The Problem of Evil

Every thinking person meets this question sooner or later, and most of us meet it first not in a book but in a hospital corridor, at a graveside, or in a news report we cannot stop seeing. A child dies. A good marriage breaks. A tyrant prospers. A wave takes a town. And the question comes, sometimes as an argument and sometimes as a cry: if God is good, and if God is able, why?

It is the oldest and the strongest objection to faith in God. It is also a question the Bible itself asks, in its own words and without embarrassment. "O LORD, how long shall I cry, and thou wilt not hear! even cry out unto thee of violence, and thou wilt not save!" (Habakkuk 1:2). Or again: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1). A faith that cannot face this question is not the faith of the Bible.

Why this question matters to me

I was raised Roman Catholic but never really connected — I went through the motions, fell asleep in the pews, and faked being sick to skip Mass. When real life hit — a lost job, a pregnant wife, constant fights — I went looking for peace anywhere I could find it. New Age, crystals, astral projection, tarot, angel numbers. None of it held.

Eventually I gave up and called myself an atheist. I decided to read the Bible for one reason: to disprove it, so I'd have an excuse to stop going to church for good. It did the opposite. I came to faith in 2022, and my wife came to faith a month later. The rest of the story is at kylelauriano.com/about.

I mention it because I know that the problem of evil is rarely only an argument. Behind the argument there is usually a wound. If that is where you are, this paper will not pretend your pain is small. It will try to do what Scripture does: tell the truth about evil, tell the truth about God, and point you to the place where the two meet.

What this paper is

This is a study, not a sermon. It argues from the King James Bible first. Where philosophers and theologians have stated the problem or answered it, their words are quoted from their own books, with the page or section, so that you can check them. It does not claim to tell you why any particular sorrow came into your life. No honest Christian answer does. What it claims is narrower and, I think, stronger: that evil does not disprove the God of the Bible, that Scripture gives real reasons why a good God would permit a world in which evil is possible, and that at the cross God has done something about evil that no other answer even attempts.

Seven parts follow. Part 1 states the problem at full strength. Part 2 asks what evil actually is. Part 3 sets out the free-will defence. Part 4 weighs the larger goods God brings out of suffering, and the limits of what we can see. Part 5 reads the book of Job. Part 6 turns to the cross. Part 7 is for those who are suffering now.

Two problems, not one

It helps to separate two things that usually arrive together. There is the intellectual problem: is it logically consistent, or reasonable, to believe in a good and all-powerful God in a world like this one? And there is the personal problem: how do I keep trusting God when this is happening to me?

The two need different kinds of help. Alvin Plantinga, whose defence is the subject of Part 3, said plainly that his argument was not written to comfort the grieving: a defence or a theodicy gives no hint as to why God permits a specific evil, and neither is meant "first of all as a means of pastoral counseling."¹ C. S. Lewis said the same in the preface to The Problem of Pain. His book, he wrote, was meant "to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering"; for the higher task of teaching patience he claimed no qualification, except "my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all."²

This paper gives most of its pages to the first problem, because a mind that believes evil has disproved God will struggle to pray at all. But it never forgets the second, and its last part is written for it.

A note on Scripture: every verse in this paper is quoted from the King James Bible. You can read it free in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library. A KJV with Strong's Concordance is the best study tool most believers will ever need.

This part matters because a weak answer to a weak version of the problem helps no one. If Christians are going to answer the problem of evil, they must first state it as strongly as its best critics have stated it. Scripture sets the example: it gives the complaints of Job and Habakkuk in full before it gives God's reply.

The ancient dilemma

The problem was already old when Christianity was young. The church father Lactantius, writing early in the fourth century, attributed it to the Greek philosopher Epicurus:

God, he says, either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them?³

Lactantius is a useful witness for two reasons. He shows that Christians did not hide the argument; he quoted it in order to answer it. And he admits that it troubled believers in his own day: many defenders of providence, he says, were "disturbed by this argument." His own answer, which we will meet in Part 4, was that God permits evils because He gives wisdom, and wisdom is a greater good than the absence of trouble.⁴

Fourteen centuries later the Scottish philosopher David Hume put the same dilemma into the mouth of Philo, the skeptic of his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published after his death in 1779:

EPICURUS's old questions are yet unanswered. Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?⁵

The logical problem

In the twentieth century the Oxford philosopher J. L. Mackie sharpened the dilemma into a charge of contradiction. In "Evil and Omnipotence," published in the journal Mind in 1955, he argued that the problem of evil shows not merely that religious beliefs lack rational support, "but that they are positively irrational, that the several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another."⁶ In its simplest form, he wrote, "God is omnipotent; God is wholly good; and yet evil exists," and if any two of these are true, the third, he claimed, must be false.⁷

This is called the logical problem of evil. It claims that Christian belief is not just unlikely but impossible, the way a square circle is impossible. If it succeeds, no amount of evidence for God could rescue faith, because a contradiction cannot be true.

