Why does God allow 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.

God does not cause the suffering to His own, but He allows it to happen, so that His servants can benefit from the experience (e.g. increase their faith), and also for His own glory. Two examples are: Job, whom Satan tested to the uttermost, see Job 1 & 2, and Peter, whom Satan desired to sift as wheat, Luke 22:31.

In 1983 a famous Rabbi in the US, Harold Kushner, published a book about the problem of suffering. In it he suggested that we should not blame God for sufferings (which is right); then he goes on to say that God is good, but that He cannot help it when evil befalls His people (which, of course, is a wrong thesis). Perhaps we may remind ourselves at this point of Romans 8:28, where we see the very opposite of Kushner's claim. God not only allows adverse circumstances, He is even in full control and uses them to form believers in His school' (Rom. 5:3-5; Jam. 1:3). His ways ultimately, and surely lead to the fulfilment of His purpose, that we should be conformed to Christ, the Firstborn among many brethren (Rom. 8:29). Why do we have sufferings? Is it not also, to make us realize that we are living in a world which is in direct opposition to God's will? (cf. 1 Peter 2:15).

The question has been often asked, Why does God allow the people on whom He has set His love to suffer in this way? and the answer is simple. It is because He loves them. There may be, there are, other reasons, but this is the chief. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and if the heart wander chastening is necessary. The wise man tells us, "By sorrow the heart is made better," and experience teaches us the truth of this. How readily will evil attach itself to the best of us! but in the furnace of affliction the dross is separated from the purer metal, and consumed. Moreover, when we endure chastening, God deals with us as with sons; and every trial which visits us, were we but patient under it, would be fruitful in blessing to our souls. True, the experience of passing through the trial is not pleasant; it would be no trial if it were; but a morning of joy succeeds the night of sorrow, and in the quiet after-time we say with David, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted."

Down the ages, God has often allowed His own to be evilly entreated, and it is not always possible for us to understand why He should allow wicked men to persecute and slay His saints and His servants. We do know that God allows these things for the purifying of His people, and that all His actions towards His own are in the perfection of His love and wisdom; and even if wicked men seem to prosper, and the righteous are put to grief, yet the day is surely coming when, at the judgment seat of Christ, we shall understand as we cannot now, the ways of God, which are past finding out.

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.

These are what may be termed the outward consequences of sin, which are attached to our present condition of humanity, and which exist in relation to the earth whereon man was when he disobeyed God. But deeper down is the secret cause of these consequences — man having a sinful nature and being alienated from God. The deeper of those sorrows is that which is spiritual. If the painful facts of human woe are looked at in such a way as to exclude the cause of all the harvest of sorrow, then the reality of man's state is passed over, the root of human wretchedness is left unjudged, and man is not face to face with God.

What should we say of a father whose craving for drink had beggared his family, looking upon the results of his sin — his pale and wasted children, and his woe-stricken, anxious wife — and stopping in his thoughts at these consequences of his sin, instead of digging deep into his miserable heart for the root of the evil? Should not we cry shame upon the man, bid him loathe himself and repent, instead of merely lamenting the existing state of his home! When people are plaintive about the condition of man, and avoid the root of human misery, even man's sin in departing from God, they are merely trifling with the disease. The floods of sorrow which roll over this world are caused by the letting out of the waters of sin disobedience opened the floodgates, and by nature we are the children of disobedience.

But the Bible goes to the root of the matter and gives us the cause of man's inhumanity. He is not as God made him. He has broken away from God's rule, and proclaimed his independence of God, as a star might break away from its orbit. And this determination to be master of his own destiny is the cause of every sorrow and calamity. “By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin,” and the terrible consequences of that primal disobedience, which the whole race by nature has willingly endorsed, is that,

Let no one suppose that those who suffer most in this world are the greatest sinners; it is often not so, though undoubtedly the greatest sinners will suffer the most in the lake of fire, for at the last great judgment they are to be judged every man "according to their works" (Rev. 20:13). We have no intention of charging the poor and suffering with the greater guilt. What we desire to do is to show, in a few words from the Bible, what is the cause of the universal misery, and it is plainly taught there that the world's misery springs from the world's sins, and the fact that it rejected and killed the only One who could have put it right.

In fallen humanity man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Besides the afflictions of man in body, mind, and estate, there are also the oppressions they suffer one from another. In some parts of the earth slavery still exists and in more enlightened parts the rich oppress the poor. James 2:6. Man is very ready to attribute all such things to the Creator, forgetting that God made man upright and God declared that everything that He had made, including man, was very good. It is sin that has brought in the misery, and man, by becoming the willing servant of Satan, has put himself into the hands of his enemy. Besides the afflictions incident on fallen humanity, there are afflictions that fall specially upon the Christian. There are those he may have to suffer for righteousness' sake as well as for Christ's sake. Another class of afflictions which the Christian has to bear is inflicted directly from the hand of God for his good. See CHASTENING.