When God Doesn’t Make Sense

The call came at 11:43 PM on a Thursday night.

I was already in bed when my phone lit up with a number I didn’t recognize. I almost didn’t answer. But something—instinct, training, the Holy Spirit, I don’t know—made me pick up.

“Pastor?” It was one of our church members, someone I’d known for years. Her voice was shaking. “I need to ask you a favor. My friends—they’re not from our church, but they’re believers—their seven-year-old daughter was just diagnosed. The doctors say she has maybe six months. They asked if you would come. They need... they need someone who can help them make sense of this.”

I’d never met this family before. But our church member had been friends with them for years, and when their world collapsed, she thought of me. I drove to the hospital in silence, praying for wisdom, knowing I was about to walk into a room where everything a family believed about God was being tested.

When I arrived, our church member met me in the hallway. “Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. “They’re good people. Strong Christians. They’ve served in their church for years. They did everything right. And now...” Her voice broke. “Their daughter is in there dying, and they don’t understand why God would let this happen.”

I walked into that hospital room and found exactly what she’d described. The little girl was asleep, her small chest rising and falling peacefully. Her mother sat in a chair by the bed, staring at nothing. Her father stood at the window, his back to me, shoulders shaking with silent sobs.

Our church member made quick introductions. They knew who I was—she’d talked about our church, about sermons I’d preached. They nodded politely but their eyes were hollow.

I sat down. Waited. Sometimes presence is all you have to offer.

After what felt like hours but was probably twenty minutes, the father turned around. His eyes were red and swollen. He looked at me—a pastor he’d never met before, brought in by a friend because their own faith was crumbling—and asked me the question that I’ve been asked more times than I can count, the question that has destroyed more faith than perhaps any other question in human history:

“Where was God? He could have stopped this. He could have stopped one cell from mutating. He could have kept the tumor from forming. Why didn’t He? We’ve served Him faithfully. We’ve raised our daughter to love Jesus. She prays every night. She believes with her whole heart. And now she’s dying. Why would a good God let this happen?”

I looked at their daughter sleeping peacefully, completely unaware that her parents’ world had just collapsed. I looked at this couple—Christians I’d just met, brought together by mutual friends in the worst moment of their lives—now facing every parent’s worst nightmare.

And I realized in that moment that if I couldn’t answer this father’s question—if all I had to offer were religious clichés and spiritual platitudes—then I had no business being in that room. More than that, if Christianity couldn’t provide a real answer to this question, an answer that could bear the weight of a believing child dying, then Christianity wasn’t worth believing.

So I told him the truth: “I don’t know why God didn’t stop your daughter’s cancer. But this question you’re asking—why a good and powerful God allows innocent suffering—is either answerable or it’s not. And if it’s not answerable, then everything you’ve believed about God, everything I preach about God, is a lie, and we should all walk away from faith right now. But if it is answerable, if there’s a way to make sense of this that doesn’t require us to stop thinking or to deny what we’re feeling, then we need to work through it together. Because how you answer this question will determine whether your faith survives the next six months.”

That conversation lasted until dawn. Our church member stayed with us, sometimes crying, sometimes praying, always present. What I shared with this family that night—strangers brought together by tragedy and mutual friends—refined by years of sitting with people in their worst moments and thinking as carefully as I can about the hardest question anyone can ask about God, is what I want to share with you now.

Because here’s what I’ve learned: most people don’t walk away from God because they’re rebellious or hard-hearted. They walk away because they’ve been given inadequate answers to the most legitimate question anyone can ask. They walk away because when they needed truth that could bear the weight of real suffering, they were given Christian bumper stickers instead.

You deserve better than that. This family deserved better than that. Their daughter deserved better than that.

So let’s think this through together. Not with easy answers or spiritual shortcuts, but with the kind of intellectual honesty and emotional authenticity that this question demands.

The Problem Stated Clearly

The logical structure of the problem is devastatingly simple. You can write it in four lines:

Premise One: If God is omnipotent—if He possesses all power—then He has the ability to prevent any evil or suffering He chooses to prevent. There is no cancer He cannot cure, no accident He cannot avert, no disaster He cannot stop. If God is truly all-powerful, then every instance of suffering exists because God chose not to prevent it.

Premise Two: If God is omnibenevolent—if He is perfectly good and loving—then He would desire to prevent all evil and suffering. A good being, by definition, opposes evil. A loving being desires the flourishing of those He loves. Therefore, a God who is perfectly good and perfectly loving would want to eliminate all suffering.

Premise Three: Evil and suffering exist. This isn’t theoretical. This is a seven-year-old believer with a tumor in her brain. This is the earthquake that kills thousands. This is the abuse that scars for a lifetime. Evil and suffering are not philosophical abstractions—they are undeniable realities.

Conclusion: Therefore, God cannot be both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Either He lacks the power to prevent suffering (and is therefore not omnipotent), or He lacks the desire to prevent suffering (and is therefore not omnibenevolent), or He simply doesn’t exist at all.

This is what philosophers call the logical problem of evil. It forces a choice. You can have a powerful God who isn’t entirely good. You can have a good God who isn’t entirely powerful. But you cannot, it seems, have both in a world where seven-year-old girls from faithful Christian families get brain tumors.

The argument is elegant. The implications are devastating. And for centuries, it has been considered one of the strongest arguments against the existence of God.

But here’s what I want to show you: when you examine this argument carefully, when you look at what Christianity actually teaches and how it differs from every other worldview, you discover something remarkable. The argument fails. Not because it’s poorly constructed, but because premise two contains a hidden assumption that turns out to be false.

Let me show you what I mean. But first, we need to understand why every alternative to Christianity fails to solve this problem.

Why Every Alternative Fails

Before I show you Christianity’s answer, I need to demonstrate why every other framework collapses under the weight of this question. Because understanding why alternatives fail helps us appreciate why Christianity’s answer is not just one option among many, but the only option that actually works.

Option One: God Is Good But Limited in Power

Some theological traditions—including some that call themselves Christian—try to solve the problem by saying God is perfectly loving but not all-powerful. He’s doing His best, but He’s constrained. Maybe by human free will. Maybe by natural laws He cannot override. Maybe by metaphysical limitations inherent in the nature of reality itself.

This view goes by different names in different contexts—open theism, process theology, finite godism. But the core claim is the same: God would stop the suffering if He could, but He can’t. He’s not powerful enough.