Mackie anticipated the obvious Christian reply, that evil comes from the free choices of creatures, and answered it with a question that every Christian should face:

if God has made men such that in their free choices they sometimes prefer what is good and sometimes what is evil, why could he not have made men such that they always freely choose the good?⁸

Part 3 shows how this question was answered, and why most philosophers, Mackie himself in the end included, came to grant that the logical problem fails.

The evidential problem

The argument did not die. It changed shape. In 1979 the American philosopher William Rowe published "The Problem of Evil and Some Varieties of Atheism," which became the best-known statement of what is now called the evidential problem.⁹ Rowe did not claim that God and evil are logically incompatible. He claimed that some evils look pointless: suffering that, so far as we can tell, serves no greater good at all. His most famous example was a fawn trapped in a forest fire, burned and dying slowly, unseen by any human being. Later he paired it with a real case of a little girl brutally assaulted and murdered.¹⁰ If even one such evil is truly pointless, Rowe argued, then a good and all-powerful God would have prevented it; and since it seems pointless, it is reasonable to believe that no such God exists.

The evidential problem is more modest than the logical one, and for that reason harder to dismiss. It does not say faith is impossible. It says evil counts as evidence against it. Part 4 takes up the main Christian response.

The protest

There is a third form of the problem, and it is the one that most often keeps people from God. It is not an argument at all. It is a moral protest.

Its most famous statement is in fiction: the chapter "Rebellion" in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan Karamazov tells his younger brother Alyosha, a novice monk, story after story of cruelty to children, and then refuses any future harmony that would be built on their suffering. "It's not worth the tears of that one tortured child," he says. "It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket."¹¹

Ivan does not deny that God exists. He refuses Him. No syllogism answers that, and Christians should not try to answer it with one. Dostoevsky, a believer, did not. He let Alyosha answer with a person, and we will hear that answer in Part 6.

The Bible asks the question too

Before turning to the answers, it is worth seeing how much of this the Bible already contains. The critics did not discover the problem of evil. The prophets and psalmists prayed it.

Habakkuk asked why a holy God looks on while the wicked devour the righteous: "Thou art of purer eyes than to behold evil, and canst not look on iniquity: wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?" (Habakkuk 1:13). Jeremiah brought the same case to court: "Righteous art thou, O LORD, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?" (Jeremiah 12:1). The psalmist confessed that the question nearly undid him: "But as for me, my feet were almost gone; my steps had well nigh slipped. For I was envious at the foolish, when I saw the prosperity of the wicked" (Psalm 73:2-3). And in the book of Revelation the souls of the martyrs cry, "How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?" (Revelation 6:10).

Notice two things. First, these voices never solve the problem by giving up one of its terms. They do not say God is weak, and they do not say God is less than righteous. "Righteous art thou, O LORD," says Jeremiah, and then he asks his question. Second, they bring the question to God. The Bible's way with the problem of evil is not to stop asking but to ask in the right direction.

Two kinds of evil

One more distinction will help. Philosophers usually divide evil into two kinds. Plantinga put it this way: moral evil "is evil that results from free human activity; natural evil is any other kind of evil."¹² Murder, theft, cruelty and lies are moral evils. Earthquakes, cancer, famine and the fawn in the fire are natural evils.

Scripture knows both, and it also knows that the line between them is not always clean. Much natural suffering is made worse by human sin, as when greed or neglect turns a storm into a massacre. And the Bible traces even natural evil back, in the end, to a moral one: the rebellion of the first man, through whom "sin entered into the world, and death by sin" (Romans 5:12). We will come back to that.

This part matters because many people imagine evil as a kind of thing, a dark substance or rival power standing over against God. If that were true, God would have made it, or else He would have a rival as old as He is. Scripture teaches neither, and the Christian thinker who did most to show why was a man who had once believed exactly that.

Augustine's question

Augustine of Hippo, before his conversion, spent nine years among the Manichees, a sect that taught that the world was a battleground between two eternal principles, one good and one evil. Part of their hold on him, he tells us in his Confessions, was the question they pressed on Christians, "whence is evil?", and the answer they claimed to have: a rival principle of evil, so that God need not be blamed.¹³ He came to see that it answered nothing. If evil is a substance with its own existence, where did it come from?

His answer, worked out over years and set down in Book VII of the Confessions, has shaped Christian thought ever since. Everything God made is good. "So long therefore as they are, they are good: therefore whatsoever is, is good. That evil then which I sought, whence it is, is not any substance: for were it a substance, it should be good."¹⁴ And when he asked what wickedness itself is, he "found it to be no substance, but the perversion of the will, turned aside from Thee, O God, the Supreme, towards these lower things."¹⁵

In his later handbook of the faith, the Enchiridion, he put it more simply: "For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good?" Disease, he explained, is not a thing that leaves the body and goes to live somewhere else when the patient is cured. It is the absence of health. In the same way, "what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good."¹⁶

Why this matters

This is not a word game. It has at least three consequences.

God did not create evil. Genesis says, "And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good" (Genesis 1:31). Evil is not one of the things He made. It is what happens when a good thing, made by God, turns from Him. "Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions" (Ecclesiastes 7:29). James says the same: "Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man" (James 1:13), and "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning" (James 1:17).

