Parenting and Pain
One of the most common arguments against God is “How could a good God allow suffering?”
The simple answer to that is that God is love.
A loving God would not allow us to remain trapped in sin. If our lives were free from pain and suffering we would have no reason to look for God or to turn from sin. Our choices to sin create the need for suffering. It is our sin that brought suffering into the world and it is our sin that causes it to continue.
No, I am not saying that you are suffering because of some hidden sin. You might be. You might not be. I’m not God nor will I ever pretend to be, so I don’t want to jump into that. But I will say that if we never sinned there wouldn’t be pain in the world.
Let me continue to present this reasoning from the position of God as father.
Parents who don’t allow their children to experience pain do their kids a disservice.
Harsh truth, but truth nonetheless. When parents step in to prevent their children from experiencing pain, they can rob the child of a learning opportunity. I’m by no means advocating for parenting without mercy and grace, but I am pointing to an important aspect of parenting. If your child tries to run out into the street you yell stop. You grab their arm. You teach them firmly that running into the street is not safe. You do not allow your child to do what they want because it is jepordizing their safety.
If a good parent allows their child to experience pain, why wouldn’t God?
God is superior to human parents in every way. If He wasn't, why shouldn’t we worship humans instead? Accepting this causes us to be forced to acknowledge that not only is God good for allowing us to experience pain, but He would not be if He didn’t allow us to experience pain.
We think that we should not experience suffering because we live from a place of entitlement that is ugly to acknowledge. We don’t like the discomfort of recognizing our own depravity and we certainly don’t like the discomfort of recognizing that sometimes it is our choices that have caused the circumstances and pain that we are now in. We idolize happiness and so we then think that we should constantly be happy, when in reality that is an incredibly dangerous place to be constantly in.
The brokenness of this world should cause us to think. It shouldn’t feel right to us. We should be craving a different experience. We should know that this broken world is not our home.
Those thoughts should then send us looking for truth. Our reaction to seeing the brokenness of this world should be to look for the One who can save us from it.
If we understand that a good human parent allows their child to experience pain, why do we then think God shouldn’t allow us to experience pain?