I understand why this answer appeals to people. It seems to solve the moral problem. If God genuinely lacks the power to prevent a child’s cancer, then we can’t hold Him morally responsible for it. He’s off the hook. The problem is solved by limiting the scope of divine power.

But watch what happens when you follow this logic through.

If God isn’t powerful enough to prevent a tumor from forming in a seven-year-old’s brain right now, then He isn’t powerful enough to guarantee that evil will ultimately be defeated. If He can’t control cellular mutations today, how can He promise to eliminate all disease forever? If human free will genuinely constrains Him now, how can He ensure that evil choices won’t continue to cause suffering forever?

Think about the promises Christianity makes about the future. Jesus will return. Every wrong will be made right. Death will be abolished. God will wipe away every tear from every eye. All things will be made new. These aren’t modest promises about God doing His best within certain limitations. These are absolute promises of comprehensive cosmic renewal.

But promises like that require absolute power. A God who might lose—who is trying His best but could ultimately be defeated by forces beyond His control—cannot make such promises credibly. At best, He can hope things work out. At worst, He’s making promises He has no ability to keep.

This creates a devastating dilemma. If you limit God’s power to solve the problem of present suffering, you simultaneously undermine every promise about future redemption. You trade the problem of evil for the loss of hope. And a God who cannot guarantee ultimate victory over evil is not a God who can save you. He can sympathize with you. He can suffer alongside you. But sympathy without power is not salvation.

There’s another problem. The universe we actually observe doesn’t look like it’s governed by a being with limited power.

Consider what physicists tell us about the fundamental constants that govern reality. If the gravitational constant had been different by one part in 10^60—that’s a decimal point followed by sixty zeros—the universe would have either collapsed back on itself immediately after the Big Bang or expanded so rapidly that no structures could have formed. Either way, life would be impossible. The same exquisite precision characterizes the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, the cosmological constant. Each is calibrated with breathtaking exactitude.

Consider the information density in DNA. A single gram of DNA can theoretically store 215 petabytes of data—that’s 215 million gigabytes. The molecular machinery that reads, copies, and implements this information displays sophistication that makes our most advanced computers look primitive by comparison.

Consider the mathematical elegance of the laws that govern reality at every scale. From quantum mechanics to general relativity, we find not just regularities but beautiful mathematical relationships that suggest profound underlying order.

Does any of this look like a universe barely held together by a deity operating at the limits of His power? Or does it look like the product of staggering intelligence and power operating at levels we can barely comprehend?

The God of open theism—a God who would like to stop a child’s cancer but can’t—doesn’t fit the universe we observe. The universe speaks of vast power. The theological system speaks of crucial limitations. They don’t match.

Which means this solution doesn’t work. You can’t limit God’s power to solve the problem of evil without simultaneously destroying the basis for hope and contradicting what we observe about the nature of reality itself.

Option Two: There Is No God—Materialism Is True

Perhaps the most common response to the problem of evil is the most radical: there is no God at all. The universe is nothing but matter and energy operating according to natural laws. Suffering happens not because God permits it, but because there is no God to prevent it. Cancer is cellular mutation. Earthquakes are plate tectonics. Cruelty is evolutionary psychology. There’s no cosmic purpose, no divine plan, no supernatural agency. Just physics and chemistry and biology playing out according to natural laws.

This seems to dissolve the logical problem entirely. If there’s no God, there’s no contradiction between divine attributes and observed evil. The problem simply disappears.

But watch carefully what happens when you follow materialistic atheism to its logical conclusion.

When that father looked at me in that hospital room and said “This is evil”—when he expressed not just sadness but moral outrage at what was happening to his daughter—what was he actually claiming?

He wasn’t just saying “I dislike this” or “This makes me sad.” He was making a claim about objective moral reality. He was saying that his daughter’s suffering violates something fundamental about how reality ought to be structured. He was appealing to a standard of justice and goodness that exists independently of his personal feelings about it.

But where does that standard come from in a purely material universe?

Can it come from evolution? No, and this is crucial to understand. Evolution by natural selection produces behaviors and instincts that aided survival and reproduction in ancestral environments. Groups that protected their young had better survival rates than groups that didn’t. So we evolved protective instincts toward children.

But evolution explains our feelings about child suffering. It doesn’t establish that child suffering is objectively wrong. The lion that kills a gazelle is doing exactly what natural selection shaped it to do. We don’t call the lion evil. The lion has no moral guilt. It’s just acting according to its nature.

If we’re just another species shaped by the same evolutionary forces, operating according to the same natural laws, then on what basis do we claim that when we harm children, it’s potentially evil, but when a lion kills prey, it’s merely nature? The evolutionary story is identical. Natural selection shaped behaviors. That’s all.

“But humans have evolved more sophisticated moral reasoning,” someone might object. “We have the capacity to reflect on our actions in ways lions cannot.”

True. But that describes our cognitive ability to think about ethics. It doesn’t establish that ethics refers to anything real. We can think sophisticated thoughts about all kinds of things that don’t exist. The fact that we can engage in complex moral reasoning doesn’t prove that our moral judgments track objective moral truth any more than our ability to imagine unicorns proves that unicorns exist.

If morality is just a useful fiction produced by evolutionary pressures—if our sense of right and wrong is just brain chemistry that happens to have survival value for social primates—then when that father said “This is evil,” he wasn’t identifying an objective fact about reality. He was expressing a feeling produced by neural patterns that his ancestors found useful for group cohesion.

But that’s not what he meant. And that’s not what you mean when you witness injustice and feel moral outrage. You’re not expressing mere preference. You’re identifying a violation of objective moral reality.

Can objective morality come from social consensus? This is even more obviously inadequate. If morality is nothing more than whatever a given society agrees upon, then we lose all basis for moral criticism of societies. The Nazis were not objectively wrong about the Holocaust—they just had different cultural values than we do. Slavery was not actually immoral when most people supported it—it only became immoral when cultural consensus shifted.

But that’s absurd. We know—not just believe, but know—that slavery was wrong even when it was legal and culturally accepted. We know the Holocaust was evil even though it had state backing and significant popular support. We are appealing to a standard of justice that transcends cultural opinion.