Evil is a parasite. Because evil is the corruption of something good, it cannot exist on its own. A lie depends on the truth it twists. Cruelty depends on the strength and intelligence it misuses. Satan himself, in this view, is not God's opposite number but a fallen creature, an angel who was good and turned. In The City of God Augustine went further: we should not look for an "efficient cause" of the first evil will, "for it is not efficient, but deficient, as the will itself is not an effecting of something, but a defect." To look for the cause of such a defect, he wrote, "is as if some one sought to see darkness, or hear silence."¹⁷

God can bring good out of evil. Because evil is always the twisting of something good, the good is never wholly lost, and God can work with it. Augustine's sentence in the Enchiridion is one of the most important in Christian thought on this subject: God, "being Himself supremely good, would never permit the existence of anything evil among His works, if He were not so omnipotent and good that He can bring good even out of evil."¹⁸ Joseph said it to the brothers who sold him: "But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive" (Genesis 50:20).

A word on Isaiah 45:7

Readers of the King James Bible will meet one verse that seems to say the opposite: "I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things" (Isaiah 45:7).

The context helps. The word set against "evil" in the verse is not "goodness" but "peace." The Hebrew word, listed in Strong's Concordance as number 7451, covers a wide range: moral wickedness, but also adversity, affliction, calamity and distress.¹⁹ In Isaiah 45 the Lord is speaking to Cyrus about the rise and fall of nations: He sends prosperity and He sends disaster. The verse teaches that no calamity lies outside God's rule. It does not teach that God is the author of sin, which James 1:13 flatly denies. The King James translators used "evil" in this wider sense often, as when Job asks, "shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" (Job 2:10), meaning his losses, not wickedness.

The problem of good

Augustine's answer also turns the question around. If evil is a lack, a falling short, then to call anything evil is to measure it against a standard of good. Where does that standard come from?

C. S. Lewis found this out on his own road from atheism. In Mere Christianity he wrote:

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?²⁰

This does not prove God exists, and Lewis did not claim it did. But it shows that the problem of evil is not only a problem for believers. An atheist who says the world is truly unjust, and not merely unpleasant to him, is appealing to a moral law that his own view struggles to account for. Paul says that law is written on every heart: the Gentiles "shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness" (Romans 2:15). Ivan Karamazov's outrage at the torture of children is right. It is the voice of that law. The question is whether a universe without God has any room for it.

This part matters because it answers the strongest form of the objection, the claim that God and evil cannot both exist. The answer most Christians have reached for, from Augustine onward, is free will. In the 1970s the philosopher Alvin Plantinga gave that answer its most careful modern form.

A defence, not a theodicy

Plantinga drew a distinction that is worth learning. A theodicy tries to say what God's actual reason for permitting evil is. A defence aims at something smaller: "the aim is not to say what God's reason is, but at most what God's reason might possibly be."²¹ Against the logical problem, a defence is all that is needed. Mackie claimed that God's goodness, God's power and the existence of evil cannot all be true together. To refute that claim, you do not have to know why God permits evil. You only have to show one possible reason that is consistent with His goodness and power. If there is one such possibility, there is no contradiction.

The defence stated

Here is Plantinga's own preliminary statement, from God, Freedom, and Evil:

A world containing creatures who are significantly free (and freely perform more good than evil actions) is more valuable, all else being equal, than a world containing no free creatures at all. Now God can create free creatures, but He can't cause or determine them to do only what is right. For if He does so, then they aren't significantly free after all; they do not do what is right freely. To create creatures capable of moral good, therefore, He must create creatures capable of moral evil; and He can't give these creatures the freedom to perform evil and at the same time prevent them from doing so. As it turned out, sadly enough, some of the free creatures God created went wrong in the exercise of their freedom; this is the source of moral evil. The fact that free creatures sometimes go wrong, however, counts neither against God's omnipotence nor against His goodness; for He could have forestalled the occurrence of moral evil only by removing the possibility of moral good.²²

By "significantly free" Plantinga meant free with respect to an action that is morally significant, something it would be right to do and wrong to refrain from, or the other way round. Choosing Cheerios over Wheaties for breakfast, he noted dryly, does not count.²³

What omnipotence means

The defence depends on a point about God's power that Christians have always held: that omnipotence does not mean the power to do nonsense. Lewis put it memorably in the second chapter of The Problem of Pain:

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say "God can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it," you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words "God can."²⁴

"It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives," Lewis continued, "not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God."²⁵ Scripture itself names things God cannot do: He "cannot lie" (Titus 1:2), he "cannot deny himself" (2 Timothy 2:13), and he "cannot be tempted with evil" (James 1:13). These are not weaknesses. They are the shape of His perfection.

So the question is not whether God could make a world without any possibility of evil. He could: a world of stones and stars, or of creatures who do right the way a clock keeps time. The question is whether He could make a world with creatures who freely love Him and each other, and at the same time guarantee that none of them would ever freely do wrong.

