If God Is Good, Why Does He Allow Evil?

SUMMARY: Explore why God allows evil, how love and human freedom are connected, and how the Cross demonstrates God’s goodness and redemptive plan for a world broken by sin.

Love, Freedom, and the Cost of the Cross

If we go to the FBI’s website, we find a sobering statement: based on reported data, a violent crime occurred, on average, every 25.9 seconds in 2024. A murder every 31.1 minutes. A rape every 4.1 minutes.

These numbers are more than statistics. They are windows into the reality of moral evil that pervades our world and this is just in America alone.

Behind every report, every headline, every case file, lies a deeper question that has echoed through history:

If God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, why does He allow such evil to exist?

From Auschwitz to child exploitation, from war zones to quiet homes where abuse is hidden, the presence of moral evil seems to stand as the skeptic’s strongest challenge to the Christian faith. If God exists, is His goodness compromised by what He permits?

I argue the opposite: God’s goodness remains intact precisely because love requires the freedom that makes moral evil possible.

Love Requires Freedom and Freedom Carries Risk

When people talk about free will, they often treat it as an abstract philosophical concept. But the freedom at the heart of this discussion is not merely the ability to choose but it is the freedom to love.

Real love cannot be programmed.

J. P. Moreland and Tim Muehlhoff illustrate this with a humorous example: imagine a doll that responds to every squeeze with phrases like, “Yes, I’ll turn off the game,” or “Yes, I’ll give you an hour-long massage.” The doll may say all the right things, but no one would mistake its words for genuine love.

Why? Because love must be freely given.

Even the most sophisticated AI can simulate affection, but it cannot embody it. Love risks rejection. Love opens itself to loss. C. S. Lewis captured this truth powerfully when he wrote:

To love at all is to be vulnerable… The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

The paradox is unavoidable: the possibility of love entails the possibility of pain. A world without freedom might be orderly and obedient—but it would be incapable of love.

Eden: A Moral Arena, Not Just a Paradise

This freedom was placed at the very center of creation.

The Garden of Eden was not merely a lush paradise; it was a moral arena. Humanity was given a genuine choice to trust God or to turn away. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was not a trap but a necessary condition for authentic relationship.

When Adam and Eve chose disobedience, moral evil entered the world. Scripture tells us that through one man, sin entered creation, and death followed. This was not symbolic, it was catastrophic.

From that moment forward, the ripple effects of moral evil have echoed through history: genocide, persecution, exploitation, and cruelty on scales both vast and personal. The Holocaust. The martyrdom of Christians across centuries. Modern persecution in places like Iran and across the Muslim world. The quieter evils of greed, addiction, deception, and abuse that rarely make headlines.

All of them flow from the same source: the misuse of freedom divorced from love.

A Glimpse Beyond Time: Love at the Center of Reality

To contribute something new to this discussion, I want to step briefly into imaginative theology, writing in the spirit of C. S. Lewis.

Imagine a woman named Kate, a lifelong student of Genesis, standing outside time after death.

She beholds a radiant light, so expansive it seems to be the source of all existence. The light is not impersonal. It is a Person. Within it, she perceives another figure, distinct yet one with the light. And flowing between them is a living, vibrant presence, like a silken thread of love itself.

Not parts. Not separations. But Persons in perfect communion.

In that moment, Kate understands something she had only argued for on paper before:

> God is not merely loving. God is love.

Creation was not born from loneliness or need, but from overflow. The Father loving the Son, the Son responding in perfect devotion, and the Spirit as the living bond of that love, this eternal relationship spilled outward into creation.

Humanity was invited into that communion.

But love, to remain love, had to be free.

The Fall and the Cost Already Counted

When Adam and Eve chose rebellion, creation itself fractured. The harmony dimmed. The world groaned.

Yet this did not catch God off guard.

Knowing that sin would occur is not the same as willing it to occur. God did not desire rebellion but He desired love enough to allow the risk. From eternity past, the cost had already been counted.

In Kate’s vision, she sees something astonishing: the grief of God. Not rage. Not indifference. But heartbreak. And alongside it, a resolve deeper still.

The plan was never coercion. It was incarnation.

Justice would be satisfied not by destroying creation, but by entering it. The Word would become flesh. The Author would write Himself into the story. The Cross was not an afterthought, it was the cost of love from the beginning.

The Cross: Where Evil Fails to Win

At Calvary, the question of evil is not answered by explanation but by participation.

God does not stand distant from human suffering. He enters it. He bears it. He absorbs its full weight.

The ultimate proof that God’s goodness is not compromised by evil is not found in its prevention, but in His willingness to suffer for the sake of love.

The risk of rebellion was the cost.

The possibility of communion was the reward.

What Adam lost by disobedience, Christ reclaimed by obedience. The same freedom that made sin possible made redemption meaningful.

So… Why Does God Allow Evil?

If I could answer my professor’s question now, I would say this:

To know God is to know love. And the deeper you know Him, the more you realize that everything He does—every command, every allowance—is born from that love. God did not desire humanity to sin, but He allowed the possibility so that our love could be real. Only love freely chosen can reflect the eternal love that existed before time began.

A world without freedom would be safer but it would be loveless.

And a God who eliminates freedom to prevent evil would no longer be the God who is love.

God did not create us to control us, but to commune with us.

He did not redeem us to fix a mistake, but to restore a masterpiece.

The Cross stands as the eternal record of the price God was willing to pay so that love—real, dangerous, redemptive love—could exist.

And in a world where darkness is real, that love remains our greatest hope.

This reflection draws from Scripture, historical testimony, philosophical theology, and contemporary reporting. For readers who wish to explore the sources that informed this essay, the following works were consulted.

If you found this reflection helpful, you’ll appreciate the full verse-by-verse exploration in my series, Verse by Verse: A Daily Devotional Through the Whole Bible, where I show how each verse connects to the whole story of Scripture and reveals the complete picture of who God is.

Sources & Further Reading

• Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Releases 2024 Reported Crimes in the Nation Statistics.

• Foxe, John. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: The History of the Sufferings and Death of the Christian Martyrs. Abridged and edited by Paul L. Maier. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2016.

• Lewis, C. S. The Four Loves. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960.

• Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters: With Screwtape Proposes a Toast. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001.

• Moreland, J. P., and Tim Muehlhoff. The God Conversation: Using Stories and Illustrations to Explain Your Faith. Expanded ed. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2017.

• Prager, Dennis. The Rational Bible: Genesis. Washington, DC: Regnery Faith, 2019.

• Reissig, Courtney. “To Love Is to Be Vulnerable.” The Gospel Coalition, August 8, 2013.

• Rostampour, Maryam, and Marziyeh Amirizadeh. Captive in Iran: A Remarkable True Story of Hope and Triumph amid the Horror of Tehran’s Brutal Evin Prison. With John Perry. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2013.

• The Story: The Bible as One Continuing Story of God and His People. Edited by Randy Frazee and Max Lucado. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2011.

• The Voice of the Martyrs. I Am N, Revised & Updated Edition: Inspiring Stories of Christians Facing Islamic Extremists. Bartlesville, OK: VOM Books, 2024.

• Vrba, Rudolf. I Escaped from Auschwitz: The Shocking True Story of the World War II Hero Who Escaped the Nazis and Helped Save Over 200,000 Jews. New York: Racehorse Publishing, 2020.