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You're tuned into Everyday Theology in Plain English, making sense of God's truth for your everyday life. Here's your host, the man who doesn't have easy answers today and isn't going to pretend he does, but believes there's real hope even in this hard episode. Charlie Miller.

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Hey there, welcome back to Everyday Theology in Plain English. I'm so glad that you're here, and I mean that especially today. This is one of those episodes I want to walk into carefully because the subject touches real pain. Maybe pain you're carrying right this minute. So let's just start with the honest question. Where is God when life falls apart? Maybe it's a diagnosis that nobody saw coming, maybe it's a marriage that ends after years of trying, or a kid who wanders off from everything they were raised to believe. A loss that still doesn't make sense even years later. If you've lived long enough, you've either been through something like that yourself, or you've sat next to someone who has, wondering what on earth you're supposed to say to them. Here's the fear sitting underneath this whole topic. Maybe God isn't powerful enough to stop what's happening. Or maybe he's powerful enough, but not good enough to want to. And honestly, neither of those feels survivable. So a lot of people just quietly stop asking the question out loud. Every answer they've heard has sounded too thin, or maybe worse, a little cruel. It's the kind of thing that sounds fine from a stage and falls apart the second you're the one holding on to the pain. And so I want to tell you right up front, we're not going to do that today. We're not going to hand you a tidy little explanation that makes your pain make sense in five minutes. And we're not going to pretend that suffering is anything less than genuinely awful. But we are going to look slowly and honestly at what the Bible actually says about how God relates to suffering and evil. How can He be completely in charge of a broken world and never, ever the one behind the evil that's in it? This is hard ground, and I want to walk through it with you, not rush you across it. Let's start with the tension itself, stated as plainly as I can, because pretending it isn't hard doesn't help anybody. So the Bible teaches that God is completely sovereign. That's a big word, so let me say it simply. It means nothing that happens is outside of his control. Not one thing. The Bible also teaches that God is completely good and that evil is really evil, not secretly fine, not something God enjoys. And the Bible teaches that suffering and evil are real and painful and not the way things are supposed to be. Now hold all three of those things in your hands at once and you feel the weight right away. If God is in control and God is good, then why does he allow what he allows to happen? Let me be honest with you. People have wrestled with this for centuries, and nobody has a complete, fully, satisfying answer for every single instance of suffering. What the Bible gives us isn't a formula that dissolves the mystery, it's a handful of solid truths, the kind that hold your weight even when you can't see the whole picture. Genesis 1, verse 31 tells us that when God finished making everything, it was very good. Very good. Evil showed up later through the rebellion of the creatures he'd made, first among the angels, and then through humanity's fall in Genesis chapter 3. Not through anything God authored or wanted. James 1, verse 13 says it flat out. So whatever else we say about God and suffering, this stays nailed down in the sinner. God is not the source of evil, and he never, ever enjoys it. Here's the second truth. God being in charge of a broken world does not mean he causes evil the same way he causes good. There's a careful distinction here that's been drawn for a long, long time, and it's worth slowing down for. God directly ordains some things, his good purposes, his acts of creation, his work of saving people. He makes those happen. But when it comes to evil, the Bible shows something different. It shows God permitting evil, allowing it, then limiting it, then working through it and over it for genuine good. And here's the key part. He does all that without the evil ever stopping being the real fault of whoever did it. So let me put a picture on that because permit versus ordain can sound a lot like word games. God running a world where evil exists is not the same thing as God producing that evil. Think of a judge who lets a trial go forward so the truth can finally come out. That judge didn't commit the crime. God's relationship to evil is something like that. Far more mysterious for sure, but something like that. He lets real evil run its course inside boundaries that he sets. He's never the author of it. And he's always the one who will, in the end, hold it to account, and amazingly work good even through it. We actually looked at the clearest picture of this a couple of episodes back, but it belongs here too. Genesis chapter 50, verse 20. Joseph looking into his brother's eyes and saying, You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good. Now their evil was really evil. God's purpose was really good, both true in the same event with no contradictions. And the ultimate example is the cross itself. Let's sit with this one. The cross is the worst injustice in all of humanity, in all of human history. Genuinely evil, carried out by genuinely guilty people. And at the very same time, it's the exact means that God used to save the world. If God can take the murder of his own son and turn it into the