Why Does God Allow Suffering? A Pastor’s Honest Answer

A solitary ship crossing a stormy sea at dawn, a picture of faith holding steady through suffering

07/25/2026|Rodney Coe|Encouragement, Portraits of Faith

In November of 1873 a Chicago attorney named Horatio Spafford stood on the deck of a steamship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The captain had walked him out to a specific spot on the rail and pointed down at the water. Somewhere below them, four days earlier, another ship had gone down. On that ship had been Spafford’s four daughters. Annie, Maggie, Bessie, and Tanetta. None of them survived.

Spafford stood at that rail and did not curse the sky. He did not lose his faith. He did not, so far as anyone can tell from what he wrote, ever ask the question that most of us would have been screaming into the wind. Why?

Instead, he went to his cabin and picked up a pen. And the words he wrote on that page have been sung in more funerals in the last century than any other hymn in the English language.

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll,
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

I want to tell you the truth about that hymn. Spafford was not made of something the rest of us are not made of. He hurt exactly the way you would hurt. What he had discovered is what every believer eventually has to discover if their faith is going to survive contact with real life. There is an answer to the question why does God allow suffering? It is not the answer we would have picked. But it is real, and it holds.

This is a pastor’s plain-English look at that question. Where the Bible actually goes with it, where it does not go, what it has looked like in real lives across church history, and what to do with the pain you may be carrying while you read this.

Pull up a chair. Take your time. There is more here than a quick answer, and you deserve more than one.

The Question Nobody Escapes

Every single human being who has ever lived long enough to think has asked some version of this question. The Bible does not treat it as a fringe issue. Whole books of Scripture, Job and Lamentations and much of the Psalms, are devoted almost entirely to it. When Jesus quoted a psalm from the cross, the line he chose was, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). Even Jesus asked why.

So let us start here. If you have asked the question, you are in the very best company in the Bible. God is not offended by the question. He wrote a book that features the question.

The trap most of us fall into is thinking there is one clean answer that will make all the pain make sense. There is not. What the Bible offers instead is something better. It offers a God who has entered the pain, walked through it in a human body, and is walking through yours with you now. That is a different kind of answer, and it takes a lifetime to unpack.

If you are looking for the short version of the road map, here it is. Scripture gives us three overlapping reasons why suffering exists at all, and one enormous promise about where it ends. We will walk through each. Then we will look at five real lives that show what it means to trust God in the middle of it.

For a shorter, more introductory take on this question, you can read Why Does God Allow Suffering? or the companion piece, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? This pillar is meant to sit alongside those and go deeper.

Reason One: We Live in a World That Broke

The Bible opens with the world working the way God designed it. Genesis 1 and 2 describe a creation without disease, without predation, without violence, without death. The line God speaks over it repeatedly is, “It was good.”

By Genesis 3 that world is broken. Adam and Eve make the choice they were warned not to make, and creation itself cracks. Thorns come into the ground. Pain comes into childbirth. Work becomes hard. Death enters the story. And every human being born after that first couple inherits the crack.

Paul writes in Romans 8:22, “For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.” That word groans is the key. Creation itself is groaning. It is not the world God originally made. Cancer is not part of the original design. Hurricanes and car accidents and Alzheimer’s and stillbirth are not part of the original design. Every one of them is a symptom of a creation that broke, and is still breaking, and that God has promised to fix.

This is the answer that most Christian teaching starts with and stops with, and I do not think that is enough. It is true. Suffering entered the world because the world fell. But the Bible does not stop there.

Reason Two: God Uses Suffering to Do Something in Us

Here is where a lot of Christians get uncomfortable, so let me say it carefully. The Bible teaches, in more than one place, that God does not merely tolerate suffering in the lives of his people. He uses it.

Romans 5:3-5 says, “We also glory in tribulations, knowing that tribulation produces perseverance; and perseverance, character; and character, hope.”

James 1:2-4 says, “Count it all joy, my brethren, when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”

Hebrews 12:11 says, “Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.”

The Bible is not shy about this. God is a Father who is willing to let his children walk through things that hurt, because there are things in us that get formed no other way. Character. Perseverance. Compassion. Trust. Depth. These are not off-the-shelf items. They come out of the fire, and only out of the fire.

