Question: If there is a God, why is there so much suffering in the world? If God is love and He loves us, why does the news seem to get worse by the day? Why have thousands of innocent people suffered the loss of loved ones or their own lives in horrible and dehumanizing conflicts?
Answer: God is not to blame for all the suffering in the world. He's not some kind of monster that enjoys making people suffer. It's not God who causes the pain, death and heartache. The truth is, much of what we suffer is caused by man's own folly and self-destructive attitudes and trends.
Take wars, for example, which have caused untold suffering throughout history. Martin Luther called war "the greatest scourge that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states and it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it!" But is God to blame for man's wars? The Bible says, "What causes wars and fighting among you? Don't they come from your own lusts?" (James 4:1.) God is not to blame for the suffering caused by war, but rather man's own selfishness, greed, pride and competitive spirit—the destruction of others for selfish gain.

Question: Okay, I can see where man might be responsible for bringing the plague of war on himself, but what about the poverty that pervades the world? What about the millions who are dying of starvation and disease in some of the impoverished nations of the world? Surely they didn't bring it upon themselves!
Answer: Believe it or not, man is largely responsible for this as well. For example, thousands of years ago, what are now the deserts of Northern Africa were fertile, wooded areas. But over the centuries people cut down all the trees and overgrazed the land. As a result, the topsoil eroded and there was nothing left but desert. As the inhabitants moved south, seeking fertile land, they continued to cut down the trees, and thus the desert expanded southward as well.
Today there are three-and-a-half million square miles of desert in Northern Africa; this is largely a result of man's foolishness in upsetting the ecological balance of God's natural creation.
In countries like Brazil and Indonesia, indiscriminate logging for fast money is slowly bringing about an ecological disaster and population displacement. In addition, civil conflicts are a major contributing factor to famine and poverty in many developing countries. Can God be blamed for this? Problems like these are caused by man's own selfishness and lack of foresight or preparation for future generations.

Question: But the shortage of food is not just caused by desert expansion, war or forest depletion—there are often natural forces beyond man's control which contribute to the poverty and starvation in much of the world. Isn't God to blame for those?
Answer: It's true that some factors are beyond man's control, but ironically, while millions are undernourished, in other parts of the world there are huge surpluses of food, running into millions of tons a year! God's earth provides more than enough. No one needs to go hungry. But unfortunately, while many rich Western countries spend hundreds of millions of dollars on storing or destroying these surpluses, even paying farmers not to grow certain crops, and while exercise and weight-loss programs are billion-dollar industries, the poor of the world starve!
Another example of misery and suffering caused by man is the pitiful poverty and squalor of the poor in the huge cities of some developing countries, exemplified by the shanty towns of cities such as Bombay, Rio de Janeiro or Manila, where millions struggle to survive in deplorably inhumane conditions.
God never intended for people to live that way! Most of the people crowded into such slums would have been better off if they had stayed out in the country, where there's fresh air, more food, fewer people, and where they can raise crops and animals, and enjoy the benefits of the good healthful country living that God originally designed for man.
In some countries, the poor crowd into the cities to escape civil war, guerrilla activity or criminal groups and bandits in the countryside, so their suffering is sometimes brought on by others' greed and oppression and man's inhumanity to man in war.
Others, unfortunately, are responsible for their own predicament. They see the cars, televisions and material luxuries that the middle-class or rich own in the cities, and they think that those things will make them happy. They think that in the city they will be able to work less, make more money and possibly even live in luxury.
So they are drawn to the cities, and soon find their families falling apart, their children getting involved with drugs and crime. They can't find work and they soon suffer from malnutrition and disease. "Cities," as the historian Arnold Toynbee said, "are the festering sores on the body politic." But they're not God's fault—they're a man-made curse!

Question: Are you implying that the poor are responsible for their own fate?
Answer: In some cases they may well be. But of course, much of the reason that millions of people around the world suffer deprivation and squalor is because of the selfishness of the rich. Most of the rich do not share their wealth or lands as they should, or pay the poor fair wages or prices for their labor and produce so that they can make a decent living. If they did, there would certainly be enough to go around, as God intended for there to be. In His Word, He repeatedly advises and even commands the rich to share with the poor. (See Matthew 5:42; Deuteronomy 15:7,8.) God doesn't want the poor to suffer!
But believe it or not, the rich also suffer as a result of their selfishness. The poor at least have the hope that riches could one day make them happy. The rich have it all but are still dissatisfied. According to God's spiritual laws, happiness comes from trying to make others happy and sharing one's material possessions with those in need.

