Podcast: How Can We Trust a God Who Allows So Much Evil? (Collin Hansen)

March 03, 2025 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

God’s Unexpected Answer to Our Suffering

In this episode, Collin Hansen addresses questions about the problem of evil and how we can confront the suffering and death that we see in the world as we ask the same questions as Job, Habakkuk, and others throughout Scripture.

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Where Is God in a World with So Much Evil?

Where Is God in a World with So Much Evil?

Collin Hansen

Written with grace and empathy, this concise booklet answers questions and doubts for those who struggle to trust God’s justice and goodness in the face of evil and suffering.

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

00:43 - Where Is God in the Midst of Suffering and Evil?

Matt Tully
Collin, thanks so much for joining me again on The Crossway Podcast.

Collin Hansen
Thanks, Matt.

Matt Tully
You open this new book reflecting on perhaps the greatest horror of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. You asked the question, along with Elie Wiesel, Where was God in the midst of this? As I was thinking about that, the Holocaust is often used as this example of extreme evil. But for our generation today, the young people living today, there’s probably a more recent situation that looms large in our mind that has striking parallels to the Holocaust. That would have to be October 7th, when Hamas attacked Israel and really just unleashed this terror on the people of Israel. And then that has beget even more violence and suffering in that part of the world. And then not to mention the war in Ukraine, which has been going on for a while now that just, again, maybe it’s kind of faded from the forefront of our minds, but that too is an example of just extreme suffering and evil that our world has within it. Have you wrestled with the question of where is God in all of this over the last few months?

Collin Hansen
Yeah, and I think it’s not just the last few months though. I’m a big student of history, and what you see with history is a lot of repetition. And so what’s happened in Ukraine and what’s happened in Israel does not really strike me as something that’s new; it strikes me as something that’s extremely familiar throughout all of history, and certainly including biblical history that we can read about in our Scriptures. And so I have wrestled with that question, but just more broadly, as a sense that we don’t ever come to an end of history. We don’t ever come to a point, before Christ returns, where there’s a decisive shift away. And at the end of every major conflict, there seems to be a strong sense, especially in the West, of let’s never let this happen again. That was certainly with the case of the Holocaust with the creation of the United Nations. And then you look at these conflicts, and the United Nations is unable, at best, to do something, or sometimes unwilling, sometimes even complicit in what’s happening, as we saw in some cases within Gaza. So you see those things repeat. Or you reach the end of the Cold War and you think, Wow! This will be a great new moment for relations between Russia and the West. And not so much. And all of a sudden it feels a lot like the twentieth century in there, and a lot like the Cold War with all these proxy wars, whether Vietnam or Afghanistan and things like that. So I do wrestle with that, but it’s more the repetition, that it just seems to keep happening.

Matt Tully
We can sometimes delude ourselves into thinking that overall there’s the march of progress, the march of civilization, and that as humanity advances, we maybe will move beyond the human evil that leads to so much of this suffering and death and violence. But I think examples like October 7th and others just in the last year remind us that, no, this capacity for evil still does exist within the human heart.

Collin Hansen
This, again, I think is where history is helpful. And for me it provides a certain normalcy or consistency, I guess, in how I interpret these events, because the way you’re describing right there, that’s the way the early twentieth century was. That’s the way people talked. There was this sense of Christianity’s incredible progress; civilization’s advance and scientific breakthroughs; and the most progressive, forward-thinking bastion of Christianity, especially very advanced Protestantism, was a country called Germany. And I remember a comedian one time saying, “Have you heard of this country called Germany? They’ve caused a lot of problems in the last century.” Well, yeah, but that’s not how they saw themselves, and that’s not how the world saw them. Part of what’s so jarring about World War I and World War II is that the Kaiser was declaring this war for the sake of Protestantism against Britain and France. Or with World War II, it was a progressive move.

Matt Tully
They were the height of civilization.

