“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” – Job 38:4

My friend Andy and I had just finished a prayer for the needs of the world when we started lamenting how endless those needs always are.

“If I were God . . .” Andy said, and stopped himself. “Always be suspicious,” he said, “of any sentence that begins, ‘If I were God!'”

We were not the first people to question the troubling gap between what we believe about our God and the immense suffering in our world. The Bible is full of just such questions.

Some of the very best of these questions are found in the Book of Job, which is the story of a good man enduring unbearable suffering. Job desperately wants to know why? His three “friends” offer him their pious answers, which are variants of “You had it coming!”

Their view that suffering is always deserved lingers: “What goes around comes around.”

But what if it isn’t true? What if the divine mystery is more complex than that? What if bad things do happen to good people? What if the punishment doesn’t always fit the crime? Read more. (From my Daily Devotional for today)