Can objective morality come from individual preference? This is the weakest option. If moral truth is just subjective personal feeling, then the statement “child abuse is wrong” has no more objective weight than “I don’t like brussels sprouts.” Both are just expressions of personal taste. But when you witness child abuse, you’re not expressing a preference. You’re identifying a violation of something real.

Here’s the logical trap that atheistic materialism cannot escape: To use the existence of evil as an argument against God’s existence, you must first establish that evil actually exists as an objective reality. But objective evil requires objective morality. And objective morality—morality that’s true regardless of what anyone thinks or feels about it—requires a transcendent source. It requires a moral lawgiver who exists beyond human opinion and cultural conditioning.

C.S. Lewis, who spent years as a convinced atheist before becoming one of Christianity’s most influential apologists, saw this problem clearly. He wrote: “My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I gotten 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?”

Lewis realized he was using a concept—justice—that only made sense if there was a transcendent standard of justice by which to evaluate reality. But in a purely material universe with no God, there is no transcendent standard. There are just particles moving according to natural laws, producing outcomes we happen to like or dislike.

The atheist wants to use evil to disprove God. But the concept of evil that makes the argument work requires God to exist for the concept to be coherent.

This isn’t just a philosophical technicality. It has devastating practical implications.

If atheistic materialism is true, then that father’s pain at watching his daughter die is just neurological activity produced by evolutionary pressures. There’s no cosmic significance to it. His daughter’s suffering doesn’t matter in any ultimate sense—it’s just unfortunate biology. When she dies, she’ll simply cease to exist. His grief will eventually fade. And billions of years from now, when the sun expands and consumes the earth, it will be as though none of it ever happened. All the suffering, all the love, all the hope and fear and joy and anguish—meaningless blips in an indifferent cosmos that grinds on without memory or purpose or destination.

That’s not a solution to the problem of evil. That’s nihilism dressed in scientific language. It doesn’t explain suffering—it declares that suffering is ultimately meaningless. It doesn’t provide hope—it obliterates the very possibility of hope. It doesn’t offer comfort—it announces that the universe doesn’t care whether you suffer and that your suffering makes no difference to anything or anyone in any ultimate sense.

Atheistic materialism doesn’t solve the problem of evil. It destroys the concept of evil while making all suffering pointless.

Option Three: Evil Isn’t Really Real—It’s Illusion

There’s a third approach, found in certain schools of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, that tries to solve the problem by denying that evil is ultimately real. In these systems, the material world itself is maya—illusion or at best a lower level of reality. Suffering is not ultimately real. It’s a misperception that arises from ignorance. What you need is not divine intervention to fix the world but enlightenment to see through the illusion of the world.

I want to acknowledge that these are sophisticated philosophical traditions with centuries of careful thought behind them. I’m not dismissing them casually. But I need to point out where they fail.

The fundamental problem is this: any worldview that solves the problem of evil by denying that evil is real requires you to systematically disbelieve your direct experience. And a worldview that asks you to deny what you directly perceive has already lost the battle with reality.

When this child wakes up with a headache so severe she can’t see straight, she is not experiencing an illusion. The pain is as real as anything in her experience. When her father watches his daughter lose her hair from chemotherapy, throw up from radiation, waste away from the disease consuming her body, that suffering is not a misperception that proper meditation can correct.

Try standing in that hospital room and telling this child that her pain isn’t real. Try looking her Christian parents in the eye and explaining that their daughter’s suffering is just an illusion of the unenlightened mind. You can’t do it. Because it’s not true. The suffering is real. It matters. It’s happening.

Any philosophical system that requires you to deny this has not solved the problem. It has simply changed the subject. It hasn’t explained evil—it has declared that evil doesn’t exist and therefore needs no explanation.

But evil does exist. This child’s tumor exists. Her father’s anguish exists. The tears her mother cries every night exist. And any worldview that asks us to pretend otherwise is not offering wisdom. It’s offering sophisticated denial.

What Christianity Actually Claims

So if limiting God’s power undermines hope, if atheism destroys the concept of evil while rendering all suffering meaningless, and if denying evil’s reality requires us to systematically disbelieve our experience, where does that leave us?

It leaves us with Christianity. And Christianity makes what seems like an impossible claim: God is absolutely sovereign over everything that happens, God is perfectly good with no trace of evil in His nature, and evil is objectively real and genuinely terrible.

Most people, when first confronted with these three claims, conclude they’re contradictory. If God controls everything and is good, how can evil exist? If evil exists and God is good, He must not control everything. If evil exists and God controls everything, He can’t be good.

But what if these three truths can coexist without contradiction? What if the appearance of contradiction comes from a misunderstanding of how divine sovereignty and human agency relate?

Let me show you how Christianity holds these together. And the clearest example in all of Scripture is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The Cross: Where Divine Sovereignty and Human Evil Meet

Look carefully at what the early church said about Jesus’s execution in Acts 4:27-28. This is a prayer offered shortly after the resurrection, as the disciples reflected on what had just happened:

“Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.”

Notice the structure of this statement. It identifies multiple human agents who made deliberate moral choices:

Herod Antipas—the Jewish tetrarch who questioned Jesus during the trial and sent Him back to Pilate. He chose to participate in the proceedings rather than intervening.

Pontius Pilate—the Roman governor who ultimately pronounced the death sentence. He knew Jesus was innocent. He said so explicitly. But he chose political expediency over justice.

The Gentiles—the Roman soldiers who carried out the execution. They chose to mock Jesus, torture Him, and nail Him to the cross.

The people of Israel—the religious leaders and crowds who demanded crucifixion. They chose to turn on the man who had healed their sick and fed their hungry.

Each of these agents made real choices based on their own motives, desires, fears, and calculations. Herod wanted to avoid political complications. Pilate wanted to maintain his position. The soldiers were following orders but added their own cruelty. The religious leaders saw Jesus as a threat to their authority.

These were genuine choices made by genuine moral agents. And for these choices, they bear full moral responsibility. They are guilty of murder. If they stood before a human court, they would be convicted. If they never repented—and we have no indication most of them did—they will answer to God for what they did.

That’s the human level of causation and responsibility. The early church understood this clearly. They describe these agents as conspiring, as acting with evil intent, as doing something morally blameworthy.

But then notice the second half of the statement: “They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.”

