Where Is God When It Hurts?

Few questions are as universal—or as personal—as this one:

Why do bad things happen to good people?

It’s not a question we ask in the abstract. We ask it in hospital rooms. At gravesides. In the silence of unanswered prayers. And for many people, this question isn’t theoretical—it’s a devastating reality. The suffering we see in the world, and the suffering we experience ourselves, can make belief in a good and powerful God feel impossible.

Christians have a name for this tension. We call it the problem of evil. And we call it that because Christianity refuses to minimize evil or explain it away. Evil isn’t an illusion. It’s more than bad luck or misfortune.

Evil is real. It’s wrong. And it’s not the way the world is supposed to be.

That instinct—the deep sense that something is broken—is something all of us share. We don’t just say suffering hurts. We say life shouldn’t be this way. That reaction reveals something important: evil is wrong because something is (ultimately) right.

The Bible tells us that the world didn’t begin broken. Sin fractured what God made whole, and ever since, the story of humanity has been marked by violence, injustice, betrayal, and loss. The question isn’t whether evil exists—we know that it does. The deeper question is what it means, and whether we can ever make sense of it.

One of the hardest realities of the Christian life is also one of the most honest and sincere: we don’t always know why God allows suffering. Anyone offering quick or tidy answers about the problem of evil is not taking pain seriously enough. Even faithful people in the Bible cried out, “How long, O Lord?” God never rebuked them for asking. Instead, he gives us language for lament.

But not knowing the reason does not mean there isn’t one.

The Bible repeatedly shows us a God who is working in ways we cannot see—often bringing good out of evil in ways no one could have predicted. The story of Joseph is one example. What others meant for evil, God used for good (Gen. 50:20). But even there, clarity came only at the end of the story, not in the middle of the pain.

It is normal to ask where God is while the pain is happening. But this is where Christianity makes its most astonishing claim.

Christianity does not find God standing far off from our suffering. It says He steps into it.

If suffering “disproves” Christianity, then we have to ask: What is God doing on a cross?

In Jesus, God entered the brokenness of the world.

He was innocent, betrayed, unjustly accused, and violently killed. The greatest evil ever committed—the crucifixion of the Son of God—became the greatest good ever accomplished.

Jesus is God’s solution to the problem of evil.

The cross of Christ confronts evil.
The resurrection of Christ defeats evil.
And the return of Christ will one day destroy evil forever.

Christianity does not promise a life without suffering. But it does promise that suffering is not meaningless and never final. God has not abandoned the world to its pain. He has entered our world full of pain to redeem what was lost at the fall.

The Christian faith does not sidestep the problem of evil. It embraces it, confronts it, and ultimately defeats it at the cross.

And the truth of the gospel is strong enough to comfort you in the midst of the darkest moments of pain.