Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

-Acts 17:11

Why does God allow suffering?

How could there be a loving God if the world is so full of evil and suffering?

For all people to have equal value, there has to be something that is equally true of all people, in virtue of which we can demand that each person be treated fairly.

What is the thing that is equally true of every single human person?

Only one thing: The love of God that is for every single person and that cannot be earned and cannot be lost.

‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD, ‘As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’

-Isaiah 55:8-9

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!

-Job 38:4-5a

If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have (at the same moment) a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know. Indeed, you can’t have it both ways.

-Tim Keller, The Reason for God

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world…

-Ephesians 1:4a

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you…

-Jeremiah 1:5a

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

-Psalm 139:13

…what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?

-Psalm 8:4 NLT

GRACE: unmerited love.

Love at its best is not based on what we earn, or merit, or deserve. It is based on grace.

Claim: It would be evil to create people into a world that you know will produce serious suffering in their lives.

To accept that claim, you will not only need to call God evil, you will also need to call evil ANYONE who decides to have a child.

Then he said to them, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death…’

-Matthew 26:38a

Thus do the gods justify the life of man: they themselves live it—the only satisfactory theodicy!

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

For by the blood of Christ we are set free…

-Ephesians 1:7a GNT

…And the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before.

-Job 42:10b ESV

Some people think the problem of suffering should push us AWAY from God. For me, it is precisely because I feel the problem of suffering so severely that I am led to trust the only God who can do something about it.

However, as it is written: “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived” — the things God has prepared for those who love him…

-1 Corinthians 2:9

Make a Decision