The same events that were evil at the human level were planned by God at the divine level. Not planned as a backup option after humans ruined His original design. Not something God had to make the best of after being caught by surprise. Planned “beforehand”—before creation itself.

Revelation 13:8 makes this explicit when it refers to Jesus as “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” Before God created the universe, before there was time or space or matter, the crucifixion was part of the plan.

This is what Christianity claims about the crucifixion: The same event has two levels of intention operating simultaneously.

At the human level, multiple agents intended evil. They intended to preserve their power, eliminate a threat, maintain control, avoid complications. Their motives were self-serving, cowardly, corrupt. They bear full moral responsibility. They committed murder. They are guilty.

At the divine level, God intended redemption. He was accomplishing the salvation of humanity. He was fulfilling prophecies made centuries earlier. He was demonstrating His love, absorbing His own justice, defeating death. He deserves all glory for what was accomplished.

Two levels of intention. Two levels of causation. One set of events.

The human agents are responsible for their evil intentions and actions. God receives glory for the redemptive purposes accomplished through those same events. Neither cancels out the other. Neither diminishes the other. Both are genuinely and completely operative.

This is what theologians call “concurrence” or “dual agency”—the teaching that divine sovereignty and human responsibility operate simultaneously in the same events without either canceling out or contradicting the other.

And if you can understand how this works in the crucifixion, you can understand Christianity’s answer to the problem of evil more broadly.

Joseph: The Pattern Established

This isn’t unique to the cross. It’s a pattern that runs throughout Scripture. Consider Joseph’s story in Genesis.

Joseph’s brothers hated him with murderous intensity. They threw him in a pit intending to let him die. When traveling merchants came by, they sold him into slavery instead—better to profit from his death than waste the opportunity. They took his distinctive coat, dipped it in animal blood, and brought it to their father, letting him believe Joseph had been torn apart by wild animals. They maintained this lie for years.

Joseph’s suffering was real and prolonged. Years as a slave in Egypt. Then falsely accused of attempted rape by his master’s wife—a woman scorned turning vindictive. Then thrown into prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Years in an Egyptian dungeon with no clear path to freedom.

The brothers’ actions were genuinely evil. Their motives were pure malice—jealousy, hatred, the desire to eliminate a rival for their father’s affection. They bear full moral responsibility for what they did. There’s no excuse, no mitigating circumstance that makes their sin less sinful.

But years later, after Joseph has risen to become second-in-command of Egypt, after God has used Joseph’s position to save thousands of people from starvation during a severe famine, Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt seeking food. They don’t recognize the powerful Egyptian official as their brother. They expect death when he reveals his identity.

And Joseph says something remarkable in Genesis 50:20: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

Same pattern. Two levels of intention operating in the same events.

The brothers intended evil. They’re guilty. They bear full responsibility. Their sin was real and terrible.

God intended good. He was sovereign. He positioned Joseph exactly where he needed to be at exactly the right time to save thousands of lives.

The events were evil in the brothers’ hands. The same events were redemptive in God’s hands. The brothers don’t get a pass because God used their sin. God isn’t tainted by their evil because He didn’t cause their sin—He governed it toward purposes they never intended and would never have chosen.

This is Christianity’s answer to the problem of evil. God is sovereign over all events, including evil events. But He governs them in such a way that human agents remain fully responsible for the evil they commit, while God works everything—even the evil—toward ultimately redemptive purposes.

Why This Makes Rational Sense

I know some of you are thinking: “This still sounds like theological sleight of hand. How can God ordain everything that happens without being responsible for the evil that happens? Isn’t that a contradiction?”

It’s a fair question. Let me show you why this is not a logical contradiction by providing some analogies that, while imperfect, illuminate how two levels of causation can operate simultaneously.

The Surgeon Analogy

Consider two scenarios involving the same physical action:

Scenario One: Someone attacks you in an alley with a knife and stabs you in the abdomen. That’s assault. That’s attempted murder. That’s evil. The attacker intends to harm you, has no right to touch you, is violating your bodily autonomy, and is causing destruction. The person should be arrested, tried, and imprisoned.

Scenario Two: A surgeon cuts you open in an operating room and removes your appendix before it ruptures and kills you. The surgeon intends to heal you, has your informed consent, is operating within proper medical authority and context, and is producing restoration. The person should be thanked and compensated.

What’s the difference? It’s literally the same physical action—a sharp blade cutting through human tissue, causing pain, drawing blood, inflicting trauma to the body.

But the moral status is completely different based on:

Intention: The attacker intends harm. The surgeon intends healing.

Authority: The attacker has no right to cut you. The surgeon has your consent and professional authorization.

Context: The attacker operates in an illegitimate context. The surgeon operates in a legitimate medical setting.

Outcome: The attacker produces destruction. The surgeon produces restoration.

Does the fact that the surgeon’s intention is good make the surgery painless? No. The pain is real. Recovery is difficult and prolonged. But the pain has a purpose, and that purpose transforms the moral meaning of the act.

The surgeon is not morally culpable for causing pain even though the surgeon directly causes it, because the pain is subordinated to a healing purpose that justifies its temporary existence.

Now, this analogy isn’t perfect. No analogy is. But it demonstrates that the concept of one agent causing pain for redemptive purposes while another agent causes pain for destructive purposes is not incoherent. We recognize this distinction all the time in human contexts.

The question is whether it can apply at the divine level as well.

The Chess Master Analogy

Imagine a chess grandmaster playing against a novice. The novice makes bad moves—genuinely bad moves based on limited understanding, poor judgment, failure to see consequences. The grandmaster doesn’t cause the novice’s bad moves. The novice is responsible for them. They flow from the novice’s own (flawed) decision-making process.

But the grandmaster is so skilled that he can incorporate every bad move the novice makes into a strategy that still leads to victory. The novice’s moves are genuinely free—chosen based on the novice’s own thinking. The novice’s moves are genuinely bad—they reflect poor judgment and missed opportunities. But the grandmaster’s control over the ultimate outcome of the game is not diminished by the fact that the novice is making real choices.

The grandmaster’s ability to win doesn’t depend on preventing the novice from making bad moves. It depends on being skilled enough to work any move the novice makes into a winning strategy.

Again, the analogy has limitations. But it demonstrates that comprehensive control over outcomes and genuine freedom of intermediate agents are not mutually exclusive concepts. They can coexist without contradiction.

