People ask, ‘If God is all knowing, if He is a God of love who knows everything about us – even down the number of hairs on our head, and our very thoughts – why doesn’t He intervene to end our suffering and to stop all the evil in the world? If God is love why doesn’t He intervene to save ‘innocent’ lives and heal people? – We worship a God who, we are told, loves us and knows everything about us and yet, He often remains silent! How do we reconcile this? What about the abduction of Madeleine McCann on holiday in Portugal a number of years ago? How do we reconcile such events with a God who loves us and knows everything about us? If we had known something was going to happen to 3-year old Madeleine we would have done something to prevent it, wouldn’t we? Why does God allow these things to happen, why doesn’t he intervene to stop them?

Friends, the trouble is we want God to intervene when we want him to intervene… but we don’t really want him to intervene all the time. We want God to save and heal and comfort but we don’t want God to intervene and bring judgment on the world, or to treat us, or our loved ones, as our sins deserve. We only want God to intervene to stop horrible things happening or to intervene when it suits us. But if God constantly jumped in to fix the world’s problems, then God would have to impose his will over ours; over mankind, and that would destroy the greatest of all freedoms, our free will. If God intervened and imposed His will over ours, He would forfeit the chance of receiving any love that is worth having. Real love, genuine love cannot be forced or commanded. In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis wrote: ‘Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.’

So how, then, do we reconcile suffering and God apparently remaining silent and not doing anything about it? Why did God even allow evil and suffering to enter the world in the first place? The short answer is we don’t know for certain why God allowed evil and suffering to enter the world, but that doesn’t mean God isn’t concerned about it. He is! God is not indifferent. He cares massively; that’s why He sent Jesus. One thing we do know for certain is that much of the suffering in the world is caused as a direct result of our own sinfulness (drunkenness, adultery, greed, selfishness, lust). God values our freedom; our free will; he respects our choices; he doesn’t want to force or control us to have to obey Him, like robots.