No one can know all the answers as to why God allows so much suffering in the world, but there are some explanations that go some way to helping people understand some of the reasons.
If your life is being blighted by a problem like depression, worry, phobias, panic or OCD, an addiction, a marriage problem, dealing with past abuse, coping with bullies, or grieving for someone, and what you'd really prefer to know is how to get over your problems rather than why God's allowing them, visit our Free self-help series.
This isn't an in-depth article, but it provides a few things to ponder on. I began to write it in response to a question I was asked, as to why people can't just turn pain down, and why God allows so much other suffering in the world. It doesn't address in detail the question of suffering in wartime.
Perhaps the best way to make sense of the idea that an all-knowing and all-powerful God could nevertheless allow world-class mismanagement and evil actions to happen resulting in the deaths of millions, along with the suffering of individuals on a daily basis for other reasons, is to think of life as a journey, a comparatively very short transitional period leading to eternity, and to think of our time here as a period of training, and a time where the quality of our character is displayed and assessed for the amount of compassion we show to others, in order that we be judged fairly on judgment day.
It isn't only the quality of the character of the person suffering that's being tested, but the quality of those around them. Every incidence of suffering is an opportunity for those around the person suffering to show compassion and to help them overcome their problems to the best of their abilities. The quality of compassion in a person's character shows up much more clearly when some of those around them are suffering so it has cause to be displayed.
Of course, suffering can lead to a feeling of helplessness and being overwhelmed and other emotional pain on the part of some of those who witness it. Yet it may be an opportunity for compassion on the part of others with better training and resources who are witnessing the same suffering, or an inspiration for others to develop the means of helping such people.
Suffering can also be a means of developing compassion in people that makes for less selfish and more caring individuals than a perfect world would, although maybe some personality types are more likely to be inspired to greater compassion by suffering than others.
I believe that failing to take opportunities to try to help others in the face of clear need when it's in a person's power to do so, as well as deliberately causing harm, will be judged, according to the degree of negligence or evil committed.
But suffering is also an opportunity for acts of personal heroism and compassion, and I believe that people will be eternally rewarded according to how much they show.
To illustrate the point that suffering and imperfection allow others to display a compassion which is maybe what God's looking for when he allows misfortune, here's a heart-warming story of an event that led a father to a conclusion about why God had allowed his child to be mentally retarded: Where is God's Perfection?
To quote a clip from it:
"I believe," the father answered, "that when God brings a child like this into the world, the perfection that He seeks is in the way people react to this child."
People need pain to survive. And it can help us avoid serious injury. That might not be any consolation to people in serious pain that won't go away. But if someone has a broken arm, for instance, they need to take special care of it, and if they didn't feel any pain, they would just use it as normal and damage it some more.
I heard about a leprosy doctor, Paul Brand, who came to understand how valuable pain can be. His patients couldn't feel any pain because the disease had damaged their nerve endings, and they could do things like take freshly-cooked potatoes out of the fire with their bare hands or walk on broken glass with bare feet without stopping to think that they were doing themselves any damage. With some people, if they think they can do something quickly enough that it won't hurt them much, it can be very tempting to do it without taking any precautions. And it must be more tempting to do that kind of thing if one doesn't really think about the consequences because one doesn't feel any pain at all. And then, a person can hurt themselves more than they ever imagined they would.
Sometimes, however, leprosy sufferers hurt themselves without even realising they're doing anything that might damage them. Leprosy patients are often pictured as having mere stumps for hands and other deformities. But according to Paul Brand, these aren't caused by the disease itself. They can be caused by the careless or unwittingly dangerous acts of the people who have it, putting their hands on hot stoves for example, not realising they're hot, and then getting serious burns which become infected and eventually cause the hand to be so diseased that it has to be amputated, or just gets so badly burned in the first place that it ends up deformed. One of Paul Brand's patients was digging all day and only at the end of the day realised that the shovel he was using had a nail sticking out of it.
