Grace and truth found their perfect union in Christ, but the rest of us tend to gravitate toward one or the other. 

Unbelievers and believers have the same heart-cry in response to evil and suffering: “Something's terribly wrong.” We know we were made for something far better. But our heart-cry itself is revealing—why do we expect more or hope for more? 

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?

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. 

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

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.  

My new book If God Is Good addresses what is arguably the greatest issue in human history: the problem of evil and suffering.

I have always loved stories, and the Bible is the greatest story ever written. The unfolding drama of redemption is a story, but it is a true story. When we write fiction, what we are doing is making up a story as, what J.R.R. Tolkien called, ‘sub-creators.’ Creators with a small ‘c.’ We are made in his image, so we can invent a story, and that story, though invented, is not ‘false.’