This is the part where honesty matters. I have sat with people in hospital rooms who could not receive this yet, and I did not push it. There is a season for this truth, and it is not the first hour of the pain. But eventually, if you keep walking with God through the hurt, you will begin to notice that the person you are on the other side of it is someone you never could have become without it. That is not a coincidence. That is a Father at work.

If you are in a season right now where the pain feels like it is grinding you down more than it is building you up, read Where Do We Go When Life Wears Us Out? It was written for exactly that season.

Reason Three: Suffering Puts Us in a Position to Comfort Others

Paul writes something in 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 that I would not have believed if he had not put it in ink. He says God is “the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”

Read that slowly. God comforts you in your pain so that you can comfort someone else in theirs, with the same comfort you received. Your suffering, God says, is not just about you. It is also about the person you have not met yet who is going to need to hear your story.

I have seen this over and over. The woman who lost her baby becomes the one other grieving mothers reach for. The man who came out of addiction becomes the one struggling addicts trust. The couple who walked through infidelity and stayed becomes the couple every young pastor calls when he does not know what to say. God does not waste a chapter of your life. He turns your worst pain into someone else’s rescue.

That does not fully answer why God allows the suffering. But it changes the shape of the question. Because now the pain is not only happening to you. It is happening through you. And on the other side of it, there is someone alive because you survived.

There is a related idea worth naming here: sometimes the pain is the very thing God uses to begin something new. If that is where you are, read When Pain Brings a New Beginning.

The Promise That Ends the Story

Before we look at real lives, one more piece has to be on the table. It is the biggest piece, and without it none of the rest holds.

Revelation 21:4 says, “And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Every tear. Wiped. By God’s own hand. The end of the Bible closes the door on suffering forever.

Christianity is not a religion that pretends suffering is not real. It is a faith that names suffering as real, walks straight into the middle of it, and then promises, on the authority of the risen Christ, that it does not get the last word. The last word belongs to a Father, a wiped tear, and a world made new.

That promise is what has kept believers standing under every kind of pressure history has thrown at them. Which brings us to the five lives.

Five Faces of Suffering, Five Faithful Lives

If you want to see what trust in God looks like when it stops being theory and starts being a person, here are five believers who lived through the five most common shapes suffering takes. Grief. Mental illness. Disability. Chronic illness. Persecution and loss. Each has a full Take 5 episode on this site.

Horatio Spafford (grief). We opened with him. Four daughters gone in a single night. What he wrote on the ship crossing the spot where they drowned became It Is Well With My Soul, the hymn the church has sung at more funerals than any other in the last hundred years. Spafford is our teacher for the suffering of loss. He did not deny the sorrow. He named it. Sorrows like sea billows. And then he named something over the sorrow. It is well. That word well is the point. Not happy. Not painless. Well. Held. Kept.

Charles Spurgeon (mental illness). London’s most famous preacher of the nineteenth century was also one of history’s most transparent sufferers of severe depression. He called it “the causeless depression of spirits.” It swept over him without warning, sometimes for months. He preached to thousands on Sunday morning and could not get out of bed on Monday. He never hid it. He wrote about it publicly, so other believers would know they were not alone. He believed, and taught, that some of God’s most useful servants are the ones who have been forced to lean the hardest. Read his story. If you are carrying a heaviness that does not seem to have a cause, Spurgeon has already sat where you are sitting.

Fanny Crosby (disability). A doctor’s mistake at six weeks old took her sight forever. She lived to be ninety-four years old and never saw a face, a sunrise, a page of Scripture, or her own reflection. And she wrote more than eight thousand hymns. Some of the most joyful lyrics ever penned in English came out of a woman who had been blind her entire life. She once said if she had the choice she would keep her blindness, because it was the first face she saw in heaven that she was living for. Read her story. Fanny is our teacher for the suffering of the body that will not cooperate.

Frances Havergal (chronic illness). She was frail from childhood. Her body kept failing her. She wrote her most beloved hymns from a fragile frame that could not do much else. Take My Life and Let It Be came from a woman who did not have much life left to give, and gave every drop of it anyway. She died at forty-two. She never married. Her body cost her most of what she wanted. But out of that fragile frame came hymns still sung in your church this Sunday. Read her story. Frances is our teacher for the person whose body has become the very place God is doing his work.