Why God’s Sovereignty Doesn’t Make Him Guilty

Now let me show you why God’s sovereignty over evil does not make Him morally responsible for evil in a way that would make Him morally culpable.

When human beings commit evil, they do so with evil intentions. They intend harm. They desire destruction or exploitation or violation. They want the evil for its own sake or as a means to selfish ends. The evil intention is what makes them morally guilty. It’s not just the outcome but the motivation that determines moral status.

When God governs evil actions toward redemptive purposes, His intention is always good. He does not desire evil for its own sake. He does not take pleasure in suffering. He does not want destruction. His purpose in permitting evil is always ultimately redemptive—He is working toward outcomes that defeat the evil, that bring good out of the evil, that transform situations of destruction into opportunities for restoration.

The difference in intention creates a difference in moral status, just as it does in the surgeon analogy. The human agent who commits evil is morally guilty because his intention is evil. God, who governs the same event toward redemptive purposes, is not morally guilty because His intention is redemptive.

But—and this is absolutely crucial—God’s good intention does not make the human agent any less guilty. The brothers who sold Joseph into slavery don’t get a pass because God used their sin for good purposes. Pilate doesn’t escape judgment because God accomplished redemption through the crucifixion. The evil of the human act remains evil. The guilt of the human agent remains complete and undiminished.

God demonstrates His power and wisdom precisely in His ability to take genuinely evil human choices—choices for which humans are fully responsible and fully guilty—and work them into a sovereign plan that defeats the evil and brings about redemptive good.

This is why Christianity can maintain divine sovereignty without making God the author of evil. God doesn’t cause evil in the sense of having evil intentions or desiring evil outcomes. Evil comes from creatures—human and angelic—who rebel against God’s perfect will. But God is powerful enough and wise enough to govern even the rebellious choices of His creatures toward ultimately redemptive purposes without violating their genuine agency or diminishing their moral responsibility.

Is this mysterious? Yes. Does it stretch our capacity to fully comprehend how it works? Absolutely. But mysterious and incomprehensible are not the same as contradictory.

It is not a logical contradiction to say that the same event can have multiple levels of causation with different intentions at each level. We see it in human contexts constantly. Christianity simply says that God is able to operate at a level of sovereignty that incorporates human freedom while working all things—even evil things—toward redemptive purposes.

Solving the Logical Problem

Now I can show you exactly where the original logical problem of evil breaks down.

Remember the argument:

If God is omnipotent, He can prevent any evil.

If God is omnibenevolent, He would want to prevent all evil.

Evil exists.

Therefore God is not omnipotent, omnibenevolent, or doesn’t exist.

The error, I want to show you, is in premise two. It contains a hidden assumption that turns out to be false.

Premise two assumes that a perfectly good God would want to prevent all evil under all circumstances without qualification. But that’s not actually true.

A perfectly good God would want to prevent pointless evil—evil that serves no purpose, accomplishes nothing redemptive, and leads to no good outcome. But if God is wise enough and powerful enough to take evil and work it toward greater good—good that actually defeats the evil, good that brings about redemption, good that could not be achieved without the temporary permission of the evil—then a perfectly good God might have morally sufficient reasons to permit evil temporarily for the sake of ultimate redemption.

Think about how this works in human contexts that we all understand intuitively.

A good parent doesn’t prevent all difficulty for their child. Some struggle is necessary for growth. A child who never faces challenges never develops resilience. A child who never experiences disappointment never learns to cope with adversity. A child who never has to work hard for anything never develops discipline or perseverance.

Does that mean the parent wants the child to suffer? No. The parent takes no pleasure in watching the child struggle. But the parent recognizes that some temporary difficulty serves developmental purposes that justify allowing it.

A good coach doesn’t remove all obstacles from an athlete’s training. The resistance is what builds strength. The challenge is what develops skill. The adversity is what forges character. The coach who prevents all difficulty produces weak athletes.

A good surgeon doesn’t prevent all pain. Some pain is necessary for healing. Surgery hurts. Recovery is difficult. But the temporary pain serves healing purposes that make it worthwhile.

In none of these cases is the difficulty good in itself. Parents don’t want their children to suffer just for the sake of suffering. Coaches don’t impose challenges just to be cruel. Surgeons don’t cause pain just because they enjoy it. The difficulty is always subordinated to a purpose. It is permitted because it serves a good end that could not be achieved without it.

Similarly, God might permit evil not because He is weak or wicked, but because He is wise enough and powerful enough to work it toward purposes that justify its temporary existence. The evil remains genuinely evil at the human level. But it is incorporated into a divine plan that defeats the evil and brings about redemptive outcomes.

So premise two should be restated more accurately: “If God is omnibenevolent, He would want to prevent all pointless evil—evil that serves no redemptive purpose.”

And when you restate it that way, the argument no longer works. Because Christianity doesn’t claim that all evil is pointless. It claims that God is working all things—including evil things—toward redemptive purposes. The evil is real. The suffering matters. But it’s not meaningless. It’s being woven into a larger story that ends in redemption.

Why God Permits Evil: Four Interconnected Reasons

So if God permits evil not because He’s weak or wicked but because He’s working it toward redemption, what are the specific redemptive purposes that might justify allowing evil? Christianity offers several interconnected reasons:

First: God Grants Genuine Freedom

God chose to create a world where human beings possess real freedom—the freedom to make genuine choices that have genuine consequences, including the freedom to choose evil.

This is not a limitation on God’s power. It’s a choice about the kind of world God wanted to create. God could have created a world of automatons who always did exactly what He programmed them to do. But that wouldn’t be a world where love was possible, because love requires freedom.

Love that is forced is not love. It’s coercion or programming. For love to be real—for human relationships to have genuine meaning, for moral choices to have genuine significance—freedom must be real. And if freedom is real, then the possibility of choosing evil must also be real.

You cannot have genuine freedom to choose good without also having genuine freedom to choose evil. To ask for one without the other is to ask for a logical contradiction, like asking God to create a square circle or a married bachelor.

Now someone might object: “But couldn’t God have created free beings who always freely choose good?” This question is more complex than it appears. If God made it metaphysically impossible for free beings to choose evil, then in what sense would the choice be genuinely free? And if God created beings with natures such that they would always freely choose good even though it was genuinely possible for them to choose evil, we’re really asking whether God could have created a world where all genuinely free choices happen to align with His will. The Christian answer is that He did create such a world—before the fall, in Eden—and free creatures chose to rebel.

