How Could God Allow All of This Suffering? (Part 1)

“Where is God in all this?” This question was recently posed to me by someone, referring to the death and suffering we see being reported on TV because of COVID-19. A very real question. As of this writing, about 40 thousand people had already died due to COVID-19 worldwide and 800 thousand have been infected. In the Philippines, almost a hundred had died and two thousand have been infected.

But as sad as this may be, these numbers are dwarfed by past pandemics and epidemics. To mention just a few, worldwide, 500 million people died of smallpox during the 19th century. 17 to 100 million died of the Spanish Flu in just 2 years in the 1900s. More than 12 million died in the Bubonic Plague in India and China. 75 to 200 million were killed in Europe, Asia, and North America due to the Black Death plague during the 13th century. The Justinian Plague of AD 500 took 25 to 100 million lives. And even 400 years before Christ was born, 75 to 100 million lives were taken by the Plague of Athens in Greece alone.

But sickness and death are just one side of the problem that the world is facing during the current pandemic. Most of the global economy has practically come to a halt causing countless people not just to lose their income but their jobs. Some businesses, especially the smaller ones, have already closed down. Those whose subsistence is merely on a day to day basis have found themselves scraping the bottom of an empty barrel hoping to find some means to feed their families. And we don’t even know how this will impact the future even when the pandemic is over when people would not only have already suffered from all this loss but also have to contend with a backlog of payables that have piled up during the lockdown. And by that time, so many would be grieving for the deaths of their loved ones, including both the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, the powerful and the powerless.

All the suffering, the pain, the anguish. Why? How could a God of love allow all this to be happening? Is He angry at the world? Maybe He has lost control of things? Maybe He doesn’t even know what’s going on with us? Or maybe He does know but He just doesn’t care?