Collin Hansen
The height of civilization. And so if the height of civilization, with all their technological and philosophical might, can do the Holocaust, then you realize that our progress is not necessarily moral. But in fact, with also nuclear weapons that ended that World War II, that progress is capable of bringing us all the way back to square one of basic evil—person-to-person evil—and could even destroy that entire civilization, which we came close to with World War II. And with nuclear weapons, we’re always a couple buttons away from that happening. So it’s another area where just knowing some of that history or knowing the figures who wrestled with those ideas, whether novelists or philosophers or theologians, is just really helpful, I think, to me.

Matt Tully
You write in this new book that, speaking about God and thinking about God’s role in the midst of all of this evil, you say the silence of God in the face of suffering, especially the suffering of children, is the most powerful objection to Christianity that you’ve ever encountered. How would you say that your own faith has been shaped or impacted by learning and thinking about the profound evils of the world, especially in history?

Collin Hansen
This is personal when I think about dear friends who have have lost children. And when we lose children or when children suffer (when they’ve been abused and things like that), we will often grasp for some why in there. We want to know that there’s some purpose to that. And especially with children, I hate to say that there usually isn’t, or not anything that we would ever regard to be worth it. It doesn’t compute, no matter how hard we try. And I remember being taught that from a couple of friends of mine about the book of Job, that the effort of Job’s friends was to find some reason why this happened to him so that they would know it would not happen to them.

Matt Tully
That was the underlying reason for wanting to know why. How do we stop this from happening to me?

Collin Hansen
How do we stop it from happening to me? And so that’s what we search for, and that’s why for me, when I’m having serious conversations with people, I’ll often jump past all those questions of why to the place of “We don’t know,” or “We don’t have that answer.” And the most helpful person for me in addressing that question is Fyodor Dostoevsky, the nineteenth century Russian novelist, because it’s at the centerpiece of what many people regard to be the greatest novel of all time, The Brothers Karamazov. That’s the question at the core of that book. In the end, there’s not an answer, and he transitions there into the Christ, into Jesus, and he displays Christ in this incredible trial scene. And for me with this book, what bridged back as the answer to the question was this incredible scene in the book where Jesus is on the stand, and he’s being accused, and this is the way Western culture now puts God in the dock.

Matt Tully
It’s like a representation of how we think about God so often.

Collin Hansen
Which we didn’t use to, but in the modern era, we now hold God accountable or judge him based on standards that we learned from him. It’s a very odd kind of thing, but it’s very typically modern. And in the end of this incredibly moving, powerful scene, there’s no grand explanation. Job, of course, has God in the whirlwind and God gives his account, but still no answer to it.

Matt Tully
He just says, “Job, who are you to question me? What standing do you have to put me in the dock?”

Collin Hansen
Right. That’s how Job goes, and Dostoevsky goes a little bit of a different direction. And what I do is, as I think Dostoevsky is very clearly pulling from Isaiah 52:53, is the suffering servant. And the response, then, is not a word but an approach, that the Christ draws near to us and, as happens in the Brothers Karamazov, the Christ brings a kiss. And so for me, that’s straight out of Isaiah 52:53: “he opens not his mouth.” He doesn’t give an explanation. He doesn’t give an answer. He submits to this. He submits to that pain, that suffering, that crucifixion, and the response is a kiss. I’ll tell you, though, Matt, when I preached this message in my courses on cultural apologetics, sometimes the students are angry at me in the end. I had one student who raised his hand and he was like, “I’m deeply offended. You didn’t answer the question.” And I just turned and I said, “Okay, what’s the answer?” And he sort of fumbled around for a while and he realized it’s good to ask the question and it’s good to want an answer, but in many ways, Christ surprises us by instead of giving us an answer, he gives us himself. That’s what he gives. He gives us his presence. He gives us his comfort, and ultimately he gives us his body broken on the cross. That’s the answer. And I think that’s a pretty good one, even though it’s not what we expect.

10:39 - Is God in Control, and Does He Truly Love Us?

Matt Tully
It does seem to me that people might fall into two broad camps when it comes to processing God’s relationship to such stark examples of evil in our world. On the one hand, these kinds of events like the Holocaust or October 7th or just even the death of your own child due to sickness or disease, some people might start to question whether or not God is actually in control over that. But on the other hand, people might start to question whether or not God, if he is in control, he must just not care about us very much. He must not love us like the Bible seems to say that he does. I know you’re going to push back on both of those and say neither of those is the right answer for us. But first, can we sympathize with why people might often, even Christians, might feel pushed towards one of those two answers? There’s an intuitive sense in which it’s got to be one of those. Either God isn’t really in control, or if he is in control, he just must not really care about us that much.

