Pain is God’s reminder to men who are under original sin, the sin & misery of Adam, and of their own responsibility have participated in it, that Christ has come to deal with the fundamental problem of evil, which is sin. He has overcome the Evil One, the Devil, in His victory on the cross and in His resurrection. We don’t yet see the final end to suffering, and that will not come until He comes again to judge the living and the dead. 

I’ve often heard the line “why do bad things happen to good people?” There is so much evil in the world. It is a cruel taskmaster when both the kind and the evil alike are overtaken by it. Sometimes it seems like the wicked flourish and the good suffer. Even the authors of Scripture complain from time to time about this phenomenon (Job 21:7, Psalm 37). This was not invented by an atheist in the 1900s. It is a an age old source of questioning.

Consider the Texas flooding where at least 120 people and more than 35 children were killed by the flood waters just in this last year. This is just one account. Many more can be named of grief and sorrow unimaginable.

CS Lewis responded to the so-called “problem of evil” by talking about the “problem of pain”. For Lewis, our reaction to evil in the world ultimately comes down to an emotional problem, that can only be dealt with by looking to Christ. Lewis writes in his book The Problem of Pain, which you can find in PDF format here: “The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.” In other words pain and hurt pulls the mask off of evil so that a man can see what it really is. Nevertheless, he still needs the Word of God and the help of the Holy Spirit to help him to clarify between the evil and the pain.

It is here that I want to talk more about “the problem of good.” If we really understand the deep-rooted evil that has taken over humanity since the Garden, the sin and misery that has consumed the world since the time of Adam, then in the midst of the pain and hurt, we should really be asking “Why do good things happen to bad people?” Or how do we deserve anything good in a world that is so evil? If God is just, why doesn’t He wipe us all out?

You see, the way that one directs the question demonstrates what his (or her) fundamental conception of anthropology (which answers the question of ‘what is man?”) and theology (which answers the question of ‘what or who is God?”) is.

Christianity in its teachings from the Bible really does give a reasonable explanation for the source of all this sin and misery and therefore also pain and hurt in the world comes from. We cannot blame God for this, but really we can only blame man for it. God is not the author of evil. Adam chose sin rather than obedience in the Garden. In fact, we should thank God who in His mercy provides the answer of the reconciliation between His justice and His mercy in the cross of Jesus Christ. This is where in His justice sin is dealt with, and in His mercy the sinner is delivered from that sin.

The deep-rooted moral confusion in our world in large part comes from a rejection in the church of some of the key teachings regarding sin and salvation, of anthropology and theology, that come out of Genesis 1-11.

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