The stronger our concept of God and Heaven, the more we understand how Heaven resolves the problem of evil and suffering. The weaker our concept of God and Heaven, the stronger our doubt that Heaven will more than compensate for our present sufferings.  

While atheists routinely speak of the problem of evil, they usually don’t raise the problem of goodness. But if evil provides evidence against God, then shouldn’t goodness count as evidence for him? And wouldn’t that be evidence against atheism?

Today, September 15, is the release date of my new book If God Is Good. I hope you’ve had the chance to read some of the excerpts from the book that have been posted over the last few weeks.

This story was sent by my friend Doug Nichols, founder and director of Action International. It is a powerful reminder that the first and second greatest commands are inseparable: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart...love your neighbor as yourself."

In my life, I’d already seen enough evil and suffering to feel deeply troubled by it. What I needed was to find perspective on what troubled me. In this process of writing If God Is Good, I’ve taken most pleasure in focusing closely on God, exploring his attributes of goodness, love, holiness, justice, patience, grace and mercy. 

The problem with short-term rewards is not that it's wrong to receive them, but that it's wrong for them to be our primary motivation for doing the work. If we take Matthew 6 seriously, when we offer people their name on a brick for giving to a building offering we're saying "Hope you enjoy this brick, because if this is why you're giving, the brick's all the reward you're going to get."

Our inability to understand all God’s purposes in evil and suffering should not surprise us.

Acts 17:11 says that "Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." We should come to God's Word with "great eagerness."

I wrote If God Is Good because the question of suffering and evil is the most commonly raised and perplexing problem there is. It’s unusual to have serious prolonged interactions about believing in God, with either believers or unbelievers, without them raising it.