Collin Hansen
Well, I think most people do pick one of the two. One of the most significant apologetic moves of the twentieth century was the development of the free will defense, which more or less argued that God isn’t really sovereign over these things; or in his sovereignty, he chooses to grant us free will, and these evil outcomes are an outworking of that free will. And so for the greater good of giving us that freedom, we have to deal with the consequences.

Matt Tully
God doesn’t intervene because he respects us so much. He respects our free will so much.

Collin Hansen
That’s an argument that I find to be very well-attuned to a freedom-loving, modern, Western population that holds that value very highly. And I believe in free will as well, but I’m a compatibilist. I find, especially in the book of Acts, a very clear explanation that God’s sovereignty and human responsibility go hand in hand. And you see this message of who killed Jesus, and Peter and the apostles give very clear answers (Acts 2, 4), and they say, “This was God’s plan, and you. You did it. You’re responsible for what you did, according to God’s plan.” So that’s my philosophical perspective is compatibilism, but the free will defense is very popular among people. I just think it has a lot of problems. I don’t think it solves much at all. Getting God off the hook, to me, only diminishes God and diminishes the possibility that he might intervene, which we want him to. When we’re crying out, we’re not crying out saying, “Thank you, God, for the freedom to suffer from other people’s sins.” We’re asking him to put an end to this. And even if he doesn’t do it now, we’re trusting him to intervene when he sends his Son again. And when his Son comes again, he’ll come in judgment. And through that judgment will also be deliverance in there. But of course, Matt, many people will also go the opposite direction and simply say, “If these bad things have happened to me, therefore, I just can’t trust God at all.” My only response there is to ask, Does it get better without God? Because if God’s not responsible for anything, he’s not there. So why are we still so angry at him? Or by letting him off the hook or saying he doesn’t exist, does it somehow improve the way we experience? I don’t find anybody who declares their atheism or agnosticism or deconstructs their faith suddenly not suffering anymore, or that they suddenly stop questioning why these things happen anymore.

Matt Tully
It doesn’t relieve the suffering.

Collin Hansen
It doesn’t relieve anything because in the end, no matter what, we’re all dealing with the same essential human condition. Nothing’s changed at all. So once again, the only question is, Is there a God who reveals himself to be loving who could intervene? Or is there nothing?

14:28 - How Being Made in God’s Image Informs Our Response to Evil

Matt Tully
I could see there being Christians listening right now, or maybe non-Christians, who would say, “I do understand the philosophical and theological weaknesses of that first option, that God just chooses not to intervene because of respect for free will. There are big problems with that view.” And so they would say, “I do acknowledge that I believe in God and I believe that if God is real, then he is sovereign over all of these things. And I recognize that the alternative to that, that there is not a God, is not satisfying either.” But they would say, “I still confess that”—and you say this in the book—“I believe in God, but I hate Him. I hate that he would be a God who would allow this to happen.” So how do you respond to that?

Collin Hansen
That’s the moment you get to in The Brothers Karamazov with Ivan. He says, “Even if God exists, even if I could join him in heaven, I would still reject him.” And what Dostoevsky is trying to show us, though, is that we only feel that way because we’ve been made in God’s image. The eagles don’t have that attitude. The birds don’t have that attitude. The snakes don’t have that attitude. We’re the only people who relate to God in that way. And so that’s why throughout the Bible, all of these figures don’t say “I hate God.” I think that’s a step further than where we need to go or should go. But they will ask some hard questions. Job, of course, is a good example of that. And in some ways, we can be dismissive of Job because of the way that God puts him in his place. And yet God dignifies him with a response, with engaging him in a conversation. What other God is like that? I think in some ways, that’s maybe not ratifying the full expression of all the anger, but it is encouraging us to turn to God by calling God to be who he’s revealed himself to be. I think the psalmists do this a lot.

