Understanding Suffering: A Journey Through Pain and Hope
- Vincent Wiggins
- Aug 23
- 7 min read
Updated: Sep 1
The Question We All Ask
Few questions feel more personal—or more frustrating—than: Why does God allow suffering? This is not just a topic for deep thinkers. It’s something we all ponder when life becomes challenging—whether in a hospital room, during grief, or in quiet moments of exhaustion.
The Bible doesn’t provide a neat answer. Instead, it tells a story. This story begins in a perfect garden, travels through a world filled with thorns, and concludes in a place where pain has no place.
This blog explores that journey. It builds on themes from Shadows of Creation’s Order, which focused on animal suffering and its place in God’s design. Here, we broaden our perspective to examine all human suffering and how God responds—not from a distance, but from within it.
Chaos, Darkness, and Why the World Drifts Toward Pain
Genesis 1 tells us that in the beginning, “the earth was formless and empty, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.” This may sound poetic, but it points to a real condition: disorder was present, and creation was unfinished.
Then God speaks. Light floods in. Land rises. The garden takes shape. God begins separating chaos from order, light from dark—bringing structure to the wildness.
Today, we recognize something similar in science: the second law of thermodynamics. It states that everything left alone tends toward disorder—heat cools, things decay, and systems break down. This phenomenon is known as entropy.
From the start, God pushes back against that tendency—and then hands that role to us. Humanity’s job wasn’t just to enjoy paradise; it was to extend order and goodness outward, subduing the chaos. When we don’t—or can’t—suffering follows.
Eden: A Garden Without Pain, Surrounded by a World That Needed Care
When Adam and Eve enter the scene, they aren’t thrown into the wilderness. They’re placed in a garden—Eden, a space where God walks with people, where there’s peace, safety, and no pain.
However, Eden was a starting point, not the entirety of creation. The rest of the world still needed shaping. That’s why God instructed them to “fill the earth and subdue it.”
This tells us that suffering didn’t exist in the garden, but it lingered outside. It wasn’t part of God’s original design for humanity, but it hadn’t been removed from the world either. It was waiting—waiting to be subdued by those God created to carry His image.
The garden was an ordered space, but more importantly, it was God’s space. Where God’s presence dwells fully, there is no suffering. This is not just Eden’s truth—it’s a spiritual principle. Suffering is the absence of God’s peace, not the result of His will.
When Adam and Eve broke trust with God, they didn’t just eat forbidden fruit—they chose to step away from His presence. They abandoned their role. Once that connection was severed, the disorder outside the garden came flooding in.
Some people point to free will as the reason for suffering. But free will isn’t the flaw—it’s a reflection of God’s character. Love can’t exist without freedom. And freedom means the ability to reject order, peace, and even God Himself.
When we did, suffering followed.
The Day the Thorns Showed Up
After the fall, God tells Adam:
“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat from it…It will produce thorns and thistles.” (Genesis 3:17–18)
That moment wasn’t just poetic. It was prophetic. The natural world began to mirror the spiritual break that had taken place. The ground resisted. Work became painful. Creation itself seemed to rebel, as if something deep in the fabric of nature had come undone.
And perhaps it did.
Modern science provides a fascinating parallel. Dr. David Sinclair, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, has proposed the Information Theory of Aging. According to his research, aging doesn’t happen simply because we “run out of time” like a clock winding down. Instead, we age because our cells stop following their original instructions. Over time, the body loses its ability to read and apply the genetic code correctly. Errors accumulate. Systems break down.
In other words, the blueprint is still there—but something is interfering with how it’s read.
Sinclair’s theory articulates something the Bible has said all along: sin doesn’t just damage our behavior—it disrupts the order of creation itself. We can think of aging as a biological echo of spiritual rebellion. Even our cells reflect the fall. The human body forgets what it was meant to do.
So when God says the ground is cursed and that life will now come “through painful toil,” we can see the effects play out not just in crops and conflict, but in every system of creation—from the withering of plants to the breakdown of DNA.
It’s not that God injected suffering into the world like a toxin. It’s that once humanity chose to walk away from divine order, disorder naturally began to spread. A world disconnected from its Creator will always drift toward chaos—physically, morally, relationally, and even genetically.
This makes the promise of redemption so powerful. God doesn’t just forgive sins. He plans to restore creation itself—down to the very code that writes who we are.
