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If God Loves Us, Why Do We Suffer?
In the Bible, those God loves most still experience pain
I am a Christian and I love God. Yet I have gotten cancer three times. How can I still believe God loves me? Yet I do. Am I naive? Am I stupid? Am I deluded?
What about someone whose child dies?
One of the assistant pastors at my church lost her son. I cannot think of anything more heartbreaking. Yet she still has faith in a loving God. How is this possible?
I think of King David, who lost his young child. He was a man that we are told, in I Kings 15:4, that was loved by God.
Yet, in Psalm 22 he wrote, in verses 1–2:
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.
If God loved David so much, why did he allow him to be in such despair?
In 2 Samuel 12:16–18 we read that:
David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and spent the nights lying in sackcloth on the ground. The elders of his household stood beside him to get him up from the ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them. On the seventh day the child died.