Matt Tully
I was going to say the psalms of lament are another example of being very honest with God about how we’re feeling about what he’s doing.

Collin Hansen
And I think, in ways that I can’t fully understand through Trinitarian theology, that we can see the Garden of Gethsemane in that way at some level—that wrestling with God. And then ultimately the cry of Psalm 22:1 on the cross the next day: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” So at some level, the whole “I hate him” response, well, that’s not where we want to be. It’s not where we should be. But the “God, how could you allow this? This isn’t who you are. This isn’t how it’s meant to be. The evil are triumphing. Your people are being trampled. Your chosen children are being murdered in the most”—well, now we’re just in the book of Habakkuk, aren’t we? And there, God’s purposes, his sovereignty, but also his love are still on full display. There’s still a promise that “In my timing, I will keep my covenant to my people.” Again, we don’t want to be in that spot where we’re hating God. We want to stay in relationship such that we can carry on that dialogue with him and truly express the depths of our agony.

Matt Tully
I’m struck that, as Christians at least, maybe sometimes we struggle with this issue because we don’t always have that category for honesty. We don’t think we have permission to be really honest with God about how we’re feeling, about crying out to God about the injustice that we feel is happening, and questioning him to some extent. We think that the options are either apostasy—“I hate you, God; I reject you, God”— or some kind of quiet, submissive, almost indifferent, some kind of passive “this doesn’t affect me because I’m so faithful right now.”

Collin Hansen
Well, I think that’s why Miroslav Volf’s work in talking about the Balkans in the 1990s as a theologian is so instructive for us. And we could jump to Ukraine. We could jump to Gaza. We could jump to Israel. But the imprecatory psalms, the crying out for the destruction of your enemies, makes a lot more sense when you’ve truly experienced evil—when people are attacking you, where your children could be taken from you at any moment, where you could lose your life, where your neighbors have been destroyed. And Volf’s perspective is simply that our Western notions of evil are often related to our insulation from the realities of this world—the way they’ve always been and the way that they will always be. And in some ways, that cycle has come back around to us in Ukraine and in Israel. And so the full depth of biblical expression about lament and judgment really hits us when you take this evil seriously, when you recognize that this is the way the world is. And then, of course, the cry becomes, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus. Put this to an end. Come quickly.”

19:23 - The Problem of Evil Is in Every Human Heart

Matt Tully
At one point in this new book you’ve written, you quote that famous line from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s book, The Gulag Archipelago. The quote is, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.” Why is that important for us to keep in mind and consider when wrestling with this issue of evil?

Collin Hansen
That’s a whole moral vision right there, and one that’s typically lost in the twenty-first century. In fact, what we can see in the situation with Gaza is incredible confusion, because our culture understands that if you’re oppressed, then you can oppress back. It’s acceptable to fight back, or it’s justifiable. And so that notion of vengeance is a moral category that we use. But you see, then you run into situations like Gaza that become utterly confusing because, for example, Hamas attacked, and we think of the Jews as this incredibly persecuted people, if we’re talking about the greatest evils that have befallen our civilization (we’re talking about the Holocaust there). Again, the Jews are an oppressed category, and yet they’re often viewed now as oppressors, whether it’s because of the response in Gaza, or broader concerns about the Palestinians, or wars in which they where they were successful—unexpectedly successful. Nobody thought they would win, and they won. So they somehow then moved from the oppressed category to the oppressor category, which supposedly changes people’s perspective on them.

Matt Tully
The moral categories there—we want to have a very clear distinction of either you’re in the right, or you’re in the wrong.

