What the Bible teaches about pain, trials, persecution, and finding hope in Christ through hardship.
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 6040 Few questions press harder on faith than this one. A faithful believer loses a child to cancer while a corrupt businessman retires in comfort. A woman who has served God for decades is consumed by chronic pain, while someone who gives no thought to God at all seems to sail through life without…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06057 The connection between sin and suffering is one of the oldest questions in Scripture. Job’s friends were convinced they knew the answer: suffering is punishment, so suffering on this scale must mean sin on this scale. They were spectacularly wrong, and the whole book of Job exists in part to demolish that simple…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 06058 This question deserves a direct answer: no, not all suffering is the result of personal sin. That may seem obvious when stated plainly, but in practice the assumption that it is underlies a great deal of pastoral harm, and Scripture addresses it head-on. Job: The Longest Answer to the Shortest Question The book…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60006 If God is all-powerful, He could prevent evil. If God is all-loving, He would want to prevent evil. Yet evil exists. Therefore, either God is not all-powerful, not all-loving, or He does not exist at all. This is the problem of evil, and it has been posed as an objection to Christian faith…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 8127 The book of Job raises one of the most searching questions in all of Scripture: if God is sovereign and Satan must seek permission before afflicting His servant Job, what about Job’s children? They died in the first wave of disaster, yet there is no explicit mention in the text of God granting…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60105 When an earthquake kills tens of thousands, when a tsunami sweeps away everything a family has built, when a community watches a wildfire consume their homes and livelihoods — the question that rises instinctively is directed at God. Why? If He is all-powerful and entirely good, why does He not stop it? The…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60106 Of all the questions people bring to God, this one carries the heaviest weight. Why does a God who is both perfectly good and all-powerful allow the abuse of children, the oppression of the defenceless, the calculated cruelty of one human being toward another? It is the question that has driven more people…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60107 Theodicy is not a word most people encounter outside of theology or philosophy, yet it names one of the most pressing questions anyone can ask: how can a God who is both all-powerful and perfectly good allow evil and suffering to exist? The word comes from the Greek theos (God) and dike (justice),…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 2068 There are seasons in Christian experience, and in the history of God’s people collectively, when prayer seems to go unanswered, when heaven feels closed, and when the silence of God presses more heavily than any theological question a person could raise. This is not a problem for beginners or doubters only. Some of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 2080 The death of the child born to David and Bathsheba is one of the most emotionally difficult passages in the Old Testament. It comes in the wake of one of Scripture’s most devastating accounts of moral collapse: adultery, deception, and the calculated murder of an innocent man. And in the middle of the…