Why Does God Allow Suffering? 3 Reasons with Verses

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

Among the most difficult religious questions for people of faith to answer is this: If he is good, loving, and powerful, why does God allow suffering of innocents? Why do bad things happen to good people? Across cultures and religions and on social media feeds and Reddit threads, people have wrestled with the pain of loss, injustice, disease, war, and disaster. For many believers, suffering is not just an emotional struggle but also a spiritual and intellectual one. How can faith in a compassionate God coexist with the reality of human pain?

What does the Bible say about suffering? I’ll explore some answers in this article,, referring to key verses and insights from religious thinkers throughout history. While no explanation can fully remove the pain of suffering, these perspectives can help illuminate how people of faith have tried to understand one of humanity’s oldest and most challenging questions.

Why Does God Allow Suffering in the World?

According to the World Food Program, almost 350 million people worldwide are undergoing severe food shortages, with about 49 million on the verge of famine. Our World in Data says that 800 million people live in extreme poverty, surviving on less than $3 a day. A different report from Our World in Data, meanwhile, indicates that natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, and wildfires kill 40,000-50,000 people every year. Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross highlights how events in the world often cause children to suffer, confirming that about 50 million were displaced due to conflict and violence in 2024 alone, a number that has nearly tripled since 2010.

These statistics are disturbing, to say the least, yet they barely scratch the surface of all the suffering in the world. It happens not only to humans, but to animals, as well. This brings up an important question for people of faith: Why does God allow suffering? Before we look into how people of faith have answered this question, let’s begin with a key term: theodicy.

The word theodicy is constructed from two Greek words:  theos, meaning "god" and dikē, meaning "justice." The word theodicy, therefore, literally means the attempt to justify God by proving that God and evil can coexist in the world in some rational sense. It’s often just framed as “the problem of evil” or “the problem of suffering.”

Philosopher Philip Pecorino frames the problem this way, based on the most common religious assumptions about God:

These assumptions create a cognitive dissonance for many of us. If God is all good (omnibenevolent), all knowing (omniscient), and all powerful (omnipotent), why wouldn’t he prevent human beings from suffering or stop the evil in the world that causes it? As Pecorino writes,

Obviously, none of these answers is satisfying to people who believe in God, so let’s first look at why God allows suffering according to the Bible. It’s important to remember, however, that while most of us think of the Bible as one book, it is more like a library, containing many books and many differing perspectives. As Joseph Kelly writes in his book The Problem of Evil in the Western Tradition: From the Book of Job to Modern Genetics, the Bible "contains no comprehensive theodicy,” no one answer to the problem of suffering.

The Old Testament Answer

As we might expect, some verses in the Old Testament assert that God is not the cause of suffering, implying that he merely allows it to happen in some cases. For instance, Psalm 145:9 says “The Lord is good to all, and his compassion is over all that he has made,” while Psalm 136 says repeatedly that God’s “steadfast love endures forever.” Exodus 34:6 says that he is “a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” Collectively, these verses agree that God is omnibenevolent.

However, in other OT verses, this position seems to be reversed. For example, in Isaiah 45:7, God says “I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I the Lord do all these things.” In other words, God creates everything in this world, both the good and the evil. Lamentations 3:38 agrees, asking “Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that evil and good come?”

Meanwhile, Jeremiah 18:11 seems even more ominous, as God tells his prophet “say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you.” Furthermore, Amos 3:6 asks “Does disaster befall a city unless the Lord has done it?” It seems all but impossible to read such verses as compassionate. Moreover, verses in which God promises to hurt his people usually are portrayed as punishment for their faithlessness, their turning to other gods.

This shows our first answer to the problem of suffering: God either allows it or causes it to punish bad behavior.

The New Testament Answer

Jesus, in Matthew 16:24, acknowledges that suffering is inherent in the Christian life:

The reference to crucifixion here is purposeful, indicating that just as Jesus willingly suffered, so must his followers. However, note that Jesus here does not explicitly say that this suffering is sent by God. A theological note on this verse from the Orthodox Study Bible says

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In other words, suffering is a way to transform oneself through imitating Jesus’ sufferings, putting our sins to death, as it were, and thus becoming more acceptable to God.