Question: But aren't modern advances, technological discoveries, and man's increased knowledge improving our well-being and the world we live in?
Answer: God has helped man learn more about the world we live in, which has led to many good and beneficial discoveries. Unfortunately, much of this knowledge has also been misused by man, culminating in horrible weapons of war, smoke-belching factories and refineries, lethal chemicals, illegal drugs, etc. These death-dealing and destructive inventions have resulted in untold pain and suffering!—But are they God's fault?—Did He intend for them to be?
Take nuclear fission, which was supposed to be one of the greatest technological breakthroughs of all time and the solution to future world fuel shortages. But its misuse by man resulted in the most terrifying invention in man's history, whereby we now possess the capability to destroy our planet and annihilate its inhabitants through thermonuclear war—not to mention catastrophic accidents at "peaceful" nuclear power plants, as evidenced by Chernobyl in 1986.

Question: Do you mean to say that man is solely responsible for all the pain in the world today?
Answer: No. A lot of it is also due to the evil work of Satan, or the Devil, a powerful spirit being whose relentless goal is to hurt man and make him suffer! In fact, one of the Devil's main objectives is to turn man away from God—giving God the blame for his own dirty deeds!

Question: Okay, I'll concede that man and the Devil may be the cause of a good deal of our problems. But if there is a God, and He's all-powerful, why doesn't He stop the Devil from causing all this suffering? Why does He allow man to perpetrate evil in the world?
Answer: God often does stop the Devil from wreaking more havoc and destruction. The Bible speaks of a great "war" in the spirit realm between the forces of good and evil. (See Revelation 12:7,8; Ephesians 6:12; Daniel 10:13, etc.) On the other hand, God sometimes allows the Devil to perform his destructive work as a judgment on those who have rebelled against God or who refuse to follow His loving natural laws.
But as far as stopping man from his evil works, if God put a stop to the evildoers in the world, He also would have to put a stop to all of us—because we're all sinners! The Bible says, "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). He would have had to stop everybody in the whole world from doing anything bad! At the very beginning of time, God would have had to step in and use force to stop Adam and Eve from sinning by eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. (See Genesis 3.) He would have had to interfere with our free will and the majesty of personal choice that He's given each of us, whereby we can choose to do good or evil.

Question: Wouldn't it have been better if He had made us all to be good?
Answer: If God had wanted robots, yes, He could have made everybody do good and love Him. But He purposely limited His own power by creating us with a free will, so we could choose to love and obey Him!—Just like parents want their children to love them of their own free will, not because they're forced to. We were put here to make a choice between good and evil, between doing things God's way or our own. This is the main reason there is so much suffering, misery, pain, ill health, wars, economic troubles and other woes in the world today—because instead of choosing to love and obey God, many people have decided to rebel against His loving rules, which were made for our health and happiness. Most people want to do things their own way, and so they are suffering from the consequences of their own wrong choices! "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death" (Pro-verbs 14:12).

Question: But doesn't God care about us? Does He care when we suffer?
Answer: He certainly does, and it hurts Him to see us suffer as a result of our own wrong choices or the wrong choices of others. The Bible tells us, "As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear [reverence] Him" (Psalms 103:13), and Jesus is not someone "who cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but He was in all points tested like we are" (Hebrews 4:15). Jesus Himself knows what it's like to suffer. He suffered more than any of us, being crucified for the sins of the world. And the good news is that some day soon, God's Word promises, all the suffering will come to an end for those who love God. At His return, He "shall wipe away every tear from our eyes; there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying; and there shall be no more pain, for the former things are passed away" (Revelation 21:4).
In the meantime, we should remember that there are benefits to be derived from suffering. For example, it often brings out the sweetness and goodness in people. For those who choose not to become embittered or hardened by it, sorrow, sacrifice and sadness can bring out the best in them: love, tenderness and concern for others. The Bible says, "We comfort others with the comfort that we ourselves are comforted with of God" (2Corinthians 1:4). And for us who are Christians, it gives us the desire to give others the answer that we've found that can ease their sufferings and help them solve their problems—Jesus and His love.

Though we can understand many of the reasons for suffering through reading God's Word, and we've tried to touch on some of the main ones in this short article, we probably won't know all the answers to this eternal question until we get to Heaven. God's ways are not our ways, and there are some things we won't understand until we see things as God sees them. (See Isaiah 55:8,9.)
A very fitting illustration of this was given by Dr. Handley Moule as he visited a coal mine immediately after a terrible underground explosion. At the pit's mouth was a large crowd, among whom were the families and loved ones of the trapped miners.
"It is very difficult," he said, "for us to understand why God should let such an awful tragedy happen. I have at home an old bookmark given me by my mother. It is woven in silk, and when I look at the wrong side of it, I see nothing but a tangled mass of threads. It looks like a big mistake! One would think that someone had made it who did not know what she was doing. But when I turn it over and look at the other side, I see there, beautifully embroidered, the words, `GOD IS LOVE!' We are looking at this tragedy today from the wrong side. Someday we shall view it from another standpoint, and we shall understand."
God always has a purpose and a plan in our lives, even though we can't always see it right away. We just have to trust God that if we don't understand now, we will later. But despite our limited knowledge and understanding, there is one thing we can rest assured of, and that is His unfailing love and care for us.
"For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, . . . nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus" (Romans 8:38,39).
(Based on the writings of David Brandt Berg.)