Why God Allows Suffering — The LDS Answer
The most coherent theodicy in Christianity — suffering is not punishment, it is the mechanism of growth
The problem of suffering is the sharpest argument against belief in God. If God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, why is there so much pain in the world? Why do children suffer? Why does faithfulness not protect from tragedy? Why does prayer sometimes seem to change nothing?
These are not casual questions. They are the questions that break faith — that have broken faith for millions of intelligent, sincere people who concluded that no adequate answer exists. The traditional Christian answers — suffering builds character, we cannot understand God's ways, it is part of His mysterious plan — feel thin against real grief.
LDS theology has a more complete answer. Not a comfortable one — but a serious, scripturally grounded one that holds up under pressure. It requires understanding what mortality is for in the first place.
The Question Every Thoughtful Person Asks
The philosophical problem is called theodicy — the attempt to reconcile divine goodness with the existence of evil and suffering. The classic statement is Epicurus's dilemma: Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both willing and able? Then whence comes evil?
Most Christian traditions answer this by appealing to divine mystery: God's ways are higher than our ways; we cannot understand why suffering exists, but we trust God anyway. This is not a dishonest answer. But it is incomplete. It tells the sufferer to stop asking — when what they need is an answer that actually makes sense of the thing they are experiencing.
LDS theology does not appeal to mystery as its primary answer. It offers a cosmological framework within which suffering is not an anomaly but an expected feature of a purposeful design.
What the Binary Heaven-Hell Framework Gets Wrong
The traditional framework in most of Christianity is binary: this life is the test, and what happens after is either heaven or hell, eternal reward or eternal punishment. Within that framework, suffering in this life is genuinely mysterious — because this life is already a complete test, and additional suffering beyond what the test requires seems gratuitous.
The LDS framework is not binary. Mortality is not primarily a judicial test where you either pass or fail. It is an educational and developmental experience — a period in which spirit beings who already existed, with already-developed character and capacity, come to earth to acquire bodies, experience opposition, and grow into something they could not become without the mortal experience.
Within that framework, suffering is not gratuitous. It is the mechanism of growth. You cannot develop patience without being required to wait. You cannot develop compassion without encountering suffering. You cannot develop faith without facing the genuine possibility of doubt. These are not design flaws. They are design features.
Why Opposition Is Necessary — 2 Nephi 2:11
2 Nephi 2:11
“For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.”
Lehi's teaching to Jacob is one of the most philosophically precise statements in all of scripture. He is not merely saying that good and evil must both exist. He is making a deeper claim: without opposition, existence itself becomes meaningless. If there is no bad, there is no good — there is only a compound of sameness with no contrast, no definition, no meaning.
This is not merely a logical observation. It is a description of what a universe without opposition would actually be: dead. Not peaceful — dead. No joy, because there is no sorrow. No growth, because there is no resistance. No love, because there is no loss. No meaning, because meaning requires contrast.
God did not create a world with suffering in it despite His goodness. He created a world with opposition in it because of His goodness — because only a world with genuine opposition can produce the kind of beings that are capable of genuine goodness, genuine love, and genuine joy.
The Fall Activated Moral Agency
The Garden of Eden was a state without opposition — and Lehi tells us exactly what that means. Adam and Eve "would have remained in a state of innocence, having no joy, for they knew no misery; doing no good, for they knew no sin" (2 Nephi 2:23). The garden was not paradise. It was an anteroom. Beautiful, innocent — and incomplete.
The Fall brought opposition into the human experience. It activated moral agency — because without the possibility of suffering and loss, choice is not meaningful. Once real consequences are possible, real choices become possible. Once real choices are possible, real growth becomes possible. Once real growth is possible, the entire purpose of mortality becomes achievable.
2 Nephi 2:25
“Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy.”
The purpose of human existence is joy. Not comfort. Not safety. Joy — which requires the capacity for its opposite and the freedom to pursue it. The Fall is what made both possible. This is not a tragedy dressed in theological language. It is a genuine resolution of the problem: suffering is not a mistake in the design. It is the design, because without it, joy itself is impossible.
Job — The Central Text on Suffering
The book of Job is the Bible's most sustained engagement with the problem of suffering, and it is more radical than most readers realize. Job is righteous. Job suffers enormously. His friends offer all the traditional explanations: you must have sinned, you don't understand God's ways, accept your suffering in humility. God rejects every one of these explanations and vindicates Job's protest.
What Job did not know was the heavenly conversation in chapter 1. God pointed Job out to Satan as a man of integrity. Satan challenged the integrity: "Doth Job fear God for nought? Hast thou not made an hedge about him?" (Job 1:9–10). The test was designed specifically to find out what Job's faith was made of — whether it was circumstantial or genuine.
Ether 12:27
“And if men come unto me I will show unto them their weakness. I give unto men weakness that they may be humble; and my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me; for if they humble themselves before me, and have faith in me, then will I make weak things become strong unto them.”
Moroni records this directly from Christ: God gives men weakness. Not as punishment. As gift. Weakness is the precondition for the divine assistance that makes what is weak become strong. God will not help you lift what you have already lifted. He waits for what is genuinely too heavy for you — and then He steps in. Suffering is the weight that creates the need for the strength.
D&C 122 — What Was Said to Joseph
Joseph Smith wrote Doctrine and Covenants 121–123 from Liberty Jail in 1839 — a dungeon where he had been imprisoned unjustly for months in brutal conditions. He cried out to God, asking how long the suffering would continue and whether God had forgotten His people. The response he received is among the most stunning in all of scripture:
D&C 122:7–8
“And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou be cast into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thine enemy; if the heavens gather blackness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good. The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?”
Two claims are made here. First: all of this will give you experience, and it will be for your good. Not might be, not could be if you respond correctly — will be. God is not merely watching the suffering. He is purposing it. Second: Christ has descended below all of it. He has not asked you to go through anything He did not go through first, at a cost infinitely greater than yours.
Suffering as the Mechanism of Becoming
The ultimate LDS answer to the problem of suffering is this: the goal of mortality is not happiness in the conventional sense. It is becoming — becoming like God. And no one becomes like God by living comfortably. The character of God — infinite compassion, infinite patience, infinite power restrained by infinite love — is not the character of a being who never suffered. It is the character of a being who descended below all things, who took upon Himself every human pain, and who came out the other side as what He is.
Mosiah 3:19 describes the natural man as an enemy to God and the process of becoming a saint through the Atonement as one of "submitting to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him." The word is "inflict." God is not passive in the suffering. He is purposing it — carefully, lovingly, with complete knowledge of what you can bear and what you need to become.
Key Scriptures on Suffering
- 2 Nephi 2:11 — Opposition in all things is necessary; without it existence is meaningless
- D&C 122:7–8 — All things will give thee experience and shall be for thy good
- Ether 12:27 — God gives weakness that grace may make weak things strong
- Mosiah 3:19 — Submitting to all things the Lord seeth fit to inflict
- Romans 8:28 — All things work together for good to them that love God
This is the LDS answer to why God allows suffering. Not because He cannot stop it. Not because He is indifferent to it. Not because He is testing you to see if you will pass some arbitrary threshold. Because He is making something out of you that can only be made this way — and He knows, because He went through it Himself, that what comes out the other side is worth what the process costs.
This does not make the suffering less real. It does not make grief wrong or pain trivial. It makes the suffering meaningful — purposeful — which is the only thing that actually helps someone who is in the middle of it. Not "God mysterious ways" but "God knows what He is doing with this, and it will not be wasted."