The suffering and untimely death of innocent people, even infants, is one of the most painful issues. Many people, finding no answer to it, turned away from faith. Meanwhile, it is a believer who is able to understand and accept the answer to this question.
A person who recognizes the existence of God knows that He is the basis and primary source of the Universe, ideally rational, ideally just, and the source of infinite love. The love and suffering of innocent people seems incompatible with this characteristic.
Suffering, death, and sin
"The punishment for sin is death, " the scripture says. Not a single Christian denies this, but often people understand this wording in a simplified way. Punishment is presented as a legal concept: act - court - sentence. It even encourages people to condemn God for "cruel sentences." In reality, the punishment for sin is not “criminal, ” but “natural.”
God established the laws of nature by which the material world exists - physical, chemical, biological. It is well known what happens when people refuse to reckon with these laws - for example, if a person smokes, he eventually develops lung cancer. No one will call it "too cruel heavenly punishment", everyone understands that this is a natural consequence of the actions of man himself.
Not always, due to thoughtless violation of the laws of nature, the immediate culprit suffers. For example, thousands of people suffered because of the negligence of Chernobyl employees, and it cannot be said that someone “punished them with senseless cruelty” is a natural consequence of human frivolity.
The spiritual component of the universe also has its own laws. They are not as obvious from a human point of view as the laws of physics or biology, but they arrange the world in accordance with the divine plan. Initially, man was conceived as an immortal being, created for happiness. Not God destroyed this state - man himself decided to retreat from the will of God.
Considering that the will of God is the root cause of the universe that organized it, the departure from it provokes chaos in the world, plunges it into a series of accidents terrible in its absurdity. And here it is impossible to neither ask nor answer what this or that person suffers for, whether it is an adult or a child: this is because the world has been plunged into a state of chaos through human sins. And everyone contributes to the creation of this "spiritual Chernobyl" - after all, there is no such person who would not sin.
