Why Does God Allow Suffering? | 756

Why does God allow suffering and death if He is good? It’s easy to forget the “why” of this question, and today at the podcast, I’ll be addressing it from the Bible. Suffering and death is the direct result of our own sin—but God offers hope through Jesus. Tune in and be encouraged!

Transcribed version of the podcast is below

Resources Mentioned in Podcast

Scriptures Mentioned in Podcast

  • Genesis 1:31
  • Genesis 1:29-30
  • Deuteronomy 32:4
  • Romans 5
  • Genesis 2:17
  • Romans 5:12
  • 1 Corinthians 15:26
  • Revelation 20:14
  • 1 Corinthians 15:26
  • Revelation 21:4
  • Psalm 9:8
  • Psalm 50:6
  • Genesis 18:25
  • Romans 8:28
  • Philippians 4:7
  • John 3:16

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TRANSCRIPTION:

Hey everybody, this is Heidi St. John. Welcome to the podcast.

I’m glad you guys have joined me! Today is Monday, April 22nd and it’s episode number 756.

It’s the day after Easter and we’re going to talk about something that’s a little bit tough for us to deal with as human beings, and that is the question of:  Why does God allow suffering and death? And basically the question is: Is He good? Is God still good? This is a tough question, but the Bible has the answer. Stick around,I think you’re going to be encouraged.

I want to say thanks for following us throughout the country this season as I’m on the road with my family. We have been enjoying meeting so many of you out on the road. We just finished Waco, Texas and drove all the way home. We stopped at the Grand Canyon and oh my goodness – some of the guys were following my insta-stories– I can not even try to explain how incredible that was! It’s just been wonderful to be with our kids. And we’re trying to teach our kids, as we take them out on the road with us, to sort of be adults. We’re not raising children, right? We’re raising adults, and many of you have gotten a chance to interact with our kids.

Our youngest daughter, actually all four of our kids who are still at home, work the table with us when we’re there. So they’re selling books and they’re learning how to interact with people- and our eight year old in particular loves to run the cash register. So a lot of you would come up to the table and you maybe were holding a book that you purchased from the day before, and Sailor would say: “Can I help you? Have you paid for that?”

So thanks everybody for being so gracious as we teach our children why it’s important that they learn to interact with people. We want to teach our children to handle money well, and something I’m really excited about as we’ve partnered with Evangelical Christian Credit Union, and one of the things I love about them is, there’s a whole bunch of things – but I’m really excited because they’re a credit union that’s grounded in Christian tradition. And I dare you guys to find anybody that’s like that right now. They support homeschoolers – I don’t know if you guys knew that. They support global missions, pastors, growing churches, and families. Something I really love about them, that we’re introducing our own children to, is a program called Start Young.

And just like we’re out on the road and you guys are watching us training our children – what we’re doing is we’re preparing our kids for adulthood. Our kids know that we support them, right? But at the end of the day what my husband and I are trying to teach our children is that they can support themselves. The way that you get there is through real world experience.

So, I want to encourage you – I will link back to it in the show notes today – check out a Start Young account for your kids where your kids will have access to online banking, even if it’s just a little bit. So when our kids are out on the road with us, every single one of our kids gets a little stipend every single day for their work that they do behind the table. And it’s no joke- because sometimes it’s eight or nine hours at a time behind the table.

But I love this because we can open up an account for our kids, they have access to online banking. If our kids are old enough like our 18 year old, he’s going to have a mobile app and a debit card that he can use in person and online. And here’s an awesome fun fact for you: no monthly or overdraft fees. So,it’s an awesome way for you to teach your tweens and your teens how to manage their money and they can start young. So you bank with them and they’re learning. And mom and dad, you guys can monitor everything with spending limits, they even have customizable alerts which – hello! we all need that, right? So I just want to encourage you, check it out. I love Evangelical Christian Credit Union. I know you guys are going to love it too. And if you are like me and you’re trying to teach your children how to wisely handle money, this is a fantastic way for you to do it.

All right I’m gonna jump in to the question today which is kind of a tough one.

All right. So I got a question- we get this question from time to time. This email was particularly heartbreaking from a young mom who lost a baby to stillbirth. And I have really wonderful friends who have lost their babies to SIDS. I know people whose children have contracted diseases and they’ve lost them in early childhood. We live in a broken, fallen world. And the question always comes up: How can you say that God is good when there is suffering and death and dying around us?

Now, some of you will remember that about two years ago – I can’t even believe it’s been that long – but in June of 2017 my nephew Bobby was hit by a car and they said he’s probably going to die, he’s for sure going to be paralyzed, and “just get used to it” is basically is what they told us.