A world that holds together

Lewis added a second point that is often overlooked. Free creatures need a common world to live in, and a common world must have a fixed nature of its own. The same hardness of wood that lets us build a house lets one man strike another. Lewis imagined a world in which God corrected every abuse at every moment, so that "a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon." But such a world, he argued, would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and freedom of the will would be void. A game of chess can survive an occasional concession to a weaker player, but if every move were revocable at will there would be no game at all. "Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve," he concluded, "and you find that you have excluded life itself."²⁶

This does not mean God never intervenes. Lewis was clear that miracles are part of the Christian faith. It means that a stable world, in which choices have real consequences, is the condition of a real moral life, and so of real love.

Mackie's question answered

That brings us back to Mackie's challenge. If God can make a man who freely chooses the good once, why not a man who freely chooses the good every time? Why not a world of free creatures who never fall?

Plantinga's answer is subtle, and it is worth stating carefully. It is possible, he argued, that every free creature God could create would go wrong at least once in any world in which it was truly free. He called this possible condition "transworld depravity," and he noted in passing that he would leave as homework comparing it with the older doctrine of total depravity.²⁷ If that possibility were actual, then God, though omnipotent, could not have created a world containing moral good but no moral evil, not because His power fails, but because what free creatures would do is up to them, and not something God can both leave free and dictate.²⁸

Remember what a defence claims. Plantinga did not claim to know that this is true. He claimed only that it is possible, and consistent with God's goodness and power. If it is even possible, then Mackie's contradiction is gone.

The verdict of the philosophers

The free-will defence did what it set out to do. In his last book, The Miracle of Theism (1982), published after his death, Mackie himself granted that the problem of evil does not, after all, show that the central doctrines of theism are logically inconsistent with one another, though he still doubted that this offered a real solution.²⁹ Since then, most philosophers of religion, believers and unbelievers alike, have treated the logical form of the problem as answered and moved the debate to the evidential form described in Part 1.³⁰

That is worth knowing. When someone says that evil proves there is no God, they are making a claim that the philosopher most associated with it gave up.

What about natural evil?

The free-will defence explains moral evil. But what of the earthquake, the cancer, the fawn in the fire? No human chose those.

Plantinga's answer drew on a much older one. Augustine, he noted, attributed much of the evil we find to Satan and his angels, mighty nonhuman spirits who rebelled against God. Plantinga did not assert that this is true. As a defender, he needed only to say it is possible, and consistent with God's goodness: possibly natural evil is due to the free activity of nonhuman persons.³¹ Many modern readers smile at this. Scripture does not. In the book of Job, the disasters that fall on Job, raiders, fire from heaven and a great wind, are all traced to Satan acting within limits God sets (Job 1:12; 2:6). Jesus described a woman crippled for eighteen years as one "whom Satan hath bound" (Luke 13:16). Paul called his thorn in the flesh "the messenger of Satan to buffet me" (2 Corinthians 12:7). And John wrote, "For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8).

Scripture gives a second and wider answer: the Fall. The world God made was "very good" (Genesis 1:31). Death entered by sin: "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Romans 5:12). And the ground itself was cursed because of Adam: "cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee" (Genesis 3:17-18). Paul says the whole creation now shares in that bondage, and longs to be free of it:

“For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” (Romans 8:20-22)

This paper reads Genesis as history: six real days, a real Adam and Eve, a real Fall. On that reading, natural evil is not part of the world as God first made it. It is the world as it became when its appointed head rebelled, a world under a curse that God Himself has promised to lift: "And there shall be no more curse" (Revelation 22:3). The groaning of creation is real, but Paul calls it the groaning of "travail," the pain of a birth and not of a death.

The limits of the defence

The free-will defence answers the charge of contradiction. It does not answer everything, and honesty requires saying so.

It does not tell us why God permitted this evil, to this person, at this time. It does not explain why God sometimes intervenes and sometimes does not. And it does not, by itself, comfort anyone. Plantinga said all of this himself.³² For those questions we need more than philosophy. We need what Scripture says about the goods God brings out of suffering, about the limits of our own sight, about Job, and above all about the cross.

This part matters because the evidential problem, Rowe's fawn and Ivan's child, presses on a real nerve. It says that some suffering looks pointless. Christians have answered in two ways: by showing what goods God does in fact bring out of suffering, and by asking whether we are in a position to judge that any suffering is truly pointless.

Goods that require a fallen world

Some goods cannot exist in a world without hardship. Courage requires danger. Patience requires delay. Compassion requires someone who suffers. Forgiveness requires a wrong to forgive. Lactantius made this point in his answer to Epicurus: if evils were taken away, "wisdom is in like manner taken away; and that no traces of virtue remain in man, the nature of which consists in enduring and overcoming the bitterness of evils."³³

Scripture says the same many times. "And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed" (Romans 5:3-5). James writes: "My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; Knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience. But let patience have her perfect work, that ye may be perfect and entire, wanting nothing" (James 1:2-4). Hebrews adds: "Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby" (Hebrews 12:11). And the psalmist, looking back: "It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes" (Psalm 119:71).