Collin Hansen
Yeah, exactly. And even Hitler justified his invasion of Poland by pretending that they had been attacked first, because that gave them a righteous cause to jump in. Even Vladimir Putin says, “We’re just going into Ukraine to de-Nazify it,” which is baffling when you consider a Jewish president in Ukraine. I mean, it’s very confusing. But everyone’s trying to get on that side of being the oppressed, which then gives justification for oppressing others. First of all, that is an utterly Christian notion that there’s any dignity or voice in the oppressed at all. So that’s an interesting observation first. But second, it illustrates the problem that Solzhenitsyn was trying to get at here, which was that when we put everybody in categories of oppressed and oppressor without recognizing that the abused can abuse, and in fact, sometimes that’s exactly how it works. The people who have been afflicted are actually even better at afflicting others because they’ve experienced it and they know what really is painful in there. And Solzhenitsyn’s warning is that it’s not about this nation’s bad or these people are bad or this group is bad; it’s that every one of us has to choose good or evil in any given moment. And it’s often seeing yourself as good that justifies the greatest amount of evil, and that’s why we have to push back on that. And of course, he saw that in communism—on behalf of the oppressed, we can therefore murder millions of people. That’s the essential moral problem that afflicted the twentieth century and made it the bloodiest of all time.

Matt Tully
I just love that emphasis, that this propensity for evil or this possibility for evil is something that is within all of us. There are not certain people that are evil and certain people who are morally righteous.

Collin Hansen
But we wish that there were, because then we would know we aren’t capable of bad things.

Matt Tully
Which side do we fall on?

Collin Hansen
Think about mass shooters or serial killers and our obsession with them. We’re simultaneously trying to find if there are certain patterns that we should look for—warning signs, which we often see—but we’re also looking to make sure that I would never do what they did.

Matt Tully
They’re so different from me. That could never be me.

Collin Hansen
Exactly. But the problem is that we’re all capable. Not necessarily in the same way. I’m not saying we all have a serial killer within us. But we all, as Jesus warned us, we all have murderous thoughts. He said, “You’re murdering people in your heart. You’re violating the commandment when you do that.” That’s the introspection that Jesus is calling us to, not, “Thank you, Lord, that I’m not like all those other people out there.” Rather, “God, in my heart I have done such things. Therefore, I need forgiveness. I need your grace. I need that blood to cover my sins.”

Matt Tully
That’s something that we see so clearly as we study history, as I know you do, whether it’s World War II and the banality of evil, where we just see all these very loving family men going about their lives, caring for their children and their wives, and then going to the gas chambers to murder people. Or you see this in the history of the Civil War in the US, where these Southerners were claiming to be serious, dedicated Christians, using all the language that we would recognize from Christianity; and yet, at the same time, oppressing a whole race of people.

Collin Hansen
Well, that’s why we tell ourselves, whether it’s a mass shooter, a serial killer, or an abuser, we say, “Oh, he seemed so normal.” Well, that’s exactly why, when Eichmann came to be on trial in Hannah Arendt’s work on the banality of evil, they’re like, “This? This guy? He’s the monster? He’s the one who did all these things? He’s the person who’s been haunting me in my nightmares every day since that happened? He just looks like a fat, old, incapable man.” Well, yeah. Satan is not some superhero. He is powerless there apart from the temporal power that God gives under the judgment of sin in this world. But in the end, it will be done away with and dismissed and cast about. And that’s the ultimate hope that we have, that there are two paths: that judgment will come and it will be righteous, and that if we claim the blood of Christ, we’ll be spared from that judgment that all of us deserve.

25:46 - Where Is God in My Personal Pain and Suffering?

Matt Tully
Let’s get a little bit more practical. Lord willing, few of us will experience the deep suffering and pain that those who endured the Holocaust or other horrors like it have experienced. And yet we will all suffer in our lives, sometimes in ways that might cause us to wonder, Where is God in all of this pain that I’m feeling? So I wonder if you could first speak to the person who is currently in such a season for whatever reason. What advice would you offer to someone who is asking that question of God?

Collin Hansen
It’s reading the Bible. There’s no history book and no personal experience that any of us could have that goes beyond what’s already there in the Scriptures. These are not sanitized stories. These are not neat and tidy narratives. They are bloody, there is evil, there is abuse, there is loss. Sometimes there’s judgment because of sin, sometimes there’s just collateral damage. It’s all there. And the hymn book of the Scriptures, in the Psalms especially, you get that full, raw, emotional, visceral, and yet divinely inspired and inerrant language in there. And so when you don’t know what to pray and you don’t know what to say, the Bible gives you those stories that you can inhabit to see that God obviously understands what I’m going through, because these are the stories that he put in his word to us. And then simultaneously, others have experienced this agony. That is the book of Habakkuk or that is especially the Psalms. And then supremely, of course, it’s Jesus. It’s the temptations he faces with Satan. It’s the frustrations that he feels in a fallen world. And ultimately, it’s his agony, leading up to and enduring the shame of the cross. So that’s where I go. I don’t know where else there is to go.