Brand also tells of a baby who was born without the ability to feel pain, and one day her mother went into the room where she was, and she had chewed the tip of one of her fingers off and was amusing herself by drawing lines and circles with the interesting new substance that was coming out of her finger - blood.
Paul Brand and a team tried to invent a substitute for pain to let his leprosy patients know they were in danger. He tried giving them a hearing aid with a system where a buzzer would go off when they were doing something that might damage them, but they just ignored it. He tried a system of flashing lights, but they ignored those too. He tried a system which would give them electric shocks on a part of their body that was still sensitive like the armpit, but they would turn the system off when they wanted to do something that might set the shock signal off, and switch it back on afterwards. So he realised that the control would have to be out of the person's reach for the system to be effective. He came to greatly appreciate the value of the warning system of pain.
For more information on the benefits pain can provide, see:
Long-lasting pain can clearly be far more of a problem for people. Much of it, however, is preventable, with a healthy diet and other such things. Much chronic pain is a consequence of bad lifestyle choices. Some cancers and heart disease are related to bad diet, for example. Here are a couple of articles on foods and other natural ways of reducing the risk of cancer and other diseases:
If longer-lasting pain was very easily switched off, people might have similar problems to those experienced by leprosy patients. People probably wouldn't bother to go and see their doctors a lot of the time when the pain was warning them that something serious was the matter because they had cancer or heart disease if they could just turn it down and forget about it, unless they perhaps had severe breathing problems or other serious symptoms. They might not worry about what was wrong, or turn the pain down because it was easier than going to see a doctor, until they unexpectedly died, and they'd realise too late that they should have done something about their situation before.
People suffering heart attacks might just turn down the pain instead of calling an ambulance, not realising what their symptoms signified.
People who needed to rest for the good of their health might just turn the pain down and get up, and give themselves a worse injury. People with chronic back pain might just turn the pain down and carry on doing the things that caused their pain in the first place, until their back was perhaps so badly injured that they were unable to move. There would be much less incentive for care homes, for example, to introduce hoists for lifting patients so care workers didn't incur the strain of doing it by hand, or to train people to lift heavy things and people properly so they didn't damage their backs, if there didn't seem to be any serious short-term consequences of making people lift others by themselves. Thus, people would have had far less motivation to improve safety standards at work. People would resort to suing companies for serious injury they'd accumulated over the years, but many people's quality of life might have been permanently ruined by then. Companies often only think in the short term.
However, there were always things around that could alleviate pain. Alcohol and herbal remedies, for example. Thus, it could be argued that God has provided help to some extent for pain sufferers. Relaxation exercises can make chronic pain seem more bearable, and so can doing something that distracts one from the pain.
And it has been noted that soldiers would carry severely injured fellow-soldiers to safety in the second world war even when they had been wounded themselves, as if they didn't notice the pain; but when they were in hospital later, some of them cried when the nurse gave them an injection, when they had less urgent things to do and more time to think about it. (Injections were more painful in those days. The substances were more acidic, and so they stung.)
Footballers sometimes carry on playing even though they've picked up an injury, and the pain only really hits them when they stop. It's probably the power of adrenaline.
Thus, if stimulating things can be found for people in pain to do or watch/listen to, they are likely not to feel it quite so much.
That's not to trivialise severe pain, however, - the worse pain is, the more difficult it may be to take one's mind off it.
Some painful conditions can be alleviated by changes in lifestyle. For instance, changes in diet can sometimes reduce the pain of arthritis. Much back pain can apparently be alleviated by spending some time doing gentle exercise, or things that relax tension, since much back pain is apparently caused by muscle tension.
Clearly, when pain becomes chronic, and though it's obvious something's wrong, there doesn't seem to be a solution to it, it no longer has any benefit as a warning signal. Thus, it should be minimised as far as possible.
