The Question Evil Can’t Answer

There are certain questions that do not arise from curiosity, but from collision. They are not born in classrooms or debates, but in moments when life presses hard against the soul and refuses to explain itself.

These questions surface when loss interrupts routine, when suffering enters without invitation, when prayer feels unanswered and silence stretches longer than comfort allows.

Why does God allow evil?

It is a question that has never belonged exclusively to skeptics. It belongs just as deeply to believers. Faith does not exempt us from asking it; in many ways, faith intensifies the ache behind it. Those who trust God most deeply are often the ones who struggle hardest when the world seems to contradict what they believe about Him.

The question is asked in hospital rooms and at gravesides. It is whispered in the middle of the night when sleep will not come. It is carried quietly by people who continue to worship even while their hearts are breaking. And it is often asked without words, simply felt as a weight that settles somewhere between belief and pain.

Scripture does not shy away from this question. In fact, it preserves it.

The Psalms are filled with cries of confusion and protest.

The prophets speak honestly about injustice and delay.

Job gives voice to suffering with an intensity that still unsettles readers thousands of years later.

Even Jesus, hanging on the cross, speaks the language of abandonment:

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

That cry matters. It tells us that the question of suffering is not rebellion against God. It is not a failure of faith. It is part of the human condition, and God does not forbid it. He allows it to be spoken — even by His own Son.

What troubles us most is not simply that evil exists, but that it seems to coexist with God’s apparent restraint. We expect intervention. We expect explanation. We expect something decisive that will justify the pain we see. Instead, we are often met with quiet. And silence, when we are hurting, can feel like absence.

This is where many hearts begin to struggle. If God is good, why does He not act sooner? If He is powerful, why does He permit such suffering to continue? If He is loving, why does the world seem so indifferent to that love?

These are not shallow questions. They reach into the character of God Himself. And because they do, the answers cannot be shallow either.

The Bible never presents evil as imaginary or insignificant. It is described as a force that corrupts, destroys, and deceives. Creation itself, Paul tells us, groans under its weight. Bodies fail. Relationships fracture. Justice falters. Even our best efforts are often compromised by motives we barely understand.

Yet Scripture is equally clear about something else: evil is not original. It is not eternal. It is not sovereign. It does not explain the world; it distorts it. It does not create; it corrupts. It feeds on what God has made and twists it away from its intended purpose.

That distinction is critical. If evil were ultimate, despair would be logical. If suffering were the final truth about reality, hope would be dishonest. But the biblical story insists that evil is an intruder, not a ruler. It is present, but it is not in control.

From the opening chapters of Genesis, the world is described as good — created in harmony, sustained by relationship, ordered by love. Evil enters not as part of God’s design, but as a rupture within it. The fall fractures not only human hearts, but the fabric of creation itself. From that moment forward, the world carries a tension it was never meant to bear.

And still, God does not abandon it.

This is where the discussion often goes astray. We attempt to solve evil as though it were a puzzle to be decoded. We look for explanations that will neatly resolve the tension. But suffering is not a math problem. It is not answered by logic alone. It is answered, if at all, by presence.

The Bible does not give us a philosophical system that explains evil. It gives us a story. And at the center of that story stands a cross.

Before Scripture ever invites us to analyze why God allows suffering, it asks us to look at what God has done with it. The cross does not immediately remove the question, but it reframes it completely. It shifts the conversation from abstraction to incarnation, from theory to flesh and blood.

At Calvary, God does not stand above human pain explaining it. He steps into it. He does not offer immunity from suffering; He shares it. He does not silence the cry of anguish; He speaks it Himself.