The point is not that freedom fully explains all evil. The point is that the kind of world God chose to create—a world where love is possible, where moral choices matter deeply, where human beings are genuine agents and not mere puppets—requires that freedom be real. And real freedom entails the real possibility of evil.

Second: God Works All Things Toward Redemption

This is the explicit teaching of Romans 8:28: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Notice the scope of that claim: “all things.” Not some things. Not just the good things. All things. Everything that happens—including things caused by human sin and rebellion, including things that are genuinely evil at the human level—God is working toward good for those who love Him.

This doesn’t mean everything that happens is good. The brothers selling Joseph into slavery was not good. It was evil. The crucifixion of Jesus was not good at the human level. It was murder. This child getting a brain tumor is not good. It’s a tragic consequence of living in a fallen world where biological systems malfunction.

But God takes these evil events and works them toward purposes that are good. Joseph’s suffering positioned him to save thousands of lives. Jesus’s death accomplished the redemption of humanity. And this child’s suffering—I’ll come back to this—is being worked into a story whose full meaning won’t be clear until eternity.

God is not the author of evil—He doesn’t cause it or desire it for its own sake. But He is the redeemer of evil—He takes it and works it into His plan in ways that ultimately defeat the evil and bring about good that transcends the evil.

This means no suffering is ultimately purposeless in God’s economy. Even suffering caused by human wickedness can serve redemptive purposes in God’s sovereign plan. This doesn’t make the suffering less real or less terrible. It doesn’t minimize the evil or excuse it. But it means the suffering is not meaningless chaos. It’s being woven into a larger narrative that ends in redemption.

Third: God Entered Suffering Himself

This is what separates Christianity from every other religion and philosophy in the world. God doesn’t explain suffering from a distance. He doesn’t govern it from an untouchable throne. He entered it.

The incarnation—God becoming human in the person of Jesus Christ—means that God subjected Himself to the same kind of suffering that human beings experience. And not just ordinary suffering, but the worst suffering imaginable.

Jesus was born into poverty in an occupied territory. He experienced rejection from religious authorities. He was misunderstood by His own family. He was betrayed by one of His closest friends. He was falsely accused of crimes He didn’t commit. He was subjected to a sham trial where the verdict was predetermined. He was tortured—whipped with a Roman flagrum designed to rip flesh from bone, beaten in the face, crowned with thorns pressed into His skull. He was nailed to a cross and left to die by slow suffocation.

And on that cross, Jesus experienced something worse than all the physical pain combined. He was abandoned by God the Father. The eternal fellowship of the Trinity was broken as Jesus bore the weight of human sin. He cried out in genuine anguish: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

God knows what suffering feels like. He knows what it’s like to be abandoned. He knows what it’s like to experience injustice. He knows what it’s like to be tortured. He subjected Himself to it voluntarily. For this family. For their daughter. For you.

This is absolutely unique to Christianity. No other religion claims that God Himself suffered and died. And this fact transforms how we should think about the problem of evil.

It’s one thing to question the goodness of a God who permits suffering while remaining untouched by it Himself. That God would be morally suspect. But it’s quite another thing to question the goodness of a God who voluntarily entered into suffering, who took the worst of it upon Himself, who used His own suffering as the means of redeeming those who were suffering.

The cross doesn’t give us a theoretical explanation for why each specific instance of suffering occurs. But it does give us something more important: it proves God’s character. It demonstrates that God is not indifferent to suffering, that He is not cruel, that He is not distant. It shows that His ultimate intention toward us is redemptive, not destructive. It proves His love in the most tangible way possible—by His willingness to suffer and die for us while we were still His enemies.

Fourth: God Guarantees Perfect Justice

Every evil will be judged. Every perpetrator will give account. Every victim will be vindicated. No evil escapes God’s notice. No evil will ultimately go unpunished unless it is covered by the redemptive work of Christ through repentance and faith.

This is crucial for understanding why the existence of present evil doesn’t contradict God’s goodness. Justice delayed is not justice denied. God has appointed a day when He will judge the world in righteousness. At that final judgment, every secret thing will be brought to light. Every hidden act will be revealed. Every wrong will be made right.

Those who committed evil and never repented will face the full weight of divine justice. God’s justice is not like human justice—imperfect, corruptible, often frustrated. God’s justice is perfect, comprehensive, and inescapable.

And those who suffered unjustly will be vindicated. Not with empty words but with eternal reality. The biblical picture of the new heavens and new earth is not just restoration to some original good state. It’s an advance beyond what existed before. It’s God making all things new in ways that compensate for and transcend all the suffering that came before.

So when we ask why God permits present evil, part of the answer is that present evil exists in a larger temporal context that includes both past and future. God is working across the entire span of history toward a conclusion where justice will be done perfectly, where every tear will be wiped away, where death and mourning and crying and pain will be no more.

We’re in the middle of the story. And it’s always difficult to evaluate a story before you reach the ending.

Why So Much Suffering? The Evidential Problem

I’ve shown you how Christianity solves the logical problem of evil—how God’s existence is logically compatible with evil. But there’s another form of the problem that needs to be addressed.

Even if we grant that God could have reasons to permit some evil, why is there so much? Why does evil seem so excessive, so gratuitous? Why do innocent children like this seven-year-old suffer? Why do natural disasters kill thousands? Why does suffering seem so unevenly distributed?

This is called the evidential problem of evil. It grants that God’s existence might be logically compatible with some evil, but argues that the amount and distribution of evil we observe makes God’s existence unlikely.

I sat with this question in that hospital room. I’ve sat with it in countless other rooms where people were facing unbearable suffering. And I need to be honest with you: I don’t know God’s specific reasons for every instance of suffering.

I don’t know why this child got a brain tumor at seven years old. I don’t know why some children are healed and others die. I don’t know why earthquakes kill thousands while leaving others untouched. I don’t know why some people suffer for decades while others live comfortable lives.

But here’s what I do know: our inability to see God’s reasons doesn’t prove He doesn’t have them.

Think about what we would need to know in order to conclude definitively that some instance of suffering is excessive or pointless.