Irenaeus and the making of souls

Long before Augustine, the second-century bishop Irenaeus of Lyons offered a related thought. Could God not have made man perfect from the beginning? He could, Irenaeus answered, but a newly made creature could not yet receive perfection, "being as yet an infant," just as a mother has strong food in her house but gives her baby milk.³⁴ Man was meant to grow, and part of that growth was learning by experience the difference between the good of obedience and the evil of disobedience, so that "the eye of the mind, receiving experience of both, may with judgment make choice of the better things."³⁵

In 1966 the philosopher John Hick built on Irenaeus in Evil and the God of Love, arguing that the world is best understood as a place of "soul-making," where moral and spiritual character is formed through struggle.³⁶ Hick's wider theology went in directions this paper does not follow, and his account did not take the Fall as history. But the core insight belongs to Scripture before it belonged to any philosopher: God uses hardship to shape His children. "For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings" (Hebrews 2:10). If even the Son "learned he obedience by the things which he suffered" (Hebrews 5:8), His brothers and sisters should not expect a different road.

Lewis on pain and love

C. S. Lewis pressed the point further, and more uncomfortably. The problem of pain, he argued, is partly a problem of what we mean by love. "The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves," he wrote, "is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love', and look on things as if man were the centre of them."³⁷ Many people, he said, want not a Father in heaven but a grandfather in heaven, "a senile benevolence" whose plan for the universe was simply that "a good time was had by all."³⁸ Real love wants the beloved to become good, not merely comfortable, and that can be costly.

Lewis also argued that pain does something pleasure cannot. We can ignore our sins and even our pleasures. "But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."³⁹ He did not pretend this was gentle. "No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument, it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment."⁴⁰ We are not, he wrote, borrowing a phrase from John Henry Newman, merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: "we are, as Newman said, rebels who must lay down our arms."⁴¹

Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940, before the great sorrow of his life. Twenty years later his wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer, and he wrote A Grief Observed (1961), first published under a pseudonym, a raw journal of grief in which he found his own earlier arguments far harder to hold.⁴² He did not lose his faith. But the book is a reminder that the intellectual answer and the lived experience are different things, and that a believer can know the first and still be flattened by the second.

Two cautions about "greater goods"

The greater-good answer is true, but it is easily misused. Two cautions.

First, Scripture forbids us to read every suffering as a punishment. Job's friends did exactly that, and God rebuked them (Job 42:7). Jesus refused it twice. When people told Him of Galileans "whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices," He answered, "Suppose ye that these Galilaeans were sinners above all the Galilaeans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish. Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay" (Luke 13:1-5). And when the disciples asked of a man born blind, "Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?" Jesus answered, "Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him" (John 9:2-3). Some suffering is the fruit of sin. Some is discipline. But no one may look at another's suffering and announce which it is.

Notice too what Jesus did with the tower of Siloam. He did not explain why those eighteen died. He turned the question toward His hearers: "except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." Every disaster is a reminder that life is short and judgment is real.

Second, Romans 8:28 is a promise, not a slogan. "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose" (Romans 8:28). It does not say all things are good. It says God works them together for good, and it says so to "them that love God." It is a promise about where the story ends for God's children, not an explanation to be pressed on a grieving friend in the first hour of loss.

What we cannot see

The second Christian response to the evidential problem is to ask whether we are in a position to know that any evil is pointless.

Rowe's argument moves from "I can see no good reason for this suffering" to "there probably is no good reason." In 1984 the philosopher Stephen Wykstra challenged that step in an article titled "The Humean Obstacle to Evidential Arguments from Suffering."⁴³ His point, put simply, was that the move from "I can't see a reason" to "there is no reason" only works if we would expect to see the reason if there were one. But if there is a God whose wisdom is to ours as an adult's is to an infant's, we would not expect to see most of His reasons. A small child cannot see why her mother lets the doctor hurt her with a needle. The fact that she cannot see the reason is no evidence that there is none. This approach is now usually called skeptical theism, meaning not skepticism about God, but modesty about what our minds can survey.

This is not a philosopher's escape hatch. It is one of the plainest teachings of Scripture:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For 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)

"O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!" (Romans 11:33). Moses taught Israel: "The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever" (Deuteronomy 29:29). And Paul again: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

There is a danger here too: the appeal to mystery can become a way of refusing to think. Scripture does not let us use it that way. It gives us real reasons, the ones in Parts 2 and 3 and this part, and then it tells us that the full reason, in any given case, belongs to God. Those two things together are not a dodge. They are exactly what we should expect if the Christian God is real.

Why "God doesn't know the future" is no answer

Some modern writers have proposed a different way out: that God does not know the future free choices of His creatures, and so is often as surprised by evil as we are. Whatever its appeal, Scripture closes that door. "Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me, Declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done" (Isaiah 46:9-10). James told the council at Jerusalem: "Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world" (Acts 15:18). David says that every one of his days was written in God's book "when as yet there was none of them" (Psalm 139:16). Another psalm says, "His understanding is infinite" (Psalm 147:5).

