Where was God when I was suffering?
I prayed and nothing happened. When I needed God most, he was silent and absent. Whatever philosophers say about the problem of evil, my own experience tells me that either God isn't there or he doesn't care about me.
Your pain is real, and Scripture gives you words for it: many of the psalms are prayers by people who felt abandoned by God. The Christian answer is not a formula but a Person. In Jesus, God came into suffering, was betrayed, tortured and cried out 'why have you forsaken me?' on the cross. He was not absent from your suffering; he has been there himself, he is near the brokenhearted, and he promises that your pain will not have the last word.
What Scripture says
1My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from saving me, so far from my words of groaning? 2I cry out by day, O my God, but You do not answer, and by night, but I have no rest.
David cries out that God has forsaken him and does not answer. Jesus prayed this psalm from the cross.
1O LORD, the God of my salvation, day and night I cry out before You. 2May my prayer come before You; incline Your ear to my cry. 3For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. 4I am counted among those descending to the Pit. I am like a man without strength. 5I am forsaken among the dead, like the slain who lie in the grave, whom You remember no more, who are cut off from Your care. 6You have laid me in the lowest Pit, in the darkest of the depths. 7Your wrath weighs heavily upon me; all Your waves have submerged me. Selah 8You have removed my friends from me; You have made me repulsive to them; I am confined and cannot escape. 9My eyes grow dim with grief. I call to You daily, O LORD; I spread out my hands to You. 10Do You work wonders for the dead? Do departed spirits rise up to praise You? Selah 11Can Your loving devotion be proclaimed in the grave, Your faithfulness in Abaddon ? 12Will Your wonders be known in the darkness, or Your righteousness in the land of oblivion? 13But to You, O LORD, I cry for help; in the morning my prayer comes before You. 14Why, O LORD, do You reject me? Why do You hide Your face from me? 15From my youth I was afflicted and near death. I have borne Your terrors; I am in despair. 16Your wrath has swept over me; Your terrors have destroyed me. 17All day long they engulf me like water; they enclose me on every side. 18You have removed my beloved and my friend; darkness is my closest companion.
A lament that ends in darkness with no resolution. God included it in Scripture: honest despair can be a prayer.
18The LORD is near to the brokenhearted; He saves the contrite in spirit.
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, even when he does not feel near.
3He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not. 4Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows; yet we considered Him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed.
The Servant is 'a man of sorrows' who bears our griefs. God's answer to suffering is to share it.
33From the sixth hour until the ninth hour darkness came over all the land. 34At the ninth hour, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” 35When some of those standing nearby heard this, they said, “Behold, He is calling Elijah.” 36And someone ran and filled a sponge with sour wine. He put it on a reed and held it up for Jesus to drink, saying, “Leave Him alone. Let us see if Elijah comes to take Him down.” 37But Jesus let out a loud cry and breathed His last.
Jesus cries out the words of Psalm 22. The Son of God experienced the feeling of being forsaken.
32When Mary came to Jesus and saw Him, she fell at His feet and said, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.” 33When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. 34“Where have you put him?” He asked. “Come and see, Lord,” they answered. 35Jesus wept. 36Then the Jews said, “See how He loved him!”
Jesus weeps with Mary at Lazarus' tomb, though he knows he is about to raise him.
15For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet was without sin. 16Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.
We have a high priest who sympathizes with our weaknesses because he has been tested as we are.
26In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know how we ought to pray, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groans too deep for words. 27And He who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. 28And we know that God works all things together for the good of those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose. 29For those God foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brothers. 30And those He predestined, He also called; those He called, He also justified; those He justified, He also glorified. 31What then shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? 32He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also, along with Him, freely give us all things? 33Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. 34Who is there to condemn us? For Christ Jesus, who died, and more than that was raised to life, is at the right hand of God—and He is interceding for us. 35Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36As it is written: “For Your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. 38For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The Spirit prays for us with groanings too deep for words, and nothing, including suffering, can separate us from God's love.
3Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 5For just as the sufferings of Christ overflow to us, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. 6If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which accomplishes in you patient endurance of the same sufferings we experience. 7And our hope for you is sure, because we know that just as you share in our sufferings, so also you will share in our comfort.
God is the 'God of all comfort' who comforts us in affliction so we can comfort others.
The case
You are not the first to ask
If this question is yours, not an abstract puzzle but something you have lived, then before anything else: you are not alone, and you are not faithless for asking it. The question "Where were you, God?" appears again and again in the Bible itself. By common scholarly estimates, around a third of the psalms are laments, prayers of people in pain who tell God exactly how they feel. Psalm 88 ends with the words "darkness is my closest friend" (Psalm 88:18, NIV), and that is where the psalm stops.
God put those prayers in Scripture. That means he is not offended by your honesty. He invites it.
C. S. Lewis, who had written a calm book on suffering, later lost his wife to cancer and wrote A Grief Observed, a raw journal in which he describes slamming against a door that seemed bolted from the inside. Christians have often found it more helpful than his earlier, tidier book. Faith is not the absence of that experience. Often it is what happens inside it.
Where God was
1. He was in it, in Jesus
The center of Christianity is a suffering God. Jesus was betrayed by a friend, abandoned by others, unjustly condemned, mocked, beaten and crucified. On the cross he cried out the opening words of Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). Whatever you have felt in your darkest hour, Jesus has felt something like it.
Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, described in Night watching a boy hanged in the camp while someone behind him asked where God was. A voice within him answered that God was there, on the gallows. Wiesel was describing his own crisis of faith, not making a Christian argument. But the Christian theologian Jürgen Moltmann took that scene as a key to the cross: in Christ, God himself entered the place of godforsakenness. Writing from a Nazi prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it in a single line: "only the suffering God can help."
2. He was near, even when unfelt
Scripture promises that God is near the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18) and that nothing can separate believers from his love (Romans 8:38-39). Notice Paul lists "tribulation, distress, persecution, famine" (Romans 8:35) as things believers will face, not things they will escape. God's presence is not a guarantee of feeling his presence. Many believers describe looking back on their darkest times and seeing, only afterward, how they were carried.
3. He was grieving with you
At Lazarus' tomb, Jesus wept (John 11:35), even though he was about to raise his friend. He did not skip the grief because he knew the happy ending. That tells us something about God's heart: he does not look at your pain with detached calm. He is moved.
4. He was preparing a future you cannot yet see
Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, later told them that what they meant for evil God meant for good (Genesis 50:20). That took years to see. Some of your story may make sense later in this life; much of it may only make sense in the resurrection. God does not promise to explain every chapter now. He promises that the story ends well: no more death, mourning, crying or pain (Revelation 21:4).
What not to say to sufferers
Christians have sometimes made suffering worse with quick answers. Scripture warns against this: Job's friends spoke many true-sounding words, and God said they had not spoken rightly (Job 42:7).
| Unhelpful | More faithful |
|---|---|
| "Everything happens for a reason." | "God can bring good out of this, but what happened was not good." |
| "God needed another angel." | "Death is an enemy. Jesus wept too." |
| "You must not have had enough faith." | "Faithful people suffer. Jesus did." |
| "At least..." | Silence, presence, and practical help |
Why it matters
The Christian answer to "Where was God?" is not a philosophy but a cross and an empty tomb. God did not stand at a distance from your pain. He entered it, bore it, and broke its power by rising from the dead. You can bring him your anger, your grief and your questions. He has room for all of them.
If you are in crisis or thinking of harming yourself, please contact a trusted person, a pastor, or a crisis line right away. Reaching out for help is not a failure of faith.
