Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 02084. God’s rule over all things is one of the most comforting truths in the Bible, and one of the most misunderstood. We live in an anxious age. People lie awake over money, health, their children, the news, and the thousand things they cannot control. Into that restlessness Scripture speaks a simple word: the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 60107. Theodicy is the technical name for the attempt to defend the goodness and power of God in a world that contains suffering. The word was coined by Gottfried Leibniz in 1710, from the Greek theos and dike, God and justice, and it means something like the justification of God. That phrase should make…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60105. Natural disasters are the version of the problem of evil that is hardest to answer, and I want to say at the outset that I know it. Human wickedness can be laid at the door of human freedom. An earthquake cannot. Nobody chose the fault line under Port-au-Prince or the wave that came…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11098 Christian suffering is the question that empties pews and fills prayer meetings, and anyone who answers it briskly has probably not sat long enough with somebody in the middle of it. If God loves his people and has the power to help, why is the believer in the next street burying a child…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 08115. The idea of guardian angels is one of the most widely held beliefs in popular Christianity and one of the least carefully examined. It appears on nursery walls, in sympathy cards and in the confident assurances people give at funerals, usually without anyone asking what the Bible actually says. My answer is a…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 08127. Whether Satan required permission to attack Job’s children is not a puzzle for the study, because anybody who has buried someone they love and then read Job 1 knows exactly how sharp it is. The text plainly shows Satan seeking and receiving permission to attack, and ten young people die within a few…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 6058. Is all suffering a result of personal sin? No, and Scripture says so with unusual force. This is one of the few questions where the Bible hands us an entire book to make sure we do not get it wrong. The instinct to trace every affliction back to personal sin runs deep in…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6040. Why the wicked prosper while decent people are ground down is not a question invented by modern sceptics. It is asked, at length and with considerable heat, by the writers of Scripture themselves. That fact alone should reassure anyone who has felt guilty for asking it. The Bible does not treat this as…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6016. The suffering of Job is the passage everyone reaches for when life collapses, and it is also the book most often misused. People quote the patience of Job at those who are anything but patient, and they quote the ending at people who are nowhere near it. Let me try to read it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 6011. Does God cause suffering, or does He only allow it? I have stood at enough hospital beds and gravesides to know this is never an academic question. How you answer it shapes whether you can trust God on the worst day of your life. If He directly causes every agony, He begins to…