As for emotional pain, Depression and other emotional problems can be caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, but a person's life experiences can often dictate what kind of chemical imbalance they will have in their brain. Sometimes the cause is purely physical, but often they can be helped a lot by therapy which teaches them to think positively about things, as well as by airing their grievances and building positive strategies for dealing with any of them that they can, becoming more assertive. Once people have been through emotional pain, they can often end up more caring.
I was reading some literature by the Christian counsellor Celwyn Hughes about what he believed to be the benefits of suffering once, which said that someone had told him that since his wife died, he seemed to have developed a sensitivity towards others that he hadn't had before.
A very important thing to state, however, is that people should never be allowed to continue to suffer in the hope that it will do them more good, if something can be done for them. That would be like experimenting on them, because that could do them more harm than good.
But suffering can sometimes motivate people to do great acts of caring that have long-lasting benefits. I heard about a woman in the 19th century called Josephine Butler who came home one day after she'd been away for a while and her little daughter rushed to greet her and fell over the stair banister onto the hard floor below and died. Josephine was very upset, but she decided to ease her pain by channelling it into something positive by finding people worse off than she was to help. She opened a home for young women who had been forced to become prostitutes out of necessity, and helped to change oppressive laws that were harming prostitutes and potentially other women, thus causing improvements in the lives of many.
I once read a message that someone had written to a group which was set up to discuss ways of improving the criminal justice system, which was written in response to someone's request for advice and support. The writer of the message said she'd been abducted, robbed and raped several years previously, and although she still wasn't over it, she wanted to put the experience to good use by helping others who'd been criminally harmed and thought she'd be more qualified to do so since she'd had such an experience. She said that although the memory of the experience often upset her, people often forgot the positive aspects of having had experiences like that.
We are led to believe in the Bible that God's ideal for us is that we are compassionate. While abuse can sometimes turn people into psychopaths, if we lived in a world free from anything harmful at all, people might not develop any empathy and compassion for others.
Of course, that isn't to say that people who inflict such harm on others should be treated any less harshly by the justice system or looked on any less unfavourably by people. No one should minimise the harm that such experiences cause. Often, the negative effects of such things may be far worse than the long-term positive ones.
But it's a common experience for those who have suffered to go on to want to make the lessons they have learned from the pain worthwhile by dedicating part of their lives to helping others.
People have said that life's experiences consist only partly of what happens to them; the more important aspects are how they respond to them.
Of course, Christians, and in fact anyone, ought to give suffering people all the support they can.
A few words from a nurse explain the importance that even just listening to people with problems they want to air can have:
Here's a story about how someone believes that suffering has actually resulted in positive things happening in her own life. It can cause people to reassess their values and dedicate their lives to the things that they feel really matter to them, since they become more aware of how life shouldn't be taken for granted:
Suffering can sometimes be like a discipline, purifying a person. For instance, a gossip who spreads a false rumour or a confidential peace of information and is subsequently ostracized by former friends for it may learn to be more respectful of others' feelings and gossip less. Someone who habitually makes fun of disabled or less gifted people may change their ways after they become disabled, perhaps only temporarily, themselves. See the example of this inspirational poem:
The Bible says that God can actually cause painful events to happen in people's lives sometimes in order to purify them. (See, for instance, Hebrews 12).
Sometimes, however, it's best not to look for explanations for suffering. They won't necessarily be found easily. Sometimes, any positive effects it may have may not become apparent till years later, if ever.
One reason for this is that suffering can not only have positive effects on the characters of those who have lived through it, but witnessing other people's hardships can also change people for the better and make them more compassionate. I read a story in the book of short inspirational stories Chicken Soup for the Soul by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, about a man who spent years feeling miserable and self-pitying. One evening, he was driving home in the rain when his car broke down. A tyre needed changing. He knocked on someone's door and a little boy answered who said he and his grandfather could help. The man sat in his car while the two of them jacked up the car and worked in the rain to change the tyre. It seemed to be taking a long time and he became annoyed and impatient. When they'd finished, they came to tell him, and he held out some money to the man but he just ignored it. The boy said he couldn't see it. Then the man realised that the grandfather must be blind, and yet he'd spent time laboriously feeling for everything he needed and changing the tyre in the rain, even though it had taken so long.
