Does God Care About Evil? A Sufferer’s Reflection 

Trigger Warning: The material presented in this article contains references to trauma and domestic abuse.

As a child, I often wondered why God didn’t stop bad things from happening. Was I not praying hard enough for my alcoholic parents to become sober and repair their marriage? Did God not care that I was being hurt, screamed at, manipulated, and sexually abused? 

Does God not care? Does he even exist? 

The problem of evil is often the Christian’s unspoken question. Leave it to fester then deconstruction and loss of faith will follow. Yet when Christians are faced with evil, many appeal to the mysteries of God’s will or offer up “thoughts and prayers” without action. Are these the only weapons we have against evil? The Bible responds with a resounding “no!”

Scripture has no reservation to confronting evil, nor does it leave us guessing as to why it exists or what God is doing about it. The world is fallen- and it’s our fault. When God created the world, it was good: no evil, no death. We were created out of love, but for love to be real it had to be a choice. And we chose to leave. Our rebellion fractured the world. From that disorder, evil was born. 

But, although we left God, he did not leave us.  

God promised to fix this broken world through a child who would defeat the forces of evil. Even more astonishingly, God chose to accomplish this by partnering with broken people. This is the story of the Bible: God working through flawed people to rescue them from the evil they unleashed. First it was Israel and from Israel came the Messiah- the one promised to save the world. But there he hangs on the cross. All seems lost, until he rises again. Jesus has defeated the curse of evil: death, which changes everything. All who believe are given his Spirit and through its power, evil doesn’t have the last word. 

This is God’s answer to evil. Instead of scrapping this human experiment, he embraces us with human hands and offers us the antidote- his own blood. By it, we are free. Every evil thing done to me no longer has power over me. Every evil thing I’ve done, when I lash out in fear of being hurt again, has been forgiven. This isn’t to say that the problem of evil has been “solved.” I don’t know why God allowed me to be sexually assaulted, but I do know it wasn’t his will. It was the free will of an evil man. Yet when I surrendered my wounds to God, he redeemed them. He gave me empathy for the traumatized, a passion for justice, and a love for teaching his truth. Jesus took my scars and turned them into strengths. 

God doesn’t want his people to ignore evil; he calls us to confront it with prayer and action.¹ Empowered by the Spirit, we carry on our Master’s mission—overcoming evil with good and setting the captives free as we await the day when evil will be no more. 

1. God is a God of justice who advocates for those who cannot advocate for themselves (See Isaiah 1:17). Instead of merely sending “thoughts and prayers,” Christians should be on the frontlines of the battlefields of evil, bringing hope and healing as they follow the example of our Lord, Jesus.  ↩︎

Further Reading

1. N. T. Wright, Evil and the Justice of God; 2006.
2. Jack Cottrell, The Faith Once and For All: “The Problem of Evil,” 218-223; 2002.
3. Timothy Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering; 2013.
4. Ingrid Faro, Demystifying Evil; 2023.