If God exist and is love, then why does God allow pain and suffering in the world?

1. Free choice

God is love and He gives us love.

1 John 4:7-8 “Let us love one another for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.”

We as human cannot fully love if it is not combined with the freedom of our will. So God gives all of us freedom to make our own choices. Think about it, if we are controlled by God to love without our own free choice in the matter then it’s not really true love.

Galatians 5:13 “…You were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh, rather serve one another humbly in love.”

You see God wants us to love Him with all of our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and also to love each other, but He will not violate our free will by controlling us to do. So He tells us what He wants us to do, because He knows what is good for us but He leave the choice with us and unfortunately, there’s a lot of people out there in the world that make a lot of wrong decisions and they decide to do evil things. But see, to ask God to stop all the evil acts is to ask God to take away our freedom of choice.

Sometimes it’s easy to just try and blame God for everything, but you have to look at humans, because we are the ones that’s creating this mess that we are living in

2. Suffering is a result of sin

Most of the suffering and pain that we go through is because of our own sin. We have free will to make our own decisions but there’s always consequences to the decisions that we make. Things like anger, lust, greed, arrogance, selfishness and some of these kinds of sins often results in broken relationship and in some kind of unhappiness.

Suffering and pain is also a result of someone else’s sin, for example, war and political agendas. Let’s look at the starvation an example, most of the starvation on the world is caused by the unequal distributions of the world’s resources civil war or some other form of human sin and in the some way individual suffering is also often caused by someone else’s sin for example adultery, theft, sexual abuse, unloving parents, reckless or drunk people and murder.

3. Pain and suffering also show us that something is wrong

God in His infinite wisdom sometimes allow pain and suffering in our lives to show us that something isn’t quite right. That something is wrong, for example, some people have congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. This means that they can never feel any kind of pain and it might sound great but it’s actually very bad because if they step into a nail and gets infected, but they don’t even realize it’s very dangerous and it might cost them their life.

Death and certain situations let you see sin and the destruction it causes in this life without God. So it shows you that something is wrong with this world that we live in, it’s a fallen world that turned his back on having God and towards the sin of people.

And so, if we see the pain and the suffering in this world then it’s very clear to also see that it needs a healer and God is the only one that can heal this world. So even pain ultimately leads to God.

4. God as the law Giver

If you ask the question, if God exist then why is there so much evil in the world? Well, if you believe in evil then you must also believe that there is good and then you must also believe that there’s a moral law where you can know the difference between good and evil. And if there’s a moral law, there has to be an ultimate lawgiver, which is God. So God has to exist for a question to be real, because if God is not real, there’s no ultimate lawgiver and that means that there’s no good and evil.

Sometimes we focus so much on all the suffering and the pain in the world and we forget that there’s also a lot of good even more. It is impossible for one person to see all the good that there is in the world. So you can’t see all the good in the world but did you ask yourself this question: “Where does all the good come from?

James 1:17 “Every good and perfect gift is from above coming down from the Father of the Heavenly Light.”

5. Pain and suffering is the result of the fallen world. Adam and Eve’s sin

Genesis 3 “cursed is the ground because of you... I will produce thorns and thistle for you.”

Romans 8:20-21 “For the creation was subjected to frustration.”

If you look at this fallen world, natural disaster is also a result of this disorder in creation.

Now, human freedom does not always answer this question of why does a particular individual suffer or why nations suffer, but it does explain the origin of suffering.

Suffering and pain is the result of either your sin, someone else’s sin, or by just living in a fallen world and remember this even though there’s pain and suffering in this world, God still works through pain and suffering to restore people’s live and to heal them.

Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you… plans to prosper you and not to harm you plans to give you hope and future.”

Romans 8:20 “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him ho have been called according to His purpose.”

No matter what problems that we face in this world, as His children, we can fully trust Him as our Father and remember this: When you focus so much on just in this world, you are forgetting that this world is temporary… we’re only here for a very short time… you might die tomorrow, you might die next week, you might die in a few years, but we never know and so if you live for God, you live in righteousness.