Where is God when it hurts?

Why is there so much sorrow and heartbreak? Doesn't God care?

Does he even know when we’re hurting?

Fortunately the Bible gives us some very clear pointers to help us understand what's going on.

It says that God made a perfect world, but it’s not the one we live in.

That perfect environment was also contaminated by people – the very first people, in fact.

It wasn’t poisoned by chemical pollution, like ours, but by something even worse.

Evil.

PARADISE LOST

The first humans, Adam and Eve, lived in that perfect world. But they chose to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit – the one thing he had warned them against.

By doing that they allowed evil in to pollute their paradise. They turned away from him, leaving the door wide open to the powers of darkness, and nothing would ever be the same again.

So the world we live in is very far from perfect. It's not hard to see sin and suffering all around us, but they were never God's idea.

There are terrible things like violence, cancer, pain and death. There are freak accidents and so-called 'acts of God'. We see crime, injustice and the awful effects of climate change all around us.

And God never intended us to experience damaging emotions like stress, depression, anxiety, fear or loneliness either.

We live in a fallen world. But that doesn’t mean he has abandoned us.

God isn’t sitting on a cloud somewhere, high above the earth, ignoring the desperate needs of his creation. He still loves each one of us and cares about our struggles, no matter how far away from him we are.

God knows what it’s like to suffer. He came as a human being who died in agony at the hands of his own creatures. All the evils of the world were heaped on Jesus on the cross.

He took the punishment for sin in our place so we would never have to go through it.

So where is God when it hurts? Right beside you. At work or school or in the supermarket.

In the hospital. At the graveside.

In the pit of despair.

The Bible promises that he will never leave us or abandon us. When we're hurting he's hurting. When we’re struggling he wants to help.

THE GOD OF ALL COMFORT

We’ve learned the hard way that we are weak and life is fragile. That’s because we were made to be dependent on God. We can’t manage without him.

The Bible tells us he is ‘the God of all comfort’ (2 Corinthians 1:3). The prophet Jeremiah calls him ‘my Comforter in sorrow’ (Jeremiah 8:18).

We are not alone. God cares.

Give all your worries and cares to God, for he cares about you.

1 Peter 5:7