Questions That Need Answering

AT SOME time in your life, you may have asked: ‘If God exists, why has he permitted so much suffering? And why has he permitted it for such a long time, throughout all human history? Will suffering ever end?’

Because of not having satisfactory answers to such questions, many become embittered. Some even turn away from belief in God, or they blame him for their misfortunes.

For instance, a man who survived the Holocaust, the murder of millions by the Nazis in World War II, was so embittered that he said: “If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.” Another man who suffered as a result of ethnic persecution, which caused the death of friends and family members in World War I, asked bitterly: “Where was God when we needed him?”

Thus, many people are perplexed. From their point of view, it appears to be inconsistent for a God of goodness and love to allow bad things to happen for such a long time.

What People Have Done

It is certainly true that people have committed enormous evils against others down through the centuries​—in fact, for thousands of years. The magnitude and horror of all of this staggers the imagination.

As civilization supposedly progressed, humans devised ever more hideous instruments for destroying or maiming others: artillery, machine guns, warplanes, tanks, missiles, flamethrowers, chemical and nuclear weapons. As a result, in this century alone, the wars of the nations have killed about a hundred million people! Hundreds of millions more have been injured or have suffered in other ways. And the amount of property destroyed, such as homes and possessions, is beyond measure.

Think of the immense sorrow, the agony, and the tears that war has caused! All too often it is innocent people who have suffered: old men and women, children, babies. And all too often, many who inflicted the evils were not called to account.

Worldwide, suffering continues right up to the moment. Every day, people are being murdered or otherwise victimized by crime. They are injured or die in accidents, including ‘acts of nature’ such as storms, floods, and earthquakes. They suffer from injustice, prejudice, poverty, hunger, or disease, or in numerous other ways.

How could a good God have created something​—humankind—​that has suffered so terribly, so often, century after century?

A Dilemma in the Human Body

This dilemma is reflected even in the human body. Scientists and others who have studied it agree that the human body is wonderfully, magnificently made.

Consider just a few of its marvelous features: the incredible human eye, which no camera can duplicate; the awesome brain, which makes the most advanced computer look clumsy; the way intricate body parts cooperate without our conscious effort; the miracle of birth, producing an adorable baby​—a copy of its parents—​in just nine months. Many people conclude that this masterpiece of design, the human body, had to be created by a masterful Designer​—the Creator, Almighty God.

Yet, sadly, that same marvelous body deteriorates. In time it is overtaken by sickness, old age, and death. Ultimately it crumbles into dust. How pitiful! Just when a person should benefit from decades of experience and become wiser, the body collapses. What a pathetic contrast, at its end, to the health, vitality, and beauty that the body had the potential for at its beginning!

Why would a loving Creator make something as superb as the human body, only to have it end so sadly? Why would he create a mechanism that starts out so well, with so much potential, but that ends up so badly?

How Some Explain It

Some have said that wickedness and suffering are God’s instruments for improving our character through adversity. A Methodist clergyman asserted: “The paying of the good for the bad is a part of God’s plan of salvation.” He meant that to build character and get saved, good people must suffer from the acts of bad people as part of God’s plan.

But would a loving human father try to improve his children’s character by planning to let them be victimized by a vicious criminal? Consider, too, that many young people are killed in accidents or are murdered or die in warfare. Those young victims would have no further opportunity to improve their character because they would be dead. So the idea that suffering is permitted in order to improve character just does not make sense.

No reasonable and loving human father would want suffering or tragedy to come to his loved ones. In fact, a father who would plan for his loved ones to suffer in order to ‘build character’ would be considered unfit, even mentally unbalanced.

Then could it reasonably be said that God, the supreme loving Father, the all-wise Creator of the universe, deliberately arranged suffering as part of his ‘plan for salvation’? That would be attaching an extremely cruel and hideous attribute to him, an attribute that all of us find unacceptable even in lowly humans.

Finding the Answers

Where can we turn for answers to the questions surrounding God’s permission of suffering and wickedness? Since the questions involve God, it makes sense to see what he himself provides in the way of answers.

How do we find his answers? By going to the source that God says he authored as a guide for humans​—the Holy Bible, the Sacred Scriptures. Regardless of what one may think of that source, it is worthy of examination, for, as the apostle Paul said: “All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial . . . for setting things straight.” (2 Timothy 3:16) He also wrote: “When you received God’s word, which you heard from us, you accepted it, not as the word of men, but, just as it truthfully is, as the word of God.”a​—1 Thessalonians 2:13.

Finding the answers to questions about the permission of suffering is more than just an intellectual exercise. The answers are crucial to our understanding of what is taking place right now on the world scene, what will take place in the near future, and how each one of us is affected.

We owe it to ourselves to let the Bible, God’s communication to the human family, speak for itself. What, then, does it say about how suffering began and why God permits it?

A key to understanding the answer has to do with how we are made mentally and emotionally. The Bible shows that the Creator implanted in our makeup as humans this crucial quality: the desire for freedom. Let us consider briefly just what is involved in free will for humans and how this bears on God’s permission of suffering.

[Footnotes]