Perhaps the most difficult and emotionally charged question ever asked the pastor or apologist is why God let a particular child suffer or die. The question is rarely abstract. I’ve never been asked why God lets children die. I’m asked why God let six-year-old Ethan get killed by a car while he was skateboarding or why God let four-year-old Kaylee die of leukemia. The typical Christian answer is, “We won’t know until we get to heaven.” Of course, we will certainly know more when we get to heaven, but is that all we can answer? I suggest we know more than that. We may not know all of God’s reasons for letting a particular child die at a particular moment, but we can answer why God allows children to die.
Note that this article isn’t directed toward those who have just lost a child. My wife, Jean, and I experienced five miscarriages, which led to our never having children and we know firsthand what it is like to have Christians try to “solve” grief.1 Those who grieve rarely search for explanations of how God works in the universe. Instead, they need hugs and maybe meals. The Scripture tells us to “weep with those who weep” (Rom. 12:15). But there comes a time, when the initial anguish subsides, that people seek the larger picture of what God is doing in the universe.
WHAT CAUSES CHILDREN TO SUFFER AND DIE?
Children suffer and die due to three main causes. First, children suffer and die due to pestilence and disease enabled when the Lord cursed the ground after Adam and Eve sinned. He banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, thus barring humans from the rejuvenating power of the Tree of Life. God warned Adam and Eve that if they ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, “you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17), and He didn’t add “at a ripe old age of natural causes.” He just said, “You will surely die,” and we’ve been attending funerals ever since. Second, children also suffer and die because of the mistakes and sins of others, such as leaving a pool gate unsecured, drunk driving, murder, and so on. Third, children suffer and die because natural laws work in regular ways: the gravity that keeps us on planet Earth also enables fatal falls; the fire that warms also burns; the water in which we swim can also drown.
Disease, sins, and consistent natural laws, then, are the main reasons that children die. That brings us to the question, why doesn’t God afford children special protection?
Keep reading my article in the Christian Research Journal.
- Jean has written about her experience: Jean E. Jones, “The Journey of Childlessness,” Today’s Christian Woman, April 2010, available at http://www.todayschristianwoman.com/ articles/2010/april/journeychildlessness.html. [↩]
