How dare God create a world with disease, natural disasters, etc? This might sound a strong argument against God’s existence, but in fact, the Bible claims that God didn’t make the world like this. It says that he made it without suffering, or even death. It stopped working as it should when we told the one holding it together to ‘get lost’, as it were.

When we say we don’t want God’s rules and his rule over the world, we are separated from his perfect control – life is unjust, and the physical world is broken and tough. This happens in Adam and Eve’s story, the story of each of us.

Maybe you don’t feel you have opposed God or asked him to abandon us, but in fact our lives live out a rejection of God and all he stands for. We don’t love our neighbour or bother to find out what God says; we entertain negative thoughts towards others; we’re dishonest, we hide things from each other. With each wrong, we reject God as the benevolent ruler whose instructions should be followed. Is God’s reaction off the scale? Our rejection of him is the choice to make ourselves number one – the root cause of every hurt and evil: unequal wealth, abuse, war, painful relationships on every scale.

But when we accuse God, the irony is that he has done something about human suffering – more than we’ve done about the needy in the world. He entered our world and suffered, himself, to pay our moral debt. This is what Jesus’ life and death is about. The Bible says that God will one day end suffering and create a new, perfect world – heaven. Hard to believe? Surely not, if God is really good, as our starting point questions. But God won’t force us to enter the world he rules (heaven). If we continue to reject him, we choose hell. Atheism faces suffering with no hope. But there is hope if all the BIble says is true, and too much at stake not to find out.