Where Was God? — The Problem of Evil and the God Who Suffers
If God is good and God is all-powerful, why is there cancer? Why was there the Holocaust? Why did the child die? This is the oldest objection in the world, and it is more than a debating point — for many it is the moment faith breaks. This plan walks slowly through Scripture's strange refusal to give the kind of answer modern philosophy demands, and through the answer it does give: a God who, on the cross, takes the question into himself.
The problem of evil is the most powerful argument against Christian faith ever made, and Christians who pretend otherwise have not been listening. If God is all-good and all-powerful, then why? Why the cancer ward, why the war, why the child who never came home from the river, why the years of prayer that produced no result, why the chronic illness in someone who already had nothing? You can finish the sentence yourself. Most of us have.
Scripture's response is strange. It does not offer a tidy explanation. The book of Job ends not with God answering Job's question but with God reframing it, and the man who has lost everything walks away satisfied — which baffles us until we realize what actually happened. The Psalms scream at God for a hundred and fifty pages. Habakkuk asks the question we ask and gets back a vision that does not solve it but transforms it. And then, at the heart of the Christian story, God himself climbs onto a Roman execution device and dies of suffocation under Pilate's silence, and somehow this is supposed to be the answer.
What to Expect
Twelve days through the texts that Christianity actually offers when it is being honest about suffering — Job, Lamentations, the Psalms of complaint, Habakkuk, the cross. C.S. Lewis's The Problem of Pain and the searing follow-up A Grief Observed (written after his wife died, when his earlier book began to feel embarrassingly tidy). Augustine's intellectual wrestling and his personal grief in the Confessions. Tim Keller's Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, written before his cancer diagnosis and tested by it. Calvin's pastoral steel under his own chronic illness. Jonathan Edwards on the strange logic of God's permission of evil. The plan does not pretend to "solve" the problem of evil. It walks toward the only place Christians have ever found honest hope in the middle of it.
Who This Plan Is For
For people in the middle of grief, for people watching someone else in the middle of grief, and for skeptics who think the Christian answer is more glib than it actually is. If you are looking for a polished defense, this is the wrong plan. If you are willing to sit with the question without rushing it, you may find the only answer that has held for two thousand years.