And the night of his accident, our family made a very conscious and a very public decision to say – that whether or not the Lord allowed Bobby to remain here with us or whether or not he took him home – we believed that God is good. That His heart toward us is only ever always good. The Bible teaches us in Romans 5:12 that:

just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all have sinned
Romans 5:12

And really, it’s interesting because one of Darwin’s chief arguments against the biblical God – and we see this all the time when atheist argue against Christianity – we hear: “why is there death and suffering?” you know, “if your God is so good, then how could He allow these bad things to happen?” And this is echoed by atheist today,and we see it all throughout the public school system, we see it in an increasingly secularized culture that we live in, and the general sentiment is this: people will say there is just no way that a good and all powerful God made a world like this. A world that’s full of death, and suffering, red in tooth and claw, full of deadly catastrophes, and diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s – and ironically they’re right.

And so I’m going to read to you from a couple of really wonderful resources that we have in our own home,  and I’ll link back to them in the shown us today. The first one was written by Brian Osborne and Bodie Hodge. The book is called Quick Answers to Tough Questions.

I want to encourage you to have books like this in your home so that you can quickly look up and see what does the Bible have to say. Part of my encouragement here at the podcast, over these many years now that we’ve been doing this, is to encourage you off the bench and onto the battlefield. And part of the way that you get off the bench, confidently, is by knowing the Word of God. And there are some wonderful wonderful resources for you to help answer these kinds of questions as they come to you – from God’s Word and study the Word of God. Because ironically these people that make this argument are right – Did God make world like this? Absolutely not.

Absolutely not. The Bible teaches us that God made the creation very good. You guys know this, right? You’ve read the Genesis account of creation – in the beginning God created the universe and everything in it, in 6 days. And at the end of His creative process, on the sixth day, the Bible records that God looked around and He “saw everything that He had made and indeed it was very good.” That’s Genesis 1:31.

And so if it was good, creation must have been without blemish, without defect, without disease, without suffering, without death. Right? And there was no survival of the fittest. In fact, I believe that animals didn’t prey on each other. And the first two humans, Adam and Eve, did not kill animals for food. The Bible records at the original creation was an incredible place. It was full of life, it was full of joy, and better than anything else -it was full of the presence of the Creator. And both humans and animals were vegetarians at the time of creation. In Genesis 1:29-30 the Lord said

I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed to you it shall be for food. Also to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food,”

And so when you read this you can see that in God’s really good awesome, amazing, perfect creation the animals didn’t eat each other and thus there was no animal death, right? As God gave Adam and Eve and the animals only plants to eat. This is tough, and I think for those of you who are wrestling with the issue of death – we had something a sort of benign, I guess. Well not benign, but sort of an introduction to death in our family when we came home from our road trip.

We have two really wonderful cats that we’ve raised from kittens here, they were rescue animals, and I’m telling you what – my younger daughters have just – they’ve fallen in love with these two cats. We call them Jack and Diane. I’ma let you guys just chew on that. Yes. My husband and I are from the 80s. And so, Jack and Diane sort of are our pets and we love them and when we’ve been on the road for about a week – I got a call from our are our older daughter and she said Jack didn’t come home, and it had been several days. And the days turned into weeks. And now it’s been, because we were on the road almost a month, and so now it’s been almost a month. And Jack’s not coming home and my daughter, the two youngest ones – in particular the 8 year old and the 13 year old who were just really attached these animals, are just devastated.

And one of the questions that we asked is  – well, where’s God? Why do things hurt so bad? Well the passage shows us, that we read in the Bible, that the original creation was good. And we read in Deuteronomy 32:4 that his work is perfect – and obviously things aren’t like that anymore. And so, if there was no animal or human death when God finished His creation, and pronounced it very good – why do we die now?

Well the answer is found of course in Romans 5. Actually, we see the story unfolding in Genesis. We see death all around us today. Even the animals, even the sorrow that comes from losing a pet that we love so much. And we want to be able to talk to our children honestly about the pain that they feel – but we also want to be able to go back to the account in Genesis and explain to them what happened – because we recognize that something must have happened to change the creation from what God said was good. Remember in the Bible He looked around He said it was very good? God looked around and said it was very good.

But now, we don’t have a very good creation. In fact,. I think we could argue that we have the opposite of that. There are many bad things that occur in the world right now, right? Earthquakes, flood, wars. And the Bible teaches us that ultimately this is a response to sin. This was a response to sin.

You see God put Adam and Eve in a paradise. We read about that, about the Garden of Eden, in Genesis –  and as the Creator, God had authority over them and in His authority God gave Adam a rule. You guys remember this? Genesis 2:17

“but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you will surely die”

Sometime after God declared His completed creation was very good, at the end of the six day one of God’s angels – remember the story? teach it to your children. Lucifer, we know him is Satan he led a rebellion against the Creator. And Lucifer then took the form of a serpent and tempted Eve to eat the fruit that God had said – no you can’t have that.