We would need to know:

All the causal consequences that flow from that suffering across all time

How that suffering affects not just the person experiencing it but everyone connected to that person, directly and indirectly, now and in the future

How that suffering fits into God’s larger purposes for human history

How that suffering relates to eternal realities that extend beyond this life

What goods God might be bringing out of that suffering that we cannot currently perceive

We have exactly none of those things. We have radically limited knowledge, constrained by our position in time and space, by our finite cognitive capacities, by our inability to see into either the distant future or eternal realities beyond this life.

Consider a three-year-old child being rushed to the emergency room. The child is terrified, crying, fighting against the parents who are restraining them while doctors insert IVs and perform painful procedures. From the child’s perspective, the parents are complicit in torture. The child cannot understand that the immediate pain serves life-saving purposes.

The child lacks the cognitive sophistication to grasp that all of this is necessary for healing. Should we conclude from the child’s inability to see the purpose that there is no purpose? Of course not. The limitation is in the child’s understanding, not in the reality of the purpose.

Similarly, we are finite beings with limited knowledge trying to evaluate infinite God’s purposes across eternity. Our inability to see why specific instances of suffering occur doesn’t prove they serve no purpose. It just proves we’re not God.

This is not an argument from ignorance. I’m not saying “We don’t know, therefore God must have good reasons.” I’m saying something more specific: we know that we lack the information necessary to make the judgment that specific instances of suffering are purposeless. Given how constrained our knowledge is, we should be epistemically humble about our ability to evaluate whether suffering serves redemptive purposes.

The Cross Establishes God’s Method

What we do know is how God has demonstrated His method for dealing with evil throughout salvation history.

God’s method is not to prevent evil from ever occurring. His method is to enter into evil and bring redemption through it.

He didn’t stop the crucifixion. He could have. Jesus said twelve legions of angels were available if needed. But God didn’t prevent the worst evil in history. He used it. He took the murder of His Son and transformed it into the means of salvation for billions.

That establishes a pattern. That shows us God’s way of working. He often allows evil temporarily in order to bring about redemptive good that defeats the evil and transcends it.

If God brought the greatest good in history (human redemption) through the worst evil in history (deicide), then the same God can bring redemptive good out of this child’s suffering, out of her parents’ anguish, out of every instance of suffering that seems meaningless to us now.

This Life Isn’t the Complete Story

There’s one more crucial piece: Christianity doesn’t teach that this life is all there is.

If this life were the complete story—if we’re born, we live a few decades, we die, and that’s the end—then you would be right to look at this child’s suffering and conclude it’s meaningless and unjustifiable. If there’s no eternity, if there’s no resurrection, if there’s no final justice and restoration, then suffering is just suffering and nothing more.

But Christianity teaches that this life is the first chapter of an eternal existence. Death is not the end. There is resurrection. There is a new heavens and new earth. There is a day coming when God will wipe away every tear, when death will be no more, when mourning and crying and pain will be no more, when former things will pass away and God will make all things new.

The apostle Paul, who suffered more than most people can imagine—beaten with rods, whipped, stoned and left for dead, shipwrecked, imprisoned, eventually martyred—wrote this in Romans 8:18: “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.”

Not worth comparing. That’s a striking claim from someone who suffered as much as Paul did. But it makes sense if what Christianity teaches about eternity is true.

If the glory that awaits believers is so great, if the restoration is so complete, if the compensation is so overwhelming that present suffering—even extreme suffering like Paul’s, even devastating suffering like this child’s—becomes “not worth comparing” to eternal glory, then the evidential problem loses its force.

Paul isn’t saying suffering doesn’t hurt or doesn’t matter. He’s saying that when you put present suffering on one side of the scale and eternal glory on the other, the glory so outweighs the suffering that the suffering becomes relatively insignificant in comparison.

That only makes sense if eternity is real and if God’s promises about resurrection and restoration are true. But if they are true—and Christianity stakes everything on the claim that they are—then even this child’s death at seven years old exists in a context where she will be raised, where her suffering will be redeemed, where she will experience joy that makes her brief time of suffering fade like a bad dream in the light of eternal morning.

What This Means When You’re in the Hospital Room

Everything I’ve said might seem abstract and theoretical when you’re reading it. But none of this is theoretical when you’re sitting in a hospital room watching a child die.

So let me tell you what difference this framework made for that family.

Your Suffering Is Not Meaningless

In an atheistic universe, this child’s suffering is ultimately purposeless. Cells mutated according to natural laws. A tumor formed. She’ll die. Her parents will grieve. Eventually everyone who knew her will die too. Billions of years from now, the sun will consume the earth, and it will be as though she never existed. Her suffering will have accomplished nothing in any ultimate sense.

But if God is sovereign and working all things toward redemption, then this child’s suffering—as terrible as it is, as much as her parents and she herself wish it weren’t happening—is not random or meaningless.

God is working it toward something. I couldn’t tell that family exactly what God was accomplishing through their daughter’s illness. But I could tell them with certainty that it wasn’t chaos, that God wasn’t absent, that their daughter’s life and suffering mattered in ways that would become clear in eternity.

That didn’t make the pain stop. But it made the pain bearable in a way that purposeless suffering is not. Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, discovered that human beings can endure almost any suffering if they can find meaning in it. The prisoners who maintained a sense of purpose were more likely to survive.

Christianity provides that meaning. This child’s suffering is not outside God’s purposes. He’s working it toward redemption in her life, in her parents’ lives, in the lives of everyone who knows them. I watched their faith through their daughter’s illness touch dozens of people in ways that changed lives.

You Don’t Have to Pretend

That father didn’t have to smile and say “God is good” when he was watching his daughter die. The mother didn’t have to act like she trusted God when she was screaming into her pillow at night.

Look at the Psalms. A third of them are raw, honest laments:

“How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1)

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me?” (Psalm 22:1)

“I am shut in so that I cannot escape; my eye grows dim through sorrow.” (Psalm 88:8-9)

God included those in Scripture. Why? Because He wants honest wrestling more than religious performance. He’s not offended by questions. He’s not threatened by anger. He’s not disappointed by confusion.

What grieves God is pretense—putting on a spiritual mask and pretending everything is fine when you’re falling apart inside.

That family brought their rage and confusion and despair to God. They told Him exactly how they felt. And God met them in that honesty in ways He never would have met religious pretense.

