Few questions press on faith harder than this one. If God is loving, and if He made a world He Himself called “very good” (Genesis 1:31), why is that world so full of pain? Additionally, the Lord Jesus said so plainly: “In the world you will have tribulation” (John 16:33). So the honest way to answer is not to explain suffering away, but to see where it came from, why God permits it, and where He is taking it.

The place to begin is where suffering began. God did not build pain into this world. Suffering entered through a choice — Adam and Eve's rejection of God's rule, which brought sin, suffering, and death into a creation that had known none of them (Genesis 3). We now live in that fallen world, and it spares no one. However careful or health-conscious we are, sickness and death still come; as God said to Adam, “to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). This matters, because it tells us that suffering is not God's design. It is the wound left by human rebellion, not a flaw in the God who made everything good.

That leads to the harder question. If suffering is the result of the Fall, why does a loving God allow it to continue rather than ending it at once? Part of the answer is honest admission: God has not told us the reason behind every particular grief. But what He has not fully explained, He has firmly promised — that He remains in complete control of the world's pain, and that in the life of everyone who belongs to Him, no suffering is wasted: “all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). The promise is not that all things are good, but that God bends even the worst of them toward good for His people. Suffering is never outside His hand, and never without purpose in it.

The deepest answer, though, is not an argument but a person. God has not stood at a safe distance and watched us suffer. In Jesus Christ He stepped into it — poverty, exhaustion, grief, betrayal, and at last the agony of the cross. Whatever we still do not understand about our own pain, we can never say that God does not know what suffering feels like. He has felt it. This is why Scripture can call Him a High Priest who is able to “sympathize with our weaknesses” (Hebrews 4:15). And the cross shows us something more: it is the place where God brought the greatest good the world has ever known out of the worst evil ever done. If He can redeem that, then no suffering in our own lives is beyond His power to use.

Because that is how God works, our own suffering is never wasted either. Often it is pain that first drives us to Him — comfort can leave us complacent, but suffering strips away the illusion that we are self-sufficient and makes us cry out for mercy. It softens hard hearts and brings a person to see his need of Christ, a need he might never have examined while all was well. And having been comforted by God in our own trouble, we are able to comfort others in theirs; as Paul writes, God “comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble” (2 Corinthians 1:4). Suffering even humbles us, loosening our grip on this world and turning us toward the next.

And it will not last forever. The suffering of this world has an end fixed by God Himself. John saw it: “Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. 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” (Revelation 21:3–4). The same Lord who warned that in this world we would have tribulation also promised, “be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Suffering is real, and the Christian has no need to deny it — but it is neither meaningless nor final.

Christians are often accused of serving a “crazy” God who destroyed innocent nations in the Old Testament. A God of love, the critic says, would never order such a thing; the fact that the Old Testament shows Him doing precisely that proves either that He is not loving or that the Bible cannot be trusted. They point to the fire on Sodom and the conquest of Canaan and conclude that the God behind them is a moral monster.

Almost every version of this accusation rests on one word: innocent. It assumes that God destroyed innocent people. But Scripture denies that premise flatly.

Paul writes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23) — there are no innocent nations, only guilty ones living under a patient God. Nor is anyone left in the dark about their guilt. Paul explains that God's “invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20). You do not have to own a Bible to know right from wrong, because that knowledge is written on every conscience. So the question is not “why did God punish people who did not deserve it?” No one falls into that category. The real question is not why God judged the guilty, but why — since all are guilty — He showed such patience before He judged at all.

The objection further assumes that love and killing cannot belong to the same character. But consider what was actually being done in Canaan: infants passed through fire to Molech, cult prostitution woven into worship, the vulnerable destroyed as a matter of routine, for generations. A God who watched all this and did nothing would not be loving. He would be indifferent to the very people being burned and abused. Love for the victim requires justice against the one destroying him.

There is also the question of authority. No human army has the right to do what Israel did at Jericho, because no human holds the power of life and death over the nations. But God is not a citizen of the world, answerable to its courts. He is its Maker and its Judge, and the One who gives life may justly require it. Abraham understood this even as he pleaded for Sodom: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25).

And yet, for all His right to judge, God never rushes to it. Through the prophet Ezekiel He states His own heart plainly: “‘As I live,' says the Lord GOD, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live'” (Ezekiel 33:11).

That reluctance marks every judgment the Old Testament records. Before the flood, Scripture says, “the Divine longsuffering waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared” (1 Peter 3:20), and Noah himself served as “a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5) to a world that would not listen. At Sodom, God agreed to spare the entire city for the sake of ten righteous people, had they been found (Genesis 18:32). With Canaan He waited across four generations, holding back judgment until evil had run its full course and every warning had been refused. His own people, Israel, were not exempt: for centuries He sent prophet after prophet to them, calling them back, before the exile finally fell.

So the God of the Old Testament is not loving in spite of His judgments. He is loving in the patience that comes before them. He warns before He acts, and waits long after the warning, holding the door open for repentance again and again. Judgment is never His first move but His last, reached only when every chance to turn back has been offered and refused. That is not the record of a moral monster. It is the record of a God who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and who judges only when His mercy has been spurned to the very end.