Nor would a God who does not know the future solve the problem. Such a God would still see evil the moment it began, and would still be able to stop it. The question "why does He allow it?" would remain. The Bible's answer is not a smaller God. It is a God whose knowledge and power are complete, whose goodness is perfect, and whose reasons, though real, are often hidden from us.

This part matters because the Bible's longest treatment of innocent suffering is not an essay. It is the story of one man, and it ends not with an explanation but with an encounter. Many believers know the first two chapters and the last. The forty chapters in between are where the book does its work.

A real man

Job is not a parable. Ezekiel names him with two other historical figures as a man of exceptional righteousness: "Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord GOD" (Ezekiel 14:14). James holds him up to the early church as a real example: "Ye have heard of the patience of Job, and have seen the end of the Lord; that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy" (James 5:11).

The book insists from its first verse that Job's suffering was not deserved: "There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil" (Job 1:1). This is the whole point. The book of Job is the case the problem of evil says cannot be: a good man, a good God, and terrible suffering, all at once.

The scene in heaven

The reader is given what Job is never given: a view behind the curtain. "Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them" (Job 1:6). The Lord points to Job. Satan's charge is that Job's faith is bought: "Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side?" (Job 1:9-10). The accusation is not only against Job. It is against God, that no one could love Him for Himself.

God permits the test, within limits: "Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand" (Job 1:12). Later, "Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life" (Job 2:6). Three things stand out. Satan is real and malicious. He can do nothing without God's leave. And God's own verdict on Job never changes: "still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause" (Job 2:3). Without cause. God Himself says Job's suffering was not a penalty.

Job's first response

When the news comes, Job tears his robe, shaves his head, falls to the ground and worships: "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly" (Job 1:21-22). When his wife urges him to "curse God, and die," he answers, "What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips" (Job 2:9-10).

This is often held up as the ideal response to suffering, and it is magnificent. But the book does not stop there, and neither should we.

Job's lament

In chapter 3 Job opens his mouth and curses the day he was born: "Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived" (Job 3:3). For most of the next thirty-five chapters he protests, argues and pleads. "Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul" (Job 7:11). He longs for a hearing: "Oh that I knew where I might find him! that I might come even to his seat!" (Job 23:3).

Yet in the middle of the protest come some of the greatest statements of faith in the Bible. "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him" (Job 13:15). And:

“For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.” (Job 19:25-27)

The lament and the faith are not opposites. Job argues with God because he believes in God. He never takes his complaint anywhere else.

The friends

Job's three friends begin well. They come to mourn with him, and "they sat down with him upon the ground seven days and seven nights, and none spake a word unto him: for they saw that his grief was very great" (Job 2:13). That week of silence may have been the best thing they did.

Then they speak. Their theology is simple and, in its place, partly true: God is just, and the wicked reap what they sow. Eliphaz: "Remember, I pray thee, who ever perished, being innocent? or where were the righteous cut off? Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same" (Job 4:7-8). The conclusion follows: Job must have sinned. Round after round, they press him to confess a guilt he does not have. Job's verdict on them has passed into the language: "miserable comforters are ye all" (Job 16:2).

The friends' error is the error Jesus rejected in Luke 13 and John 9. They took a true principle, that God judges sin, and turned it into a formula that explained every suffering. In doing so they slandered both Job and God.

God answers

At last the Lord speaks "out of the whirlwind." He does not explain the scene in heaven. He does not answer Job's questions. He asks His own:

“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.” (Job 38:2-4)

For four chapters God walks Job through creation: the sea, the dawn, the snow, the lion, the raven, the wild goat, the horse, the hawk, and the great beasts behemoth and leviathan. The message is not "be quiet, you are small," though Job is small. It is that the world is far larger, stranger and more ordered than Job knows, and that the One who governs all of it is not absent from Job's corner of it. One question goes to the heart of Job's complaint: "Wilt thou also disannul my judgment? wilt thou condemn me, that thou mayest be righteous?" (Job 40:8). Job had been tempted to clear his own name by accusing God. God will not allow that trade.

Job's answer

Job's reply is not defeat but sight:

“I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak: I will demand of thee, and declare thou unto me. I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:2-6)

"I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee." That is the answer of the book of Job. Job never learns why. He learns Who. And it is enough.

The verdict

Then comes the most surprising verse in the book. God turns to the friends who defended Him: "My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath" (Job 42:7). Job, who argued and lamented and demanded a hearing, spoke rightly. The friends, who said pious things about God's justice, did not. God accepts honest lament from a man who clings to Him. He does not accept tidy theology that crushes the sufferer.

And Job, the one wronged, is told to pray for the friends who wronged him: "my servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept" (Job 42:8). His restoration comes as he does: "And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before" (Job 42:10).