Similarly, referring to the common New Testament trope of God as a father, Hebrews 12:7–8 says

The implication in this verse is that God sends suffering to believers in order to correct them. This suffering is thus evidence of his parental love for believers. For this reason, 1 Peter 1:6–7, the author writes that his readers should

While this verse again doesn’t overtly say that suffering is sent by God, it suggests that this is the case and that any sufferings are the method God uses to increase the strength of their faith. Earlier, in 1 Peter 4:12–13, the author writes about how suffering brings the believer closer to Christ:

Paul, however, seems to have a slightly different perspective on suffering in Romans 5:3–5:

Paul seems to believe that suffering is good for Christians, training them in endurance and may even induce the Holy Spirit to inhabit believers more fully. Meanwhile, in 2 Corinthians 1:3–4, Paul writes

There is no hint in this verse that God sends suffering upon his adherents. Instead, God comforts them, in a sense suffering along with them.  

It would seem, then, that our second biblical answer to the problem of suffering, is that God either sends or allows sufferings to befall his followers for the sake of correcting them and bringing them closer to him. It’s a different answer from that of the Old Testament which views suffering as a just punishment.

Having looked at biblical perspectives on suffering, then, let’s investigate what some post-biblical Christians have said about God and suffering.

If He Loves Us, Why Does God Allow Suffering? Later Christian Answers

In the 7th century, a monk and theologian named Maximus the Confessor wrote about suffering as a natural and inevitable part of all human life rather than the result of divine causation:

Another 7th-century monk and author, John of Damascus, made a useful distinction between primary causation, defined as that which God wills, and secondary causation, defined as that which is the result of human freedom and choice (although allowed by God for our discipline and correction). For John, sin was the result of the misuse of our God-given free will.

Many Protestant thinkers, including C.S. Lewis, also believed that suffering was the natural consequence of human freedom. When sin was introduced into the world through Adam and Eve (whether literally or figuratively), the human will was corrupted. Nevertheless, for us to have a true relationship with God, God must allow us to have free will. Anything less would be coercive.

Donald Macleod, meanwhile, believes that God allows suffering because it is the only way humans can learn to submit their own wills to God’s will as did Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane (“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will but yours be done” Luke 22:42). Commenting on this idea, Derek W.H. Thomas writes

The third Christian explanation to the problem of suffering, then, is that it is the result of our God-given free will. That is, because of the Fall, people often misuse their free will, thereby bringing suffering upon themselves and others.

The Problem of Suffering in Islam

The most influential philosopher in Islamic history was named Ibn Sina. He asserted, first of all, that God had created a good world, a belief shared with Jews and Christians (Gen 1:31). Therefore, Ibn Sina said that no matter how terrible some circumstances appear to us, the world, as it is, is the best possible world, since it was created good by God, In other words, the world as it actually exists, no matter what changes occur, is always the best way it can possibly be in. In some ways this sidesteps the notion of suffering by simply saying that things couldn’t possibly be any other way.

The Problem of Suffering in Modern Judaism

While Judaism’s answer to the problem of suffering has often referred to the last chapter of Job, in which Job is forced to accept that God can do anything he wants for no reason at all (Job 1:21), after the Holocaust, many Jewish thinkers began to rethink this position. The new position, which rejects attempts to justify God, is called anti-theodicy (coined by Zachary Braiterman).

One of the most influential post-war Jewish philosophers, Emmanuel Levinas, who was imprisoned in a Nazi camp during the war but survived, had a slightly different take. In his 1947 book Existence and Existents, Levinas wrote that no one should try to justify God after the Holocaust. Instead, they should try to live godly lives themselves. While many Jews understandably asked whether God had been present or absent with them during the Holocaust, Levinas argued that it was the responsibility of all humans to work to create a world in which virtue was dominant rather than evil.

Conclusion

The problem of suffering, also known as the problem of evil or theodicy, will never be solved in a way that satisfies all believers in God. Since God rarely speaks openly about such things to humans, it is left to us to interpret circumstances and sources in order to decide what we believe about the matter.

There are three general explanations of suffering found in Christian writings. One answer, found in the Hebrew Bible, is that God seems to create suffering in order to punish them for wrongdoing. This admittedly leaves us wondering whether God is an angry despot.

The New Testament, on the other hand, seems to say that suffering is a tool by which God teaches and refines his followers, although this leaves open the question of whether he causes suffering or merely allows it. 

Finally, later Christians came to the conclusion that suffering was the result of human moral error, allowed by God’s gift of free will. In this scenario, God could not be directly blamed for human suffering, although one could argue that he was indirectly responsible for permitting fallen human beings to choose for themselves.

While these answers have been dominant in Christianity, at least one form of Islam seemed to believe that since God created the world as good, that world, no matter how terrible it might look to human beings, is always in the perfect condition. Meanwhile, many post-Holocaust Jews have rejected the notion that humans must find a way to justify God’s lack of intervention on their behalf. In fact, one Jewish philosopher in particular says that humans must reject this idea entirely and instead take on the duty to build a better world themselves.