You Can Trust God’s Character Even When You Don’t Understand His Actions

This is the most important practical implication of everything I’ve written.

Look at the logic of Romans 8:32: “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

Paul is making an argument from the greater to the lesser. If God was willing to do the harder thing—give up His Son to death on a cross—when you were His enemy, how much more can you trust that He’s working for your good now that you’re His child?

The cross doesn’t answer every specific question about why this child got cancer. It doesn’t explain in detail what God is accomplishing through her suffering. But it does answer the fundamental question about God’s character.

If God loved this child enough to die for her—if He was willing to experience abandonment by the Father, to bear the weight of human sin, to endure the worst death human cruelty could devise, all for the sake of saving her when she couldn’t do anything to earn it—then you can trust Him when you don’t understand what He’s doing.

This is not blind trust. This is trust grounded in demonstrated character. The cross is God’s character revealed. The God revealed at the cross is trustworthy, even when His ways are mysterious, even when the pain is overwhelming, even when nothing makes sense.

I told that family: “I can’t explain why your daughter is dying. But I can point you to the cross and say: That’s the kind of God we’re trusting. The God who entered suffering, who knows what it feels like, who used the worst evil in history to accomplish the greatest good. If He did that, He can bring redemption out of your daughter’s death too.”

The Gospel That Changes Everything

Let me show you why the Christian gospel is fundamentally different from every other response to suffering.

Buddhism looks at suffering and says it’s an illusion you need to transcend through enlightenment. The solution is to achieve a state of consciousness where you no longer perceive suffering as real.

Islam looks at suffering and says it’s the will of Allah that you must submit to without question. The solution is acceptance and submission.

Atheistic materialism looks at suffering and says it’s meaningless randomness you have to endure until you cease to exist. There is no solution—only eventual annihilation.

Various forms of philosophical optimism look at suffering and try to explain it away as necessary for character development or the best possible world, but usually from a comfortable distance, as abstract arguments that provide little comfort to people actually suffering.

Christianity stands alone. Christianity says suffering is real, not an illusion. It matters deeply. Evil is genuine corruption, real rebellion against God’s design.

And then Christianity says something no other religion or philosophy says: God entered into suffering Himself.

The eternal Son of God took on human flesh. He was born as a baby in a feeding trough. He grew up in poverty. He experienced hunger, thirst, exhaustion. He was rejected. He was betrayed. He was tortured. He was executed.

And on the cross, He experienced something worse than physical pain. He was abandoned by God the Father. He cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

God knows what this child’s headaches feel like. He knows what her father’s anguish feels like. He knows what her mother’s tears feel like. Because He experienced it all Himself.

And He did it voluntarily. Not because He had to. Not because He was forced. But because He chose to, as a demonstration of His love and as the means of accomplishing redemption.

Romans 5:8 says it clearly: “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

While we were still sinners. While we were His enemies. While we had nothing to offer Him and no claim on His love. He died for us anyway.

That’s how you know God is good. Not because life is easy—it’s not. Not because children don’t get cancer—they do. But because when humanity was at its absolute worst, when we were actively engaged in murdering God, He was simultaneously accomplishing our salvation through that very act.

The cross doesn’t make this child’s death easy to bear. But it proves that the God who allowed it is trustworthy. The God who entered suffering, who knows it from the inside, who used it to accomplish redemption—that’s a God you can trust even when you don’t understand what He’s doing.

The Choice You Have to Make

Six months after that late-night hospital visit, I stood with that family and our church member and about three hundred other people at their daughter’s funeral.

She died on a Tuesday morning, held by both her parents, singing “Jesus Loves Me” with her last breath. She was seven years and four months old.

At the funeral, her father stood up to speak. And here’s what he said:

“I don’t understand why our daughter died. I’ve asked God that question ten thousand times in the last six months. I’m still asking it. But here’s what I do know: The God who wept at Lazarus’s tomb, who knows what it’s like to lose someone you love, who entered death to defeat it—that God is worth trusting even when nothing makes sense.

“Our daughter believed in Jesus. She loved Him with her whole heart. And because of the cross, because Jesus rose from the dead, I know I will see her again. Not as a memory. Not as a ghost. But resurrected, with a new body that will never get sick, in a new world where there is no more death or crying or pain.

“That doesn’t make today easy. But it makes today survivable. Because this isn’t the end of our daughter’s story. It’s just the end of chapter one.”

That father made a choice that day. He chose to trust the God of the cross, even though he didn’t understand God’s ways. He chose to believe that his daughter’s death existed in a larger context where resurrection is real and restoration is coming.

Now you have to make the same choice.

You can choose to believe that life is fundamentally random, that this child’s death means nothing, that suffering is purposeless, that when you die you cease to exist and your pain accomplished nothing.

Or you can choose to believe that God is sovereign over everything that happens, perfectly good in His character and intentions, and powerful enough to work even the worst evils toward redemptive purposes that will make sense in light of eternity.

I’m not asking you to understand everything. I’m not promising you’ll get answers to every question. Faith is not the absence of questions. Faith is trusting God’s character enough to follow Him even when you don’t have all the answers, even when circumstances make no sense, even when the pain is overwhelming.

But I am asking you to look at the cross—at God dying for you—and make a decision. Is that the kind of God you can trust with your unanswered questions?

Because here’s what Christianity promises in Romans 8:28: “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

Not some things. All things. The joys and the nightmares. This child’s laughter and this child’s death. Her parents’ faith and their anguish.

All of it.

Not because God causes evil—He doesn’t. Not because suffering is good—it’s not. But because God is wise enough and powerful enough and redemptive enough to take even the things caused by human sin and biological breakdown and work them into a story that ends not in meaningless suffering but in resurrection and restoration and the renewal of all things.

The throne of the universe is occupied by a slain Lamb. Sovereign. Wounded. Victorious.

Either God reigns over your suffering and is working it for ultimate good, or suffering reigns over you and there is no hope.

That family chose to trust the God of the cross. Not because it was easy. But because the alternative—a universe where their daughter’s death meant nothing—was unbearable. And because the God who wept at Lazarus’s tomb, who knows what it’s like to lose someone you love, who entered death to defeat it—that God proved Himself worthy of trust.

That’s the question you have to answer. Not whether you understand all of God’s ways. But whether you trust the character of the God revealed at the cross.

Your life depends on getting this righ