God's Love Conquers All of our Suffering

Published Thursday, April 19, 2007 by Joshua | E-mail this post

Things don't always work out the way we want them to, or the way we think they will. Sometimes we don't even see it coming. We get hit with some form of pain out of nowhere leaving us feeling desperate and helpless. That's the way life is. Still, it makes us wonder how God can let these things happen to us. How God can just stand by and watch us suffer. Where is God when it really hurts? Maybe God is actually closer to us than we think. Maybe it's when we're in these situations, where everything seems to be falling apart, that God gets an opportunity to remind us of how much he really loves us.

I wrote this in my old blog several years ago:

I think that sometimes we all wonder how God could ever let some of the tragic things in our lives happen. Sometimes life gets so tough that we begin to doubt God's existence. In my experience sharing God with others I have come across many people that just couldn't get past this question. Why does God allow Suffering? So, I decided to tackle this question here. And what better place to begin than the beginning. When God created man he created him innocent. He placed him in a garden with no sin, pain, sorrow, or death. Through sin, man lost his trouble-free paradise. Genesis 3 shows how man's sin caused suffering to enter the world. Eve bit into the apple or the forbidden fruit. Because she disobeyed god, and so did Adam, suffering entered the world. Man - not god - through sin and rebellion, was responsible for bringing suffering into the world. Today, we are directly the cause of 85% of all the suffering in the world. We inflict it upon ourselves. Some of this suffering includes lung cancer, murder, rape, drunken driving accidents, robbery, poverty that arises out of laziness, and more. Another cause of suffering is because the world is in a fallen state due to man's sin. So if sin is causing all of these problems then why didn't God create us without the ability to sin? If he created us without sin we would no longer be human. We would be like machines. There would never be any conflict or harsh words but there would never be any spontaneous love either. God didn't want us to love him because we didn't have a choice. Love isn't really love if you do not have the ability to choose to love. So God gave us the ability to choose. By giving us the ability to choose to love Him, He also had to give us the choice to love other things. Through this choice, sin was created. But isn't God doing something about the worlds suffering? You bet he is. He sent his son to suffer redemptively (Hebrews 2:18; 1 Peter 2:20-24) He Gives grace to us when we suffer. (2 Corinthians 12:7-10) He purifies through suffering when we mix it with faith (Romans 8:18, 28-29) He uses us to help others face their suffering (James 1:27 and 5:14-16; Cor. 1:3,4) God loves us so much that he gave us the choice of love and the choice of sin and then he suffered and paid the price for that sin so all that remains is his overflowing love. All you have to do is accept it and you will be 4Given.