Can Deism better explain our suffering?

She had barely lived a quarter of a century, but her soul felt so ancient. At 25, Favor had already lost her mom, battled chronic illness, watched her dreams crumble under the weight of depression, and sat by a friend’s hospital bed as cancer drained the light from her young eyes. Favor had prayed constantly, passionately, desperately. She had believed that anything was possible with God. But silence had become the most consistent response to her now fading cries. She’s at the brink of giving up.

“You know, maybe God just wound the world up and left it to spin,” she thought, next to her friend’s bed. “Maybe He’s actually out there, but He just doesn’t get involved anymore.”

It wasn’t a conclusion born of rebellion. It was born of exhaustion. She really needed her pain to make sense, and if God wasn’t going to show up, Deism started to look like the most rational option.

Deism is the belief that a Creator made the universe but does not intervene in it. Simply put, God set natural laws in motion and then stepped back, like a watchmaker who crafts a watch and leaves it to tick on its own. 

Believe me when I say that many who suffer are drawn to this idea, not because they stop believing in God’s existence (Atheism is just too far of an inconsistent reach) but because they struggle to believe in His nearness.

It’s just easier to say God exists, but He’s not interested or paying attention to what’s happening. That might sound logical and somewhat absolving at first. It lets God off the hook in the conversation of the brokenness we see ever so often. Diseases, war, abuse of all kinds, injustice. But at what cost?

The cost of truth maybe?

If you have any degree of literary relationship with the Bible, you would know that it doesn’t shy away from the difficult conversations. Like if anyone expected the Bible to be a book of happy endings and angelic intervention, from the moment they opened it, they’d be surprised. 

From the innocent blood of Abel to the weeping prophet Jeremiah, from Job’s boils and ashes to the cross, Scripture is drenched in suffering. And yet, the God of the Bible is never distant from it.

He hears the cries of Israel and walks them through slavery and wilderness. The incarnate son of God weeps at Lazarus’s tomb. He actually comes down in flesh and bleeds, engaging with the kind of suffering humans experience. The God of the Bible is not an absentee Father. He is intimately acquainted with grief, and when His people suffer, He is not unmoved. 

David so beautifully describes this in the 56th Psalm where he said He “keeps track of all my sorrows, each tear in your bottle”

That’s not Deism. That’s not disinterest.

Even if Deism could explain why suffering exists by saying God simply isn’t involved, it fails to answer the true aching human question: Does my suffering mean anything?

A silent God might explain pain, but He doesn’t fix it. And deep down, we don’t just want transient relief. We want full repair. We want to know that everything we’re going through, depression, breakfast (not the morning meal), lack and poverty aren’t pointless.

Christianity, the Sun by which I see everything, doesn’t pretend that suffering is good. It doesn’t deny its brutality or dismiss our pain and loss. But it also doesn’t waste it. God doesn’t always cause our pain, but He is sovereign over it, using it with meticulous and unsearchable wisdom to refine, mature, and shape us. There is utility in suffering because God is in it with us. Do I know why it has to be this way? I honestly don’t have an answer.

The Apostle Paul, no stranger to pain, wrote, “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3–4). 

This past Sunday, I shared at my church on the poster boy for unjust suffering after Job, Joseph. Sold by his own brothers. Falsely accused. Forgotten in prison for 2 years. If anyone had reason to believe God had checked out, it was him. But looking back, he said something stunning to those same brothers: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

His pain was very real. But so was God’s purpose through it.

There have been so many shows that really messed up with their last season. And there are those ones that still don’t have an end in view. Like why should a show have 16 seasons? What are they acting? Well, Pain is not the end of the series. It’s also not an experience without an end. You see, Christianity holds a bold hope: that God has answered the problem of suffering, not with a theory, but with Himself. Jesus stepped into our world of blood and betrayal. He bore suffering with us and for us. And He rose again, securing the promise that one day, every tear will be wiped away (Revelation 21:4).

That day hasn’t come yet. But it will. And in the meantime while we walk through this series, we do not walk alone. God is not distant. He is close. Present. Weeping. Redeeming. Loving.

So is Deism the best explanation for my pain No. No it’s not.

Because when I look through the tears, I don’t see a watchmaker but a Father. I don’t see a misguided movie producer. I see a finisher. A Savior. A Comforter.

And that is enough to carry us through the pain.