What Job teaches

Gathering it up:

• Innocent suffering is real. Scripture does not explain it away. God Himself calls Job's suffering "without cause."
• Satan is real but leashed. He can afflict, but only within limits God sets, and he cannot win the argument he started.
• Lament is permitted. God is not offended by honest anguish brought to Him. He is offended by false comfort.
• The reason may never be told. Job died without knowing what the reader knows. Many believers will too.
• God's presence is the answer before any explanation is. "Now mine eye seeth thee."
• There is a redeemer. Job's confidence that "my redeemer liveth" points beyond the book, to a Redeemer who would one day stand on the earth and suffer Himself.

That last point is where the Bible's answer to evil finally rests.

This part matters because every other answer to the problem of evil, however true, leaves God at a distance. The cross does not. It is the place where the Christian answer becomes unlike any other, because the God who permits suffering is the God who entered it.

Alyosha's answer

Recall Ivan Karamazov's protest. He asked whether there was "in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive." Dostoevsky gave Alyosha the reply:

“But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent blood for all and everything. You have forgotten Him, and on Him is built the edifice.”⁴⁴

That is the Christian answer to the protest. Not an argument, but a Person, and a Person who suffered.

God with us in suffering

The God of the Bible is not a spectator. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). He "made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross" (Philippians 2:7-8). Isaiah had foreseen Him: "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Isaiah 53:3). Even in the Old Testament the prophet could say of Israel, "In all their affliction he was afflicted" (Isaiah 63:9).

Jesus knew grief. At the grave of His friend Lazarus, knowing He was about to raise him, "Jesus wept" (John 11:35). He knew fear and anguish: in Gethsemane "being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground" (Luke 22:44). He prayed for the cup to pass and then yielded: "nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt" (Matthew 26:39). Hebrews says He "offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears" (Hebrews 5:7), and that we therefore "have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin" (Hebrews 4:15).

And He knew the worst thing a sufferer can feel, the silence of God. "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). He was quoting the first line of Psalm 22, the psalm of the righteous sufferer. The most honest question in the whole problem of evil, why?, was asked by God the Son on a Roman cross.

Whatever else we say, we cannot say that God does not know what it is like.

The worst evil, and its purpose

The cross is more than sympathy. It is the clearest case in history of God bringing good out of evil without ever approving the evil.

The crucifixion of Jesus was the greatest moral evil ever committed: the murder of the only innocent man, by the religious and political powers of the world together. And yet Peter, preaching in Jerusalem seven weeks later, said this:

“Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain” (Acts 2:23)

Both halves are true at once. God's "determinate counsel and foreknowledge" stood behind the event. And the hands that did it were "wicked," and fully guilty. The church prayed the same: "For of a truth against thy holy child Jesus, whom thou hast anointed, both Herod, and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles, and the people of Israel, were gathered together, For to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel determined before to be done" (Acts 4:27-28).

This is the pattern of Genesis 50:20 at its highest. Men meant it for evil; God meant it for good, to save much people alive. Christians differ on exactly how God's sovereign purpose and human freedom fit together. Scripture does not settle the mechanics for us. It simply teaches both, side by side, and the cross is the proof that they can stand together. If God could take the murder of His Son and make it the salvation of the world, there is no evil in your life that is beyond His power to redeem.

The cross and justice

Part of the problem of evil is the problem of justice. Why do the wicked prosper? Why do sins go unpunished? "Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil" (Ecclesiastes 8:11).

The cross answers this too. It shows that God does not ignore evil. He judges it, and judges it fully. Paul says God set forth Christ "to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus" (Romans 3:25-26). God's patience with sin was never indifference. Sin was always going to be paid for. At the cross it was paid for by the One who "his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree" (1 Peter 2:24), suffering "the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God" (1 Peter 3:18).

And for those who refuse that payment, judgment is still coming. God "hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead" (Acts 17:31). Jesus Himself spoke of it without softening: "And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal" (Matthew 25:46). The delay of judgment is mercy, not neglect: "The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).

This matters for the problem of evil more than people realise. A universe without God has no final justice at all. The murderer who dies in his bed has simply got away with it. Ivan's tortured child has no one to answer for her. The Christian faith says otherwise. Every wrong will be either paid for at the cross or answered at the judgment. None will be forgotten.

The argument from the cross

The cross also gives us a way to trust God when we cannot see His reasons. Paul makes the argument in one sentence: "He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32). If God has already done the greatest and costliest thing for us, we have good reason to trust Him in the smaller things we do not understand. "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8).

When we cannot see why God permits a particular sorrow, we can still look at the cross and know that it is not because He does not love us. Whatever the reason is, it is not that.

The end of evil

Finally, the cross is not the end of the story. The resurrection is. Jesus did not stay dead, and because He rose, death itself is under sentence. "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (1 Corinthians 15:26). Christ took flesh "that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage" (Hebrews 2:14-15).

Scripture's last word on evil is not an explanation but an ending:

“And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away. And he that sat upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things new.” (Revelation 21:4-5)

Paul, who knew more suffering than most of us ever will, did the arithmetic: "For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18). And again: "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory" (2 Corinthians 4:17). He did not call it light because it was light. He called it light because of what it was being weighed against.

