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: 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 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: 4 minutesQuestion 12063 The question of euthanasia — the deliberate ending of a person’s life to relieve suffering — is one that medicine, law, and culture are increasingly willing to normalise. For Christians, it raises questions that Scripture addresses at the level of principle, even where it does not speak to every contemporary medical specific. The…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 11070 Depression is one of the most misunderstood experiences within the Christian community. Well-meaning believers have told sufferers that their depression is evidence of weak faith, unconfessed sin, or spiritual failure. The effect of such responses is not healing but additional pain layered on top of pain that was already unbearable. Before asking whether…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60077 Peter’s first letter was written to believers scattered across Asia Minor—what we now call Turkey—who were facing increasing hostility for their faith. These were real people in real danger. Persecution was ramping up. Their neighbours were suspicious of them. Their former friends thought they were strange. Some were losing their jobs, their reputations,…
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…