He was amazed, and ashamed of himself for having been so impatient, and from that time on, he stopped focusing his thoughts on himself and his misery and became thankful for what he had and thus much happier, and more concerned about others.
It may be that the blind man had influenced others in a similar way at other times in his life, and that other disabled people do.
Of course, this isn't to say that all suffering has a positive outcome, and people ought to be motivated to try to alleviate it whenever they can, since the effects can sometimes obviously be highly damaging.
Leaving aside the beneficial effects that suffering can sometimes have on people's characters, there is another reason why God allows it which is perhaps more significant. Since much or even most suffering is caused by man's inhumanity/negligence towards others, if God eliminated suffering, he'd have to do it partly by preventing us from having free will. As it is, we have the responsibility to use our will in a moral way. The fact that so many people don't is a major cause of suffering in the world, especially when people with power and influence use it in a destructive or corrupt way.
If we didn't have free will, it would mean that God would have to more-or-less control every one of us. So we'd either be like robots who didn't mind being controlled, or like people whose emotions were switched off beyond a certain point of provocation or under temptation to do something immoral, so we couldn't do any serious damage to anyone; or we'd be like people who couldn't really think for ourselves but resented God for it. It wouldn't be good enough just to make everyone so nice that they'd never want to do anyone any harm, because a lot of suffering results from actions committed by people who just didn't think of the possible consequences of them. Everyone would have to be made willing by God to obey a set of rules, like the commands for Christians in the Bible.
For instance, teenagers might just be negligent of the potential consequences of having sex, which can lead to the fear and unwanted responsibility caused by teenage pregnancy. People would all have to be programmed to want to obey a moral code like the Christian one. Maybe part of the reason God hasn't programmed everyone like that is because of the maturity of character, compassion, empathy and concern for others that suffering can sometimes produce in people.
It may be, however, that on some occasions, God does override a person's free will, controlling their actions to ensure a favourable outcome to a problem. Indeed, if he didn't, there wouldn't be any point in praying a lot of the time, which the Bible encourages us to do.
In fact, I've heard of things altering when people prayed. I read a book about a Welsh missionary, David Davies, who went to China in the 1930's and was captured and tortured by the Japanese who thought he might be spying for the Chinese. The book told of an incident he'd said had taken place before his capture, when a group of women were panicking because Japanese men had intruded into their quarters, and he went in and shouted at the women to pray. They did, and for whatever reason, the men left. Of course, there's no guarantee that that would happen every time.
Many other people have testified to what they believe to be the power of prayer, which is said to be stronger when combined with commitment to God, which partially means commitment to following the commands believed to be the expressed will of Christ laid down in the New Testament. Here are some links to stories about what the authors believe to have been answered prayer, and an article about some reasons for unanswered prayer:
The Bible says that God is passionately concerned about justice and that people should lead moral lives and care enough about the well-being of others not to harm them. It makes it clear that societies have been given the responsibility to discipline unruly members and to treat everybody fairly. (See, for example, Isaiah 58).
Much of the suffering in the world would be eliminated if people followed biblical instructions. That would include the suffering caused by greed/profiteering, domestic violence, unwanted pre-marital pregnancy, incest, murder, other crime and excessive alcohol use, as well as the suffering caused by sexually transmitted diseases and many of the other diseases that have plagued humanity.
Medical advances have helped alleviate a lot of suffering, but the most effective solutions to the problems have often been improvements in living conditions. Following the principles laid down for sanitation, hygiene and protecting food from contamination by insects laid down in Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy could have meant that conditions didn't get so bad in the first place. In previous centuries, sewage and refuse was piled up in the streets and became a breeding ground for disease. But the Bible encourages people to bury excrement. In the 19th century, one of the main killers of babies was what they called "Summer diarrhoea", caused by infection carried by flies. Flies got into food and milk in large numbers. Not only would disposing of refuse and the horse manure that flies were so attracted to have subdued the fly population, but following other Bible commands would have meant people made more effort to keep food covered up so no insects would fall in it.