hinge point of rescue for everyone who believes, that tells you something about what he's able to do with the suffering in your story, too. Not by pretending it wasn't evil, by working through it towards something genuinely good. So hear this clearly. God working good through your suffering is not the same as God causing your suffering so good could happen. The evil stays evil. The people responsible stay responsible. And God, being who he is, is still able to bring real good out of what he never authored and never enjoyed. This is also where I have to say something very plainly. The Bible never asks you to pretend your pain is secretly okay. It never asks you to feel grateful for your suffering in the moment, like it isn't really a loss. Have you ever read the Psalms? They're full of raw, unfiltered lament. How long, O Lord, will you forget me forever? That's Psalm 13. And that's scripture's own permission slip to bring your honest anguish to God instead of performing an acceptance you don't actually feel. Even Jesus in the garden the night before he died asked God if there was any way that God could take this cup of suffering from him. So being honest about with God about your pain is not a lack of faith. It's one of the most faith-filled things you can do. It assumes he's listening. It assumes he cares how you're doing. It's worth stopping on the book of Job for a minute because it's the longest, most sustained wrestle with this exact question anywhere in the Bible. Job loses his children, his health, and his livelihood in one absolutely devastating stretch. And the book never gives him or us reading it a full explanation of why. Now here's what gets me. When God finally speaks near the end, he doesn't explain the reasons. He doesn't hand Job a chart. Instead, he shows Job more of who he is: his wisdom, his power, his hands-on involvement in every corner of a universe. Job could never fully wrap his head around. And that, not a tidy answer, is what settles Job down. That's a huge pattern for us. Sometimes the peace that finally comes isn't the peace of understanding why, it's the peace of trusting the character of the God who does know why, even when he doesn't tell us. One more honest thing, because bad theology here does real damage. The Bible does not teach that every bit of suffering is direct punishment for some specific sin. Jesus corrects that head on in John chapter 9. His disciples point at a man who was born blind and ask whose fault it was, his sin or his parents. And Jesus says, neither. Suffering in a broken world lands on good people and bad people alike. It's not a precise scorecard of who deserves what. So if you're suffering right now, that suffering is not automatically evidence of some hidden sin God is punishing you for. If that voice has been whispering to you, push back on it. Let's take a quick gut check before we keep going. Is this making any sense? Drop a comment either way. Uh yeah, absolutely. Or wait, what? Both help me and honestly, both help the people listening alongside of you. This topic especially deserves a real conversation, not just me talking at you. So let's bring this back down to the ground where it makes sense. Here are three ways this truth actually changes how you live when you're the one in the middle of it. First, you can bring your honest grief to God without a shred of fear that it disqualifies your faith. Let me describe a situation that might sound familiar. Someone gets news that flips their life over. Maybe it's a diagnosis or a sudden loss or a betrayal they never saw coming. And right alongside the grief comes a second layer: guilt. Because somewhere they've picked up the idea that a good Christian should be handling this with more composure, more instant trust, less anger, less confusion. But that expectation isn't in the Bible anywhere. The pattern we actually see from Job to the Psalms to Jesus in that garden is people bringing devastating honesty to God, not a performance of peace that they don't feel. And I want to be honest with you here because this one isn't theory for me. I still catch myself doing the tidy Christian thing. Something hard hits, and my first instinct is to clean it up before I take it to God. Edit the anger out, spiritualize the fear, hand him a nicer, calmer version of what I'm actually feeling. Like he can't be trusted with the real thing. And every time I have to remind myself, he already knows the unedited version. He's just waiting for me to bring it. So if you're in something painful right now, you don't have to manufacture a claim you don't have before you're allowed to talk to God about it. Bring the real thing. He can handle your honesty a whole lot better than he can handle your pretending. Second, resist the urge to explain someone else's suffering for them. Now, this might be the most important one for how we treat each other. When someone we love is hurting, we often feel a desperate itch to say something that makes sense of it all. Everything happens for a reason. God needed an angel. This is probably because of, and we reach for some tidy cause. And Job's friends did exactly this. They confidently assigned reasons for his suffering. And at the end of the book, God rebukes them directly for speaking wrongly about him. Here's the thing: certainty about why a specific tragedy happened is usually just not available to us. And offering fake certainty to someone in pain tends to wound them, not comfort them. Your presence almost always serves people better than your explanation. Sitting with someone, grieving alongside them, praying for them, that does far more good than any neat little sentence. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is nothing. You just stay. Third, let God's track record, not a full explanation, be the thing that steadies you. We may never get a complete answer for why a specific hardship happened. What we do have is a consistent pattern running through Scripture and all through the lives of faithful people across history. God does not waste suffering. Even the suffering he didn't cause. Romans 8.28 promises that God works all things together for the good of those who love him. Read that carefully. Not that all things are good, but that he actively, faithfully works within them. It's a promise about God's ongoing faithfulness. It is not a demand that you find the silver lining today or this week, or maybe even in this lifetime. Some of his purposes might only come into view on the other side of eternity, and that's allowed to be true without your present grief being wrong. Now, I want to be careful because this exact truth gets weaponized sometimes, even by well-meaning people, into pressure to perform gratitude for pain you're still standing in. That's not what this promise is for. Romans 8.28 was never meant to be quoted at somebody standing at a graveside. It was written so that over the long arc of a whole life, sometimes only clear in hindsight, sometimes not clear until eternity, you could trust that God's faithfulness doesn't run out, even in seasons that make zero sense at the time. Now, here's where I can almost hear one of you talking back to me saying, okay, Charlie, that's all fine, but you skip the hard one. If God knew this suffering was coming and he had the power to stop it, and he didn't, doesn't that make him at least partly responsible for it? That's fair. And that's the real question, and I'm not going to dodge it here. That right there is the deepest version of the whole problem. A good, all-powerful God on one side and real, terrible suffering on the other, and no obvious way to fit them together. Now, I won't pretend there's a bow tie on that, but here's the most honest, biblically faithful answer I can give you. God has reasons for permitting the evil and suffering he permits. Reasons that are in this life largely hidden from us. Deuteronomy 29, 29 puts it this way: the secret things belong to the Lord. Some of it we just don't get to see from here. But look at what we do know. We know God is not indifferent to suffering, he stepped right into it himself, in the person of Jesus, who wept at a friend's grave and endured real agony on a cross. We know that he promises suffering is not the final word. Revelation 21 points to a coming day when he wipes away every single tear from every single eye. And we know from Joseph's story that, and from the cross and Jesus' story, that God is fully able to work real good through real evil without becoming its author. Now, is that a complete answer to every why we could ask? No, it's not. But it's a trustworthy place to stand while the why stays for now unanswered. As we close, I don't want to rush too fast because this isn't a topic that deserves a nice neat bow on top. So here's what's true: your pain is real, and God sees it. Evil is real, and God did not create it, and God does not enjoy it. And God being in charge of a broken world means that even the worst things that happen to you are not beyond his reach to redeem. Not because he needed the evil to happen, because he is powerful enough and good enough to work through it anyway. So if you're in the middle of something painful as you listen to this, I don't want to hand you a slogan and just move on. I want you to know that the God we've been describing today isn't some distant explanation giver. He's the God who came near, who wept at a grave he was about to empty, who absorbed the very worst of human evil on a cross and turned it into the hinge of history. That's the kind of God you can trust with a story that doesn't make sense yet. So here's your assignment for this week. If you're walking through something painful right now, give yourself permission this week to bring it to God honestly without adding it into something more spiritual sounding first. And if you're not in a hard season right now, use this week to check in on someone who is, not with an explanation for their pain, but with your presence, sit with them, pray with them, resist the urge to fix it with words. Now here's our community question. Without sharing any more than you're comfortable with, has there been a season of suffering where you later saw even a glimpse of how God was working through it? Or are you still in the middle of one, still waiting? Either answer is welcome here. These this community exists to help us carry things together. Our season three companion guide is either coming out soon or may already be out when you're watching this. It goes deeper into topics like this one with more room to reflect than a single episode allows. So keep an eye out for it. Next time, we're shifting to a question that might catch you off guard after today's heavy ones. And that is, do miracles still happen today, or did they stop somewhere back in the Bible? We're going to look at what miracles actually are, why God does them, and how to think clearly about the claims you hear now without becoming a skeptic who's closed off to God's power, or someone who spots a miracle behind every coincidence. Until then, remember, your pain is not invisible to God, and it is never wasted, even when you can't yet see now. Thanks for being here with me today, especially if this one hit close to home. I'm Charlie Miller, and I'm grateful for every one of you who shows up. We'll talk again next time.