Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60110 Few questions in pastoral ministry provoke more anguish than this one. A believer prays earnestly for healing, trusts God sincerely, and yet the healing does not come. The result is often confusion, guilt, or a quiet crisis of faith. The question deserves a careful, honest, and compassionate answer, because the stakes are not…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60056 Joshua 10:12-14 records one of the most extraordinary events in the entire Old Testament. In the middle of a battle against the Amorite coalition, Joshua commanded the sun to stand still over Gibeon and the moon over the Valley of Aijalon, and Scripture states plainly that “the sun stopped in the midst of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01202 The book of Job is the Bible’s most sustained engagement with the problem of innocent suffering, and it remains one of the most honest, unsettling, and ultimately profound books in all of Scripture. Job’s story demolishes simplistic explanations of suffering while pointing toward something far deeper than any of his friends were able…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 01201 This question sits at the intersection of theology and lived experience, and how it is answered shapes everything about a person’s relationship with God. If God directly causes every instance of suffering, then He becomes morally responsible for evil. If He has no involvement at all, then He is either powerless or indifferent….
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 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: 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: 5 minutesQuestion 06066 This question touches one of the deepest fault lines in all of theology — the relationship between God’s purposes and the existence of evil in His creation. Scripture affirms with remarkable plainness that God can and does bring good out of evil. It also affirms with equal plainness that God is not the…
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…