Matt Tully
And it’s helpful, too, just going back to where we started, so often we do naturally want the explanation. We want the resolution to a story that ties everything up in a nice bow and makes everything make sense to us. But I think coming to the Bible without that expectation, understanding that it’s not going to probably answer the why for this situation that we’re facing. We’re not going to know exactly what God is doing, the good that he’s bringing out of this. But by examples in the Scriptures and by even just knowing that Christ does come to us and enters into that suffering, that can still give us a lot of help.

Collin Hansen
And it will come to an end. And it gives us that longing that this is not—you go back to David’s agony after his sin with Bathsheba, his murder of her husband, the loss of the child. He’s almost dismissive and it seems unnatural that he didn’t grieve more, but nevertheless his message is profound. It is, “I will see him again. I will see him again.” And that is a hope that’s written over all this, that one day I will see Jesus, not through a glass dimly, but I will see him face to face. The evil will be done away with—no more tears, no more grief. And I will see my loved ones who have been covered under the grace of Christ. I will see them again.

Matt Tully
My mind goes right to a good friend of yours, someone that you spent a lot of time with and has had a big influence on you, Tim Keller. As he was approaching the end of his life, he did an interview, and I’m sure he shared this in other contexts, where he reflected on something similar. The question was something like, “How are you doing? How do you think about your own potential death?” And he just kind of said, “Ultimately, I just know that because of Jesus, everything’s going to be okay.”

Collin Hansen
That message goes back to what he preached after 9/11. And when he was in those moments, of course he would reach to Scripture, but he would often reach to literature. And that’s a lot of what I do in this book. His interest and my interest diverged, in some ways, because he was always going to Tolkien and especially Tolkien and Lewis.

Matt Tully
You like the Russians.

Collin Hansen
I do. I like the Russians and the Scandinavians. That’s where I tend to go. But he pulls, of course, from the exchange with Gandalf. And this message is that everything sad is going to come untrue. And that’s what he reached back to in 9/11 to say, “I don’t know what the future holds for this city. I don’t know what the future holds for this country. But I do know how the story will ultimately end, and everything sad is going to come untrue, not because of just the return of the white wizard, but ultimately the return of the King—the King Jesus himself. He will put an end to all that.” And so death is the essential problem that we all face. Yes, there are concentrated moments of it when many people die and the great tragedies in there. But it’s the essential problem that all of us face. And there is no good account for it, no hopeful account for it, apart from what we see in the Scriptures. And so oftentimes this question of evil that I address in this book puts Christians on the defensive, but find me a better explanation than what Christians have to offer—a God who becomes a man and submits himself to death on a cross so that in dying and becoming a curse, we might be lifted of the curse of death. Find me another story like that. So no wonder that Tim, having preached that his entire life, would find hope in that. I hope we’ll all find hope in that in the end, through our own death and, of course, the inevitable loss of everyone else that we love. You either die and leave them, or you watch them all leave you. There’s just no other way. And sometimes we imagine that sounds morbid, but that’s just reality. Christianity is a wonderfully amazing thing for us to be able to survive that reality and to cope with that reality.

Matt Tully
We’re uniquely equipped with the tools and with the worldview that would allow us to face that very universal human reality of death.

Collin Hansen
A simple way to put it is I look at my friends who, in trusting in Christ, have just experienced the greatest pain, and I watch their agony and I agonize with them and sit with them in their suffering. But then I imagine, “What if you did not know Jesus? Where would you turn then? What are the alternatives there?” And that gives us perspective.

Matt Tully
Collin, thank you for helping us think through some of these very heavy, very serious things. Ultimately, death is the culmination of all of this evil in the world that we see and feel around us. Thank you for giving us that perspective, a perspective rooted in Scripture and is ultimately centered on Christ.

Collin Hansen
Thank you, Matt.

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