Word study
hebrew · “to leave, forsake, abandon” · Psalm 22:1
The psalmist uses the strongest ordinary word for abandonment, yet addresses it to 'my God'. The cry of forsakenness is still a prayer. Jesus quoted this verse in Aramaic on the cross (Mark 15:34), joining every sufferer who has felt abandoned.
greek · “to be deeply moved, to snort with indignation” · John 11:33
Before Lazarus' tomb Jesus was 'deeply moved', a word that elsewhere expresses stern indignation. Many commentators see here not only grief but anger at death itself, the enemy he came to destroy.
“But what about…?”
If God was there, why didn't he stop it?
That is the honest question, and Scripture doesn't give a full answer for any individual case (see the related entry on why God allows evil). What it does show is that God's presence in suffering doesn't always mean rescue from it. Jesus himself prayed to be spared the cross and was not spared, yet the Father was working his greatest good through it.
Is it wrong to be angry at God?
The psalms, Job, Jeremiah and Habakkuk are full of anger, complaint and protest addressed to God. Bringing anger to God is an act of faith: you are still talking to him. What Scripture warns against is not lament but turning away from God altogether.
Why don't I feel God's presence?
Feelings are real but are not a reliable measure of God's nearness. Christians across history, from the psalmists to John of the Cross, have described seasons of darkness when God felt absent but was at work. Faith sometimes means holding on to what God has said in the dark.
Did my suffering happen because of something I did?
Not necessarily. Job's friends assumed his suffering proved his guilt, and God rebuked them (Job 42:7). Jesus rejected the same logic (John 9:1-3). If you carry guilt for something real, there is forgiveness in Christ. But much suffering is not punishment at all.
Where Christians differ
Go deeper
- book · 1987Lament for a SonNicholas Wolterstorff
- book · 1961A Grief ObservedC. S. Lewis
- book · 2013Walking with God through Pain and SufferingTimothy Keller
- book · 1977Where Is God When It Hurts?Philip Yancey
- bookLetters and Papers from PrisonDietrich Bonhoeffer
“Only the suffering God can help. (Letter of 16 July 1944)”
- book · 1974The Crucified GodJürgen Moltmann
Sources (3)
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, letter to Eberhard Bethge, 16 July 1944
- Elie Wiesel, Night (1958; English 1960), the account of a boy's hanging at Auschwitz, discussed in Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (English 1974)
- C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (1961), written after the death of his wife, Joy Davidman
Related questions
If God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there evil?
The argument assumes that a good God would never allow any evil for any reason. But a good God might allow evil if it is the cost of something very valuable, such as creatures who can freely love. Even many atheist philosophers now grant that God and evil are not logically contradictory. And Christianity does not stop at an argument: God entered our suffering in Jesus, defeated evil at the cross, and promises to end it for good.
Why would God allow children to suffer?
This is the objection at its most painful, and Christians should feel its weight rather than explain it away. Scripture does not treat children's suffering lightly: Jesus welcomed children, warned of terrible judgment on anyone who harms them, and wept with the grieving. We do not know God's reasons for any particular child's suffering, but we know his heart toward children, we know he will bring perfect justice, and we know he promises a restoration in which no child's suffering is wasted or forgotten.
Why doesn't God answer my prayers?
Scripture never presents prayer as a vending machine. Jesus himself asked for the cup to pass and was told no; Paul asked three times for his thorn to be removed and was told no. God answers as a wise Father, not a genie: sometimes yes, sometimes not yet, sometimes no, because he sees what we cannot. Unanswered prayer is painful, and the Bible gives you permission to say so. But it is not evidence that God has stopped listening.
Is it wrong for a Christian to have doubts?
Doubt is not the opposite of faith; unbelief is. Scripture is full of faithful people who doubted: John the Baptist in prison, Thomas after the resurrection, even some of the disciples on the mountain as they worshiped the risen Jesus. Jesus did not reject them. He met them with evidence and grace. Jude tells Christians to 'have mercy on those who doubt.' Honest questions, brought to God and investigated, can lead to a deeper, sturdier faith.
This entry is a draft and has not yet been theologically reviewed.