In the Middle Ages, the Jews, inspired by the Bible's commands on sanitation, were blamed for a plague in Europe because they burned all the rubbish in the streets when the plague came, thus denying the rats that carried the fleas that harboured the bacteria that caused the plague their breeding ground. So they didn't suffer from the plague much. It's unfortunate that residents in other areas didn't do the same.
The Bible also instructs that people with certain diseases be quarantined for a while. I heard that when authorities in Europe in the Middle Ages, desperate for a way of tackling the Black Death, decided to try using the commands as an example of what to do about other disease and started isolating plague victims, that began to reduce the incidence of it.
Overcrowding, partly caused by the profiteering schemes of unscrupulous employers and landlords who built very cramped houses close together, meant that disease spread fast in poor areas in the 19th century in some industrialised towns/cities. Malnutrition was often caused by poor diet which could be a consequence of the low wages paid by businessmen who reaped huge profits. Safety standards at work were frequently extremely poor, and the government had to introduce regulations to rectify bad practices because compassion for the well-being of workers wasn't a high priority among many employers. The Bible insists that people should care about the needs of the poor and employees and treat them fairly.
The building of sewers to transport waste away from populated areas eliminated cholera epidemics in London in the 19th century. Using the Bible as a guide for hygiene practices and ethics could have eliminated much suffering long before.
Many people were killed by infection spread by doctors who didn't wash their hands in previous centuries. Doctors tended not to wash their clothing since they thought it was only going to get bloody again, and they could even treat people straight after touching dead bodies. The importance of cleanliness was not well understood for centuries. But the Bible contains instructions on strict hygienic measures which, if people had taken inspiration from them, would have saved many lives and prevented much suffering.
For more information on living conditions in the 19th century, see:
Suffering can sometimes make people want to search for God, and from a Christian perspective, if that inspires them to follow him and they end up in heaven because of it, then ultimately, it worked out for good.
To read a story about a man who says he encountered God in suffering, visit:
To quote briefly from it:
But when the doctors removed a lump from my groin and told me that it was malignant, then I got serious about locating God.
A bout of suffering, or a scare that makes people think of how easily they could die, can make them think of their behaviour and its consequences more soberly, particularly if they have some awareness of God and it makes them temporarily afraid of offending him because they realise how soon they could meet him. It can cause people to change their behaviour for the better, resulting in the good of their families and communities, and also, according to Christian teaching, more likely to enjoy a blissful eternity. Of course, such a behaviour change will be by no means universal.
But as the apostle Paul wrote, encouraging Christians going through suffering, suffering on earth will appear momentary in the light of eternity. (See 2 Corinthians 4, 16-17).
The Bible teaches that the suffering Christians go through can make us more worthy of eternity and better people, when it functions as a discipline, and as an inspiration to make us more compassionate towards others, and when it brings us closer to God because we have to rely on him more.
The Old Testament records many incidences and prophecies of how God caused/would cause whole nations to suffer severe hardship like disease, and even famine and war, in order to punish them for the pervasive harm their people were causing, and to motivate them to give up their wrongdoing and turn to him.
The impact of suffering for Christians going through severe illness will often be softened, because fear can make it much worse, and they have eternity to look forward to, so they won't be troubled by the fear of death or oblivion.
There are hints in the Bible that young children who die will go to heaven since they aren't old enough to be accountable for their actions. Whether this is so or not is uncertain, but if so, it would explain why God allows young children to die. It may also be that he foreknows that many will suffer more if left on earth; although it may be that his ideal is that they live and lead a life of godly influence on others, doing good in their communities, which the Bible instructs Christians to do.