Samuel Rutherford (persecution and loss). A seventeenth-century Scottish pastor who was imprisoned, exiled, buried children, and preached to his flock through smuggled letters that are still in print four hundred years later. He wrote from prison, “The great Master Gardener, the Husbandman, in a wonderful providence, with his own hand, planted me here, where by his grace, in this good soil, I set down root.” He is our teacher for the suffering that comes at you from outside, from other people, from injustice, from the loss of the life you built. He kept planting even when he did not choose the soil. Read his story.

Five people. Five shapes of suffering. One faith holding them up. Every reader of this pillar has met at least one of the five in their own life. God has walked people through every one of them, and he can walk you through yours.

What This Is NOT

Before we land the plane, some misreadings have to be cleared out of the way. Bad theology of suffering has hurt a lot of believers, and I do not want to let any of it stand.

It is not “everything happens for a reason” in the trite sense. That phrase, tossed at a grieving person, is usually cruel. What Scripture actually promises is not that every specific evil has a specific redeeming purpose we can identify. It promises that God is able to weave even the worst things into his good in a way we may not see until eternity. Romans 8:28 is not “everything is fine.” It is “God is at work in all of it.”

It is not “if you had more faith you would not be suffering.” This is the prosperity gospel wearing a Sunday shirt, and it is a lie. Paul had more faith than most of us will ever have, and God left the thorn in his flesh. Every named person in this pillar had faith by the wagonload, and each of them suffered anyway. Faith does not cancel suffering. Faith carries you through it.

It is not “God caused your suffering to teach you a lesson.” This is a subtle misread of the middle section above. God uses suffering. God is not always the immediate author of it. Living in a fallen world, being sinned against by other humans, and inheriting a fragile body are the immediate causes of most of what hurts. God’s job is not to have caused every pain. His job, the one he actually claims in Scripture, is to redeem every pain. Do not mix those up.

It is not permanent. This is the point Revelation 21 will not let us forget. Whatever you are walking through, it has an expiration date. Even if that date is on the other side of the grave, it is real. Every tear will be wiped.

What to Do With Your Pain Right Now

If you are reading this in a hard season, here are five things I would say to you as a pastor if we were sitting across a table.

One. Tell God the truth. He can handle it. Read Psalm 88. Read Job. The Bible has whole chapters of raw complaint, addressed straight to God, that God saw fit to preserve for the rest of us to pray. If you are angry, tell him you are angry. If you are done, tell him you are done. He would rather have your honest anger than your polite silence.

Two. Do not try to walk it alone. Every one of the five figures above had someone. Spafford had his wife. Spurgeon had a congregation that loved him through the dark stretches. Fanny Crosby had a husband who understood. Havergal had her sisters. Rutherford had a network of correspondence that kept him alive. Isolation is where suffering does its worst work. Find one other believer and tell them.

Three. Keep going through the motions of trust. Read Scripture even when you do not feel it. Show up to worship even when you cannot sing. Pray even when your prayers feel like they hit the ceiling. Faith is a muscle. It does not need feeling to stay strong. It needs practice.

Four. Watch for the ways God is at work in the middle of the pain. Not the ways he will explain the pain later. The ways he is right now, in the middle of the fog, giving you a friend, an unexpected verse, a moment of relief, a small mercy. He is there. Train your eyes to see him.

Five. Hold onto the promise. Not vaguely. Specifically. Revelation 21:4. Write it on a card. Put it on your bathroom mirror. Say it out loud in the dark. Every tear. Wiped. By his hand.

Where This All Lands

Why does God allow suffering? The short answer is that we live in a world that broke, that God uses the brokenness to shape us, that he comforts us so we can comfort others, and that in the end he will wipe every tear from every eye and close the story of pain forever.

The longer answer is that God did not spare himself from the answer. He came into the suffering himself. He hung on a cross with nails in his hands and a crown of thorns on his head and cried out the same word we cry out. Why? And in his rising three days later, he cracked open a door that leads out of the room of pain forever.

If Christianity were a religion that promised believers a life free from suffering, it would be a small and dishonest religion. It is not. It is a faith that promises a Savior in the middle of the suffering, a Father at work through it, and a world on the other side of it where the tears stop for good.

Horatio Spafford stood on that ship and wrote it is well with my soul, and he was not lying. His soul was well because his soul was held. Yours can be too.

And that, friend, is why the story does not end where the pain does.