That is the final answer to Ivan Karamazov. The harmony he refused is not one built on the unavenged tears of children. It is one built on the blood of the innocent Son of God, who bore the world's evil, who will judge every wrong, and who will wipe away every tear with His own hand.

This part matters because sooner or later the problem of evil stops being a topic and becomes your life. Everything in the earlier parts is true. But on the day the phone rings, you will need something more than arguments. Scripture gives it.

You may lament

The first thing Scripture gives the sufferer is permission to grieve, and words to grieve with. Many of the psalms are laments. "How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me? How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having sorrow in my heart daily?" (Psalm 13:1-2). Another psalm invites it: "Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us" (Psalm 62:8).

Job lamented and God said he spoke rightly. Jesus lamented on the cross. You are not being unfaithful when you bring your honest anguish to God. You are doing what the faithful have always done. The only wrong way to lament is away from Him.

He is near

"The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit" (Psalm 34:18). David wrote, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me" (Psalm 23:4). Not one sparrow falls "on the ground without your Father" (Matthew 10:29). The psalmist even says God keeps count of our tears: "put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?" (Psalm 56:8).

You may not feel His nearness. Job did not, and neither did the Lord Jesus in the darkness of the cross. Feelings are real, but they are not the measure of God's presence. His promise is.

Grace for the day

When Paul begged three times for his thorn in the flesh to be removed, it was not. He received something else: "And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). God does not always take the suffering away. He always gives grace to bear it. "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness" (Lamentations 3:22-23), words traditionally ascribed to Jeremiah, written amid the ruins of Jerusalem.

How to stand with someone who suffers

Most of us will spend more time beside sufferers than being one. Job's friends show us both what to do and what not to do.

• Come. They travelled to be with him. Presence matters more than words.
• Sit in silence. For seven days they said nothing, "for they saw that his grief was very great" (Job 2:13). That was their best moment.
• Weep with them. "Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep" (Romans 12:15).
• Do not explain. Do not tell a grieving person why this happened. You do not know. The friends thought they knew, and God rebuked them.
• Do not hurry them. "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning" (Psalm 30:5), but the night can be long, and it is not yours to shorten.
• Pray for them, and with them. And remember that God comforts us "that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God" (2 Corinthians 1:4).

Get help

Some suffering has a medical side as well as a spiritual one. Grief can become depression; trauma can become something a person cannot carry alone. Seeing a doctor or a counsellor is not a failure of faith. And if you are thinking of ending your life, stop reading and call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or call 911 if you are in immediate danger. Tell someone today.

The hope that does not lie

Christians "sorrow not, even as others which have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Notice: we do sorrow. But our sorrow has a horizon. Jesus said to a weeping sister at her brother's grave, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?" (John 11:25-26). That question is put to every sufferer.

Habakkuk began his book asking why God did not act. He ended it with this:

“Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.” (Habakkuk 3:17-18)

Nothing in his circumstances had changed. What had changed was where he was looking.

The problem of evil is real, and this paper has not pretended otherwise. The question Epicurus asked, and Hume repeated, and Ivan Karamazov felt in his bones, is a question the Bible itself asks. But it is not the end of faith.

What we have seen

• The logical problem fails. Plantinga showed that a good and all-powerful God and the existence of evil are not contradictory, because a world of truly free creatures who can love is worth the risk of their misuse of freedom. Mackie, its most famous champion, conceded the point.
• Evil is not a thing God made. With Augustine, Scripture teaches that evil is the corruption of good, the turning of a good creature from its Maker, and that God is so good and so powerful that He can bring good even out of it.
• Natural evil has a history. The groaning of creation is traced in Scripture to the Fall and to the malice of a real enemy, and it is travail, not death throes.
• God brings real goods out of suffering, patience, character, compassion, a deeper knowledge of Him, though no one may read another's suffering as a punishment.
• We are not in a position to call any evil pointless. Our inability to see God's reasons is what we should expect if He is God.
• Job shows that the answer to "why?" is often "Who." God may never explain. He does come.
• The cross is God's own answer. He entered suffering, judged sin, brought the greatest good out of the greatest evil, and promised an end to every tear.

An invitation

If you are reading this as a skeptic, the question to ask is not only whether evil fits with God, but whether it fits without Him. If there is no God, there is no standard by which to call anything evil, no justice for the murdered, and no hope for the grieving. The Christian faith does not offer you a world without pain. It offers you a God who has borne it, and who calls you to come to Him with repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ (Acts 20:21). The promise is plain: "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).

When real life hit — a lost job, a pregnant wife, constant fights — I went looking for peace anywhere I could find it. None of it held. Then one day I got on my knees and prayed: "Jesus, if you are real, show me — and I'll serve you." That prayer is open to anyone. His promise stands: "him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out" (John 6:37).

And if you are reading this as a believer in the dark, remember Job: "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee" (Job 42:5). The answer you need most may not be an explanation. It may be Him.

“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)