When Evil Hurts: Finding Hope Between Two Gardens

“If God is good, why does evil exist?”

That question has echoed through hospital corridors, funeral homes, and late-night conversations for thousands of years. Most people don’t ask it because they’re looking for a philosophical debate. They ask it because life has knocked the wind out of them. A marriage falls apart. A loved one dies. A diagnosis changes everything. The question isn’t really about explaining evil nearly as much as it’s about explaining our pain.

The good news is that the Bible doesn’t avoid the question. In fact, it tells the entire story of evil from beginning to end. The answer doesn’t begin at the cross, and it doesn’t begin with suffering. It begins in a garden.

Before cancer existed, there was health. Before war, there was peace. Before addiction, abuse, anxiety, and funerals, there was a world exactly as God intended it to be. When God finished creating the heavens and the earth, He looked over everything He had made and declared it “very good.” There were no tears to wipe away, no cemeteries to visit, and no broken hearts wondering where God had gone.

That’s why it’s so important to remember this simple truth: God never created evil. Evil vandalized what God created. We often make the mistake of blaming the Architect for what the vandal has done. When life hurts, it’s easy to assume tragedy must somehow be God’s design. Scripture paints a very different picture.

Psalm 115:16 says, “The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s, but the earth He has given to the children of men.” God has always been the Owner of creation, but He chose to entrust humanity with the responsibility of stewarding it. There’s a difference between ownership and delegated authority.

Think about renting out your home. You may own the house, but once you’ve handed someone the keys, you don’t simply walk in whenever you please, help yourself to the food in the refrigerator, and start rearranging the furniture. Ownership and authority aren’t always the same thing. God didn’t entrust humanity with the earth because He lacked power. He did it because He desired relationship. He wasn’t interested in creating puppets who simply obeyed commands. He wanted sons and daughters who could genuinely choose to love Him.

And that’s where the story turns.

Love only exists where choice exists. A spouse programmed to say, “I love you,” isn’t actually loving you. Love requires freedom, and freedom always carries the possibility of rebellion. When the serpent entered the Garden questioning God’s goodness—“Did God really say?”—the temptation wasn’t ultimately about fruit. It was about trust. Would Adam and Eve continue trusting the heart of their Creator, or would they decide they knew better?
They chose independence over dependence. Self-rule over God’s rule. In that single decision, sin entered the human race, death invaded creation, shame filled the human heart, and fear replaced peace. Humanity surrendered the authority God had entrusted to them, and a fractured creation has been groaning ever since.

Every one of us has repeated that same story. Maybe not in a garden with forbidden fruit, but every time we’ve decided our way was better than God’s way, we’ve stepped onto the same path.

The Bible teaches that humanity handed over the authority God had entrusted to us, allowing evil to gain influence in this broken world. That’s why Jesus referred to Satan as “the ruler of this world.” It wasn’t because God had somehow lost control. It was because humanity surrendered what had been placed into our hands.

That’s why children get sick. That’s why wars rage. That’s why addiction destroys families. That’s why storms devastate communities. That’s why our hearts ache when we watch the evening news.

This isn’t the world God designed.

Jesus Himself helps us understand the difference when He says in John 10:10, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”

One destroys.

One restores.

Never confuse the work of the thief with the heart of the Father.

Thankfully, the story doesn’t end in Genesis 3. If it did, we’d all be without hope. Instead of explaining suffering from a distance, God did something no one expected.

He stepped into it.

The message of Christianity is unlike every other religion in the world. Most religions tell us what we must do to climb our way to God. Christianity tells us the story of God climbing down to us.

Jesus didn’t arrive in a palace surrounded by wealth and power. He entered the world through a stable. He surrounded Himself with fishermen, tax collectors, widows, children, and ordinary people whose lives had been touched by pain. He never seemed uncomfortable around hurting people. He touched lepers everyone else avoided. He defended the woman everyone else condemned. He stopped for blind beggars everyone else walked past. He even stood outside the tomb of Lazarus and wept, though He knew resurrection was only moments away.

One of my favorite truths in all of Scripture is that the resurrected Jesus still bears the scars of the cross.

Think about that.

The only scars in heaven belong to our Savior.

God wanted eternity to remember what love was willing to endure.

It’s no coincidence that humanity’s fall began in a garden and our redemption began in one too. In Gethsemane, Jesus prayed, “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me.” He didn’t pretend suffering was easy. He felt every ounce of its weight. Yet He finished His prayer with words that changed history forever: “Nevertheless, not My will, but Yours be done.”

The only person who never committed evil became the greatest victim of it.

He endured what He didn’t deserve so we could receive what we could never earn.

When Jesus stood before Pilate, He reminded him, “You could have no power against Me unless it had been given you from above.” At any moment He could have called legions of angels. He possessed the power to stop everything that was happening.

Yet He stayed.

The nails didn’t keep Him on the cross.

Love did.

Every blow of the hammer echoed one message: I’d rather suffer for you than spend eternity without you.

That’s why the cross forever answers the question, “Does God really love me?” You never have to wonder again. Just look at the cross.

Then came Sunday morning.

When Jesus walked out of that grave, He wasn’t simply proving He was God. He was announcing to sin, death, evil, fear, suffering, and hell itself that they would not have the final word.

The resurrection was the first crack in the kingdom of darkness. The cross won the victory. The resurrection announced it. One day Jesus will complete it.

John gives us an incredible glimpse of that future in Revelation. He tells us there is coming a day when God Himself will dwell with His people. Every tear will be wiped away. Death will be no more. Neither will there be mourning, crying, or pain. The former things will have passed away.

• Every tear.
• Not most tears.
• Every tear.
• Every funeral.
• Every diagnosis.
• Every broken relationship.
• Every unanswered question.
• One day Jesus will make it right.
  
  

That’s why I love to say that we live between two gardens. We look back to Eden where everything was lost, and we look forward to the garden city of Revelation where everything will be restored. Right in the middle stands an empty tomb, reminding us that hope is alive.

Until then, we have to be careful which voice becomes the lens through which we interpret God.

• Pain has a voice.
• Loss has a voice.
• Disappointment has a voice.
• Betrayal has a voice.

If we’re not careful, those voices begin telling us who God is. Someone loses a loved one. Someone prays for healing but doesn’t receive the answer they hoped for. Someone experiences unimaginable heartbreak, and before long their experience begins rewriting their theology.

• Experience is real.
• But experience isn’t truth.
• Experience tells us what happened.
• God’s Word tells us what it means.

One of the lines from Sunday’s message that has stayed with me all week is this:
Pain is a terrible theologian.

If we build our understanding of God on the worst day of our lives, we’ll almost certainly misunderstand His heart. But if we build our understanding on Jesus Christ, then even when we don’t understand our circumstances, we can still trust the One who walks through them with us.

• The Garden explains the problem.
• The Cross explains God’s response.
• The Empty Tomb guarantees the ending.
• That means evil doesn’t get the final word.
• Death doesn’t get the final word.
• Your past doesn’t get the final word.
• Your diagnosis doesn’t get the final word.
• Jesus gets the final word.

And until the day He makes all things new, we keep walking by faith—not because we have every answer, but because we’ve come to know the One who does. When we don’t understand everything, we can still trust His character. We can still trust His heart. And we can still trust that the story isn’t over yet.