Two Flavors of Pain
Not all suffering is the same. The Bible shows us at least two kinds:
Formative pain
This is the pain of growth. Like sore muscles after a workout, or the sting of honest feedback. James calls it “pure joy,” not because it feels good, but because it produces endurance and maturity.
Fallen-world pain
This is the deeper ache—illness, injustice, war, betrayal. The kind of pain that seems pointless. God doesn’t cause this kind, but He knows how to redeem it. And that’s what we see next.
When Darkness Sets the Stage for Light
Suffering doesn’t always signal failure. In Scripture, it often sets the stage for something greater:
Joseph was betrayed, enslaved, and imprisoned—but those trials became the path that saved entire nations.
Job lost everything and still worshiped. His story became a monument to faithful suffering.
But no story makes the point clearer than the one at the center of it all: Jesus.
The Suffering of Jesus: The Servant Who Chose the Thorns
Jesus didn’t just suffer. He chose to suffer. He left heaven’s peace to step into earth’s pain. He didn’t arrive as a king, but as a child—fragile, ordinary, and often misunderstood.
He came as the Suffering Servant. That’s not a title we gave Him—it’s one Scripture gave Him long before He was born:
“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of suffering, familiar with pain…He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities…and by His wounds we are healed.” — Isaiah 53:3–5
Jesus didn’t come to avoid pain. He came to walk through it—to feel what we feel, carry what we couldn’t, and fix what we broke.
As Paul writes in Philippians:
“Though He was in very nature God, He did not consider equality with God something to cling to. Instead, He made Himself nothing…and became obedient to death—even death on a cross.”
On the cross, Jesus took in all the brokenness of the world—violence, betrayal, injustice, sin—and let it crush Him. But not because He was weak. Because He was willing. He was the Suffering Servant, stepping into our place so that pain would no longer have the final word.
In rising from the dead, He didn’t just conquer death—He showed us that pain can be overcome, scars can be redeemed, and suffering can serve a greater purpose in God’s story.
So when we suffer, we don’t follow a distant God. We follow the Servant who suffered. The one who went first—and walks with us still.
Our Role Between the Gardens
After the resurrection, Jesus didn’t just prove His love—He passed the mission on. We are still called to push back darkness, bring order to chaos, and carry light into broken places. Every time we love, forgive, advocate, serve, or simply show up for someone in pain, we’re participating in Kingdom work—the same work Adam and Eve were given in Eden, now with a cross-shaped clarity.
But Jesus didn’t just give us a task. He gave us a promise. In one of His most tender teachings, He said:
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4)
That’s not denial of suffering—it’s the opposite. It’s a promise within suffering. Jesus doesn’t say those who mourn are blessed because mourning feels good, but because He will meet them in it.
Without divine intervention, suffering has only one logical conclusion: death. That’s what makes Jesus’ comfort so radical. He doesn’t just soften sorrow; He overturns its trajectory. He doesn’t just empathize; He restores.
So as we carry out our calling—pushing back injustice, lifting burdens, sitting with the grieving—we aren’t just slowing the spread of suffering; we’re aligning ourselves with the very heart of Christ. And where suffering remains unavoidable, comfort is guaranteed.
Not always relief on our timeline, but always presence. Always grace. Always Jesus.
Even the Apostle Paul—who saw miracles, wrote Scripture, and endured great hardship—spoke of a “thorn in the flesh” that God refused to remove. But God told him what He tells us:
“My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is made perfect in weakness.” (2 Corinthians 12:9)
That’s the promise we live by. Not escape from every ache, but enough grace to endure it, enough love to redeem it, and enough comfort to carry us through.
The Ending We’re Headed Toward
The Bible ends in a garden-city. Not a return to Eden, but a renewal of all creation. No more death. No more crying. No more pain. And Jesus—still bearing the scars—walks among His people, not as a victim, but as a victorious King.
The garden wasn’t lost forever. It’s just waiting to be completed.
The Final Word
So why does God allow suffering? Because He created a world where love is real, choices matter, and healing takes time. Because instead of walking away, He walked in. Because even now, He is working—through us and among us—to bring order where there’s chaos and peace where there’s pain.
Until He returns, we live in the shadows of redemptive pain—holding sorrow in one hand and hope in the other.
Our scars—like His—may become windows through which others glimpse the world made new.
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