God hasn’t told us all the reasons he allows unjust suffering, but he has promised he’ll ultimately judge the wicked. He’ll right the wrongs. Isaiah prophesies about the Savior to come, saying, “With righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; and he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked” (Isa. 11:4).

Last month, a horrible abuse story broke in my state, Alabama. It involved children, a bunker, and sex trafficking. I can’t tell you any more than that because I couldn’t bring myself to click on the reports. I fear that if I look head-on at such suffering inflicted on helpless children, the weight of that evil would crush me.

The contemplation of great evil can wreck a person’s faith. Last week, Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative Party in Britain, gave a wide-ranging interview in which she talked about losing her Christian faith after reading the horrific story of Josef Fritzl, an Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter as a sex slave for 24 years. Badenoch said,

I couldn’t stop reading this story. And I read her account, how she prayed every day to be rescued. And I thought, I was praying for all sorts of stupid things and I was getting my prayers answered. I was praying to have good grades, my hair should grow longer, and I would pray for the bus to come on time so I wouldn’t miss something. It’s like, why were those prayers answered, and not this woman’s prayers? And it was like someone blew out a candle.

Revealing Question

Badenoch is asking a version of the question “How could a good God allow suffering?” Somehow, this question comes into focus most sharply when children are involved. Children are weak and defenseless. Jesus loved children and welcomed them. How could a compassionate God fail to protect them and deliver them from evil?

The Scriptures ask versions of this question again and again: “O LORD, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult?” (Ps. 94:3). The Bible anticipates the discordance we feel between an all-powerful God and unjust suffering.

But the fact that we ask this question at all is evidence of what theologians call common grace. Although sin and death pervasively taint everything in our world, this world isn’t as bad as it could be. It isn’t acceptable or legal for fathers to rape their daughters. It isn’t acceptable or legal for women to sell children to sex traffickers. Although sinful men and women have flawed consciences, we know that children should be—must be—protected from cruelty.

C. S. Lewis writes of himself before his conversion,

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.

Had we been the product merely of chance plus time, we might have felt an evolutionary instinct to protect our own offspring, but we wouldn’t feel a moral revulsion when others mistreat theirs. Human beings judge each other because we’re made in the image of a just God.

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