a just and holy God with rebels; and, while sin remains, righteousness demands that all these evils — the fruit of sin — should also remain. Even God's saints, while here in the body, are exposed to the sorrows to which humanity is heir. The Lord Jesus Himself submitted, in grace truly, to all the consequences — sin excepted — of taking a place among men and specially the remnant of Israel, a thing wholly distinct from being made sin on the cross. To remove the sufferings while sin is present would be a denial of God's righteous government.

Through one man, says the great apostle, sin entered into the world, and death through sin. When man fell, "dying thou shalt die" began; and Adam was only a father after he sinned. The race is a fallen one. Physical maladies are the symptoms and evidence of the mortality that is the portion of every child of Adam. Nor did he deny the sufferings of this present time, though he counts them not worthy to be compared with the coming glory to be revealed toward us. For we know, says he, that the whole creation groans together and travails in pain together until now.

The Word of God, however, teaches us something different. Death is the domain of God's great adversary, Satan, who “had the power of death” (Heb. 2:14). Because the first man was deceived by his craftiness, death could enter our world: “Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin” (Rom. 5:12). Death, one of the other apostles says, is the last link in the chain of evil that begins with the desires of our sinful hearts (James 1:13-15). And as not Adam and Eve only, but all their descendants were sinners, death spread to all men.

This simple truth strikes at the root of all human pride — all pride of birth, all pride of ancestry. We are all, as men, sprung from one common stock, one head, one source. We are all begotten in one image and that is a ruined man. The head of the race and the race of which he is head, are all involved in one common ruin. Looked at from a legal or social standpoint, there may be differences, but looked at from a divine standpoint, there is none. If you want a true idea of the condition of each member of the human race, you must look at the condition of the head. You must go back to Genesis 3 and read these words, “He drove out the man.” Here is the root of the whole matter. Here is the source of the river the streams whereof have made sad the millions of Adam's posterity for nearly 6000 thousand years. Sin has entered and snapped the link, defaced the image of God, corrupted the sources of life, brought in death and given Satan the power of death.

The fact is, so far from the truth are those who judge solely from present experience, that man was naturally made at the outset to live. Death was sin's wages, not then a physiological necessity. God had provided the means for prolonging his life if obedient; but deprived him of that means peremptorily when fallen. For what greater misery, or moral anomaly, than an everlasting life of sin? Death therefore is in no way a debt of nature but of sin; and here we read its knell for each even of those who stood aloof from the evil way of Cain, the ancestors not of Israel only but in due time of the Messiah. Of Adam, so of Seth, Kenai], Mahalaleel, Jared, it was alike said "he died." Now that man is a sinner, it is the one event that happens to all in the seen world; in the unseen there will be another still more solemn. "For it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this judgment" (Heb. 9:27).

Sin came by Adam, the first man, the head of a lost and ruined race — the head of a race appointed to death. For “in Adam, all die.” All sinful mankind is then briefly comprehended in one man, Adam. His posterity have inherited his fallen nature: they are consequently sinners by nature and by practice: they fall under the same sentence of death as Adam. There is no escape from this sentence: it is only perfectly righteous and necessary, if the honor of God is to be maintained. Death is God's answer to sin: there is no other. Man may attempt to get rid of death; but he must first get rid of sin, and this he has neither ability nor desire to do. So that whatever his fear or abhorrence of death, it is one appointment that he cannot avoid.

As regards death, it is the penalty of sin. It was by sin that death came to Adam, but the death that came thus to him has passed on to his descendants. Involved in his moral ruin by his sin, deriving from him his fallen, sinful nature, to be righteously exempted from the death he brought in by sin, his children must establish a right to live. Not one has ever done this. They all sin, and so death justly passes to them. In the holy government of God it would be impossible to exempt from death the sinning children of Adam, although it is not their sinning that brought death into the world. It was brought into the world by the sin of Adam. It came in thus under the government of God as penalty for sin, and it necessarily passes to all that sin — which all do. Righteously, therefore, all die.