Has the bottom ever dropped out of your life without warning? One phone call, one diagnosis, one headline, and everything you thought was steady is suddenly on the floor.
If that is where you are right now, you are asking the oldest question there is. Why does God allow bad things to happen? And if he is good and powerful, why doesn’t he stop them?
I want to walk you through what Scripture actually says, because Scripture says more than “we’ll never know.” You may not learn which reason lies behind your own situation, but God has given us several. In this message I open the first three biblical reasons he allows suffering, and each one comes with a benefit attached.
The question everyone asks
On April 20, 1999, two students walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, carrying guns. Twelve students and one teacher were killed in the attack. Students who left for class that morning thinking about a calculus assignment spent the afternoon running for their lives.
In the days that followed, people filed through Clement Park to stand at the makeshift memorials, and one word was on almost every lip. Why?
You do not have to live near Littleton to ask it. A father of five whose wife is killed on the highway asks it. A mother holding a stillborn baby asks it. A young man in his early twenties who just heard the word “terminal” asks it. Evil and suffering reach the mansion on the Riviera and the hut in the village, and nobody gets a pass.
Some have tried to solve the problem by shrinking God. In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner argued that God cares about us but simply is not powerful enough to prevent tragedy. Now while that answer may feel gentle, it contradicts what the Bible plainly teaches about God’s goodness and his power. A God who loves you but cannot help you is not the God of Scripture.
So let’s go to Scripture. Here are three reasons God allows suffering.
Reason one: God can turn it into a positive result
God has a way of making flower buds push up through the ashes. Some suffering, in his hands, gets adjusted and turned toward good.
You say, “Pastor, what good could possibly come out of a school shooting?” I have no interest in making that day smaller than it was. But good did come. There was more outreach to people who did not know the Lord, and people came to faith. There was more prayer, more compassion, more acceptance of kids who were different. Parents held their children a little longer. Communities pulled closer together and thanked the police and medical workers who ran toward the danger. Every one of those results came at a terrible price. They are still real.
Joseph knew this from the inside. His brothers hated him, threw him into a dry pit, and then sold him to passing traders as a slave. He was seventeen. He would be thirty before he stood in front of Pharaoh. Thirteen years of slavery, false accusation, and prison, and then God lifted him to the second-highest seat in all of Egypt.
From the pit to the pinnacle.
When their father Jacob died, his brothers panicked, sure that Joseph would finally get even. Instead he told them, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good … to save much people alive” (Genesis 50:20). Five chapters earlier he had already said it another way: “it was not you that sent me hither, but God” (Genesis 45:8).
If you are in a deep, dark pit today, do not despair. God has not lost track of you, and he is fully able to turn what was meant to crush you into something that saves lives. If you do not even know how to put that into words right now, start here: how to pray when life feels crushing.
Reason two: suffering builds within us a need for God
Hunger for God is often formed in hard places. After Columbine, I heard report after report of people accepting Jesus. It took a cataclysm to show them their need for a Savior.
The prodigal son is the classic picture. In Luke 15, a younger son asks for his inheritance before his father is even dead, takes the money to a far country, and blows every cent on high living. Then a severe famine hits, and he finds himself hired out to feed pigs. He would have gladly eaten the pods the pigs were eating, and nobody gave him anything.
Rock bottom.
That is exactly where he came to his senses and started home. His father’s verdict says it all: this son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found (Luke 15:24).
Do you have someone in mind right now who is spiritually lost? It may be that God will allow a crisis in that person’s life, not to destroy them, but to bring them to the end of themselves, where they finally look up.
Reason three: suffering cultivates character and maturity
If you are serious about becoming a godly person, you will need to enroll in a course that Jesus himself completed, and so has every godly person in history. The course is Suffering 101.
The good news is that tuition is free. There is no GPA requirement, and there is only one required textbook, the Bible. The challenging news is that you will not graduate until you meet the Master Teacher face to face, and you will not pass until you learn one lesson: suffering is the pathway to spiritual maturity.
James wrote to believers who were being exploited by the rich, dragged into court, and slandered for the name of Jesus. Into that pressure he wrote, “count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience” (James 1:2-3).
Count it all joy? Is he out of his mind? Not at all. We are not glad for the tragedy itself. We are glad that in the middle of it God is near, and that he is building something in us that cannot be built any other way. Paul says the same thing in Romans 5: tribulation produces patience, patience produces proven character, and proven character produces hope.
Maybe you feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, living the same hard day over and over again. When the trial is beyond your control, the best response is to put it in the hands of a sovereign, good God. As the old hymn by William Cowper puts it, God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. He may be stretching you right now, and the stretching may take longer and hurt more than you expected. It is not wasted.
What to do with your pain today
So let’s summarize. God allows suffering to turn it into a positive result, to build within us a need for him, and to cultivate character and maturity. Those are not the only reasons, and I will open more of them in the next message. They are enough to tell you that your pain is not meaningless.
And if you have never known God as your Savior and Lord, it may be that he is using the broken dreams in your life to get your attention right now. Scripture says, “To day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Hebrews 3:15). Rather than building a wall between you and God, open your heart to him. Believe that Jesus died for your sins and was raised victorious over death. Turn from your sin and trust Christ today. Come just the way you are.
If you are going through something heavy right now, share it in the comments under the video on YouTube. I would be glad to pray for you.
Until next time, may God grant you and yours his strength for today.