And what happened? He tempted Eve, and she ate it. And she tempted Adam, and he ate it. And Adam and Eve’s actions resulted in the punishment that God had warned them about. The Bible teaches us that God is holy and just, and He will not – He cannot – tolerate sin in His presence. So the just Creator, righteously kept His promise that punishment would follow Adam and Eve’s disobedience. With the rebellious actions of one man – death entered God’s Creation. That’s what Romans 5:12 teaches us, right? Justice through one man, sin entered the world, and death through sin – and thus death spread to all men because all have sinned.

And so we know that the reason that there is death and suffering in the world today isn’t because God isn’t is an unjust God. The opposite is true. God is a good God but it was Adam’s decision to disobey ,that brought sin into the world. So then the next question always is: Then how come we all have to suffer punishment?

You see, after Adam and Eve were were banished from the garden because of their sin, they began to have children. And each child inherited Adam’s sinful nature. And each child rebelled against against God. Every human being is descendant of Adam and Eve.

And we’re all born with the same problem. We’re all born with sin. We’re all born with it. So within a biblical worldview the origin of sin and suffering, now we’ve accounted for it, right? And victory over death, we’ve account for that through the Bible also because God provided a way for us through the death of His son Jesus. And in the end the Bible teaches us that death is going to be destroyed, and that God’s Kingdom will remain established for ever.

Look up 1 Corinthians 15:26 and Revelation 20:14. We want to know and to teach our children that one day God’s going to settle the score.One day the world will be made right again. But right now we live in a broken, fallen, painful world. We are separated from God by our sin. And sin is the problem that we have. So the problem if death and suffering comes because of sin. And you guys know that our hope is in Jesus, right?

Jesus came to Earth as a man. The Bible teaches us that he lived a sinless life and then He died to pay the penalty for our sin. The apostle Paul tells us in Romans 5 that it was one man’s offence and Jesus came and He set us free from the penalty of sin by His death. You see, God is righteous. We learn this all throughout the scriptures, and justly He sentenced us to die. And so, we received the punishment that we deserve.

But God exercised grace, right? – because of His love for us, and He took our punishment upon Himself. The payment for our sin.

The Bible also describes death in 1 Corinthians 15:26 as the last enemy that will be destroyed. And I was talking about that to my daughters, just a couple of days ago, that one of these days we’re not going to live in a world anymore where there’s death, and dying, and suffering. In fact Revelation 21:4 says that God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.

There will be no more death, no more sorrow, nor crying. There will be no more pain for the former things that have passed away. You see those who receive salvation – we are looking forward to a time when the Lord is going to revoke the curse, and restore the universe to the perfect state that it was in before Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. And your children, mom and dad, your children need to understand the story of creation.

It matters that we teach our children,starting in Genesis, that God created the world and how it was created. That it was created to be good, He created a perfect world and sin intruded into that world, right? Because the Devil lied to Eve and she bought it, right? He deceived her, and the Bible says that she listened to his lie – and oh my goodness you guys – if we’re not listen to the Devil right now, he’s still lying to us. He’s still deceiving us and we want to be telling our children that there is such a thing as truth and there is such a thing as a lie.

And when we do that it provides answers for the suffering. It doesn’t make it easier, so I’m not here to say, oh you know – blow it off it’s easier. No. Death hurts, but the Bible says death wears your sting because as believers death doesn’t carry the sting for us that it does for an unbeliever – because we know that one of these days we’re gonna see those loved ones again who have died in Christ. Right?

You see, God is the righteous judge of all the earth. We know this because we read it in Psalm 9:8, we read it in Psalm 50:6. In fact, Genesis 18:25 testifies “shall not the judge of all the earth do right

Because God is just, He must punish sin. He judged Adam’s sin and the punishment was death – and Adam forfeited the right to live, right? And this took place because a man’s rebellion. And so when we talk about sin, and suffering, and death with our children – we talk about it in the context of sin, right?

And so God could prevent bad things from happening in this world, but we can trust that because He’s good – He has good reasons for allowing bad things to happen. And this is what we teach our children all the time this is what we declared when Bobby had his accident – Lord we trust you. And my grandmother used to say, “Heidi, you either trust God or you don’t”. He’s either good or He isn’t. We either believe His Word or we don’t. And it is worn out in the way that we respond to the sin and the suffering that’s all around us.

The Bible teaches us in Romans 8:28 that God is always working everything together for good. And so we pray that when we’re struggling and suffering – that God will receive the glory for whatever we go through. And one of the most important examples of this is the death of Jesus on the cross, right? This was an evil event and yet God used it to bring salvation to all of us, if we receive it. You see God is always using the things that happen around us – even the hard things – for our good.