Suffering may also cause us to enjoy heaven more because of the contrast.
Similarly, on earth, someone who's experienced deprivation is likely to appreciate the things they get more than someone who has always taken them for granted. Someone who's suffered may be more greatful for good times. Someone who's had a scare with death may think of life as more precious and so take more delight in it than someone who's always taken it for granted. Thus, suffering can cause joy to be intensified. A man told me that several years ago, one of his grandchildren died at the age of three. He said he was very griefstricken for a while, but now, he has a deeper joy in and appreciation for his other grandchildren, so he doesn't regret the pain he suffered at the loss. In fact, he says that other suffering has made him ultimately more joyful at the good things in life, so he wouldn't trade in any of it.
The Bible tells us that Christians should do good as a matter of course. To read an inspiring short story related to this, about someone who himself was suffering but devoted his life to helping others, see:
To quote from it briefly:
And from his small offering of words I learn a vast lesson. Do not spend the majority of your time and energy contemplating your life’s mission and purpose. Your purpose on earth is more readily discovered when you increase your awareness about what is going on around you and seek to help others.
Here are other brief stories of Christians who have spent much time working for the good of others:
The Bible has much to say on how Christians should live a life of goodness, including:
1 John chapter 3 (NLT)
16 We know what real love is because Christ gave up his life for us. And so we also ought to give up our lives for our Christian brothers and sisters. 17 But if anyone has enough money to live well and sees a brother or sister in need and refuses to help - how can God's love be in that person? 18 Dear children, let us stop just saying we love each other; let us really show it by our actions. 19 It is by our actions that we know we are living in the truth.
This article doesn't extensively cover the reasons why God allows people to suffer in large-scale atrocities, and it's unlikely that anyone on earth could ever have all the answers. But here are some links to stories, two of which are about how groups of people in dire wartime situations rose above them and turned to God, with a resultant growth in happiness and a change for the better in their behaviour:
God won't always take people out of their suffering when they ask him to. He can, but he may choose to change the sufferer instead so they can cope with it better. See the story of a woman who says she was healed from a terminal illness, but the greatest healing she says she received was psychological, which happened several years before her physical healing when she became more accepting of her circumstances:
The Bible promises that all things will work together for good in a Christian's life. (See Romans 8 28) Christians can place their security in Jesus. As stated previously, it will often be that in our own lives or the lives of others, at some future time, our suffering will have a positive effect.
And when Christians see their suffering from the point of view of eternity, it can seem less significant. The apostle Paul wrote:
Romans chapter 8 (TEV)
16 God's Spirit joins himself to our spirits to declare that we are God's children.
17 Since we are his children, we will possess the blessings he keeps for his people, and we will also possess with Christ what God has kept for him; for if we share Christ's suffering, we will also share his glory. 18 I consider that what we suffer at this present time cannot be compared at all with the glory that is going to be revealed to us.
The main pages on this site:
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Bible Part 1: The Bible, The Holy Spirit Today, People And Their Stories (Bible topics include the story of Jesus, sex and marriage, violence, anger and jealousy, whether Christians should get drunk, gossip and tell dirty jokes, and some of the reasons why Christians suffer. There are also articles to help with various problem behaviours like alcoholism and anger management.) |
| Bible Part 2: The Lives and Suffering of the Ancient Israelites, hell, The Book of Revelation, And People's Religious Experiences Today | |
| Bible Part 3: The Bible, Articles About Alleged Inaccuracies in it, And Stories of People who Became Christians (Bible topics include love and caring, the appropriate Christian attitude to personal wealth, prejudice, and false Christian teaching.) | |
| Or go to the next in the series: The Suffering of God's People as a Purifier, a Test of Faith and a Developer of Empathy. | |
The selections of Bible quotations have been put together by Diana Holbourn.
Throughout this series, wherever the initials TEV appear, they stand for Today's English Version (The Good News Bible).
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