If God is good, why is there so much suffering?

If you're asking this from real pain, I'm sorry. The Bible doesn't hand out tidy answers, and I'm not going to pretend to either. Here's what it does say: suffering is not the way things were meant to be. Something is broken. God knows it, hates it, and is doing something about it that does not bypass us — he came in person to suffer with us and for us.

Jesus did not stand at a safe distance and explain pain. He entered it. The shortest verse in the Bible — Jesus wept — happens at the funeral of a friend. He doesn't owe you an explanation for what you've lost, but he has not left you to carry it alone. That's not a slogan; it's the whole point of the cross.

The classical 'problem of evil' assumes that an all-good, all-powerful God could have no reason to allow suffering. Philosophers from Augustine to Alvin Plantinga have shown that this is not a logical contradiction — it only stands if we also know there cannot be sufficient reasons. We don't.

More importantly, Christianity is the only major world religion in which God himself suffers. C.S. Lewis (writing after his wife's death in A Grief Observed) and N.T. Wright (Evil and the Justice of God) argue that the cross is not God's answer to the problem of evil in the abstract — it is his answer in person, absorbed into himself, and undone by resurrection.