So I want you to think about this in another way, for just a minute. So let’s think about the question from this from this perspective. Because God is good, He defines – not man, not me, not you. God defines what is good and bad. And so only those who believe in God in His Word are able to declare one event good – for example, the curing of a disease or the birth of a baby – and another event bad, that might be a car accident, or a disease that takes the life of someone that you love, or tsunami that destroys human life, right?

So if there is no God, who or what would be the basis for determining good or bad? Well if there is no God – then you are, then I am – and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be the person who determines good or bad. Remember I told you, I said this last week on the podcast –  and I’m going to keep saying it: The Bible teaches us that God is true.

Jesus said I’m the way the truth and the life no man comes to the Father but by me, and people who don’t believe in God don’t have any way to absolutely say that one thing is good and another is bad – because we’re depending on our human experience and our human emotions and what we can see with our eyes. But the Bible teaches us in Psalms, that the heart of man is desperately wicked.

And so when we hear of tragedies in any form we need to remember it’s our fault, because of sin, that these things happen and we can look for ways to help other people and we should be doing that, right?

We donate to people in need. We travel the country. I love the work of Samaritan’s Purse and organizations like that. That is the job of the church. I have a friend who told me – “listen, if the church was doing its job there wouldn’t be welfare, there wouldn’t be the need for the foster care system – because the church would be doing its job.” So I want to encourage you look for ways that you can help, look for ways to get off the bench and onto the battlefield – but more than anything else we need to pray and ask the Lord to help those who are hurting. We pray for people who are suffering, right? We pray for each other.

I know many people right now, particularly this time of year as I travel the country with my husband and our kids, and we meet many people who are suffering – and we need to teach people that God has not turned His heart away from them. God wants to save us from what our sin did. Our sin is the reason that we’re suffering, and it’s in these times, in the times of difficulty, that people need the peace that only God can provide.

Philippians 4:7 tells us that people need to understand that God is the true source of comfort in a fallen and cursed world. And I’m telling you what – I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again- I believe that God does His best work, not in the shallow places of our lives, but in the deep. And so if you’re struggling through a deep place in your life right, now know that God is for you. That He loves you, that God said if you had been the only person on the, according to John 3:16, God would have sent His son for you.

I love the story of the Good Shepherd who left the 99 to come back for the one. God is good. His heart toward you is always ever only good. And so, if you’re suffering today look up – the Lord is for you, His heart is for you and so are we, here at the podcast.

I’m going to link back to some really great resources for you. Some of these questions are tough – but I’m telling you what – God’s Word has the answers. Also I wrote a book about six months ago called Prayers for the Battlefield, I’ll link back to it in the show notes today – it’s a wonderful, wonderful resource for anyone who is struggling to understand why God’s creation includes death and suffering, and also it just is an encouragement to point you back to the Creator, away from our human reasoning, away from the things that trips up – and keep our eyes focused on the Lord.

I love that the Apostle Paul, through all of his suffering, at the end of the day said – I have learned to trust the Lord, I’ve learned to be content whether I’m suffering, when I’m in want, or when I have plenty, or when I’m in need  – because he knew that God’s heart toward him was good, and he knew that he was just passing through.

And so, it doesn’t mean that we don’t hurt it doesn’t mean that we don’t cry – but it means that we know that at the end of the day God is going to make things right and that He is going to return. And the Bible says He will wipe every tear away from our eyes. That’s the God that we serve. He loves you. He loves you. Let your children know how loved they are, and remind yourself today that no matter what you’re going through -God loves you and He can be trusted.

I want to thank you guys for listening to the podcast. As always, it encourages us tremendously if you leave reviews for the podcast over it at iTunes. Tell your friends about it! We just hit 50000 downloads an episode! So as you can imagine, it’s quite a lot of bandwidth that’s going out here and it just encourages us so much if you will share the podcast with your friends. And I also really want to encourage you to support the podcast sponsor Evangelical Christian Credit Union. You guys can find them at ECCU.org.

I know you’re gonna be encouraged because it’s a positive change from a biblical approach to banking, and one of things we love about it is when we bank with ECCU – our money does more than grow! Those guys are on a mission to change the world – off the bench and onto the battlefield. Thanks for listening everybody. And I’ll see you back here on Wednesday.

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About Heidi St. John

Heidi has been married to her husband Jay since 1989. Together they have seven children and three grandchildren! The St. Johns homeschooled their kids all the way through high school. Heidi is the the author of seven books, host of the popular podcast "Off the Bench," and the founder of MomStrong International, an online community of women learning God's Word and how to apply it to every day life. She and her husband Jay are also the founders of Firmly Planted Family and the Firmly Planted Homeschool Resource Center, located in Vancouver, Washington.