Does God even care when we’re hurting?

Leestijd / Lesezeit / Reading time: 6 min

This past week, I had a conversation with someone who started with this question:

Everyone talks about God, but does He actually care if people get sick or hurt?

In that one question, you can hear sadness, pain, confusion—you name it. It’s just one sentence someone asks, but sometimes those kinds of questions really hit you.
How do you even begin to answer something like that?

The first important thing is figuring out whether the person is a Christian or not. Once you know that, you can move on to asking how much they actually know about the Bible (or if they don’t). Otherwise, you might end up talking “nonsense” that just doesn’t land with them. That doesn’t help anyone.
Finding out who you’re really talking to takes time—and you’re dependent on the other person’s patience and whether they’re willing to open up and share what they truly believe (or don’t believe).

Anyway, in this case, there was a decent amount of Bible knowledge. But whether this person was actually a Christian… I honestly don’t know. That was a tough one.
Because of that, we decided to go back to the basics and build from there.
So we started with: “Adam, Eve, the apple, the snake” (Did you know the Bible never actually says it was an apple, by the way?)

In that “apple” story, we see that we, as humans, made the choice not to listen to God.
In Genesis 2, God told us this:

God said to the man, “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:16–17, NASB)

You can see right there what the consequence was for eating the “apple”: “If you eat from that tree, you will die.” Clear, right?

So then the question comes up: Why didn’t Adam and Eve just drop dead the moment they ate that “apple”? Because death was supposed to be the direct result. And yet… God let them live?
Even there, you can already see that God does care about what happens to us. He could’ve pulled the plug right then and there—He had every right to, based on what He clearly said.
But instead, He gave Adam and Eve—and you and me—a second chance.
And we didn’t deserve that.
Because we were definitely disobedient, we knew the consequences ahead of time, and still we went ahead and did exactly what we wanted, not what He—in all His goodness—wanted for us: a perfect paradise.
Right there in Genesis 2, we see that God absolutely does care about how we’re doing.

But… that doesn’t mean bad behavior comes with no consequences. That would be weird, right? Like, we get to wreck God’s beautiful world and just walk away with no fallout? That wouldn’t sit right with anyone.
Even today, we see people destroying the planet, destroying each other’s lives—and if there were no consequences for that, I wouldn’t be okay with it.
Are we really fine with Hitler, Pol Pot, or Stalin just getting away with their evil? Of course not!
So I’m honestly glad there are (eternal) consequences for evil.
Yes, God gave us a second chance we didn’t deserve—but our choices still carry weight. There are consequences.

Now let’s take a look at the consequences for the snake—the devil—who was behind all this disobedience in the first place. Does he get away with it? No way.
He faces the worst consequence imaginable. Honestly, death would’ve been easier for him. What’s waiting for him is way, way worse:

“And the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also; and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” (Revelation 20:10, NASB)

Wow… so disobeying God—sin—doesn’t just have consequences for us, but also for the devil.
You can also see that there are different levels of punishment.
What we got as humans was a completely different kind of consequence.
Still punishment, yes—but not the eternal fire and brimstone the devil is headed for.

Here’s what it says about the consequences we face:

Then to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree about which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat from it’; Cursed is the ground because of you; With hard labor you shall eat from it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; Yet you shall eat the plants of the field; By the sweat of your face You shall eat bread, Until you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:16–19, NASB)

And those consequences—let’s just call them “thorns and thistles” for now—yeah, we definitely feel those.
People do get sick and hurt. That’s reality, and it hurts… because we were stubborn and didn’t listen to God’s best plan.
We thought we knew better than Him… oops.

And now we get a little deeper into the answer. At the end of that part about our consequences, it says:

For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.

So after all the mess with the “thorns and thistles,” we go back to dust (we die and decay), and that’s it? A life full of suffering and then nothing more?
If that were true, then the question of whether God even cares would actually make sense.
We’d just be born to suffer—and that’s the end of the story.
But no.
Because here comes the God of grace again!
He gives us another chance.

Someone has to pay the price God made super clear:
“If you eat from that tree, you will die.”
We deserve to die—forever.
And God is very clear that death will come.

But here’s the thing—God does care deeply about us.
That death—the eternal death—the price for our own wrong choices—should come.
But because God loves us so much, He sent Christ, His Son, from perfect heaven down to this earth full of “thorns and thistles.”
Jesus took that huge consequence for us, took the punishment on Himself, by being crucified on a cross, wearing a crown… made of those very same “thorns and thistles.”

God loves you so much that He:

“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16, NASB)

If we believe that Christ did all that, God sets us free forever from those “thorns and thistles” that are the consequence of our own bad choices.
We won’t face the punishment we deserved.
Instead, an eternity awaits us—with (among other things, because this is just a small part) the following promises:

The old world with its “thorns and thistles” will be gone:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there was no longer any sea.” (Revelation 21:1, NASB)

“They will hunger no more, neither thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any scorching heat.”
(Revelation 7:16)

God cares about you so much.
His own Son paid the price for you, and if you believe in Him, that’s waiting for you—forever.
And when you understand that, it changes how you see the pain you might be feeling now.
That pain is real, the consequences of your sin are real, but because of His Son, God made those consequences temporary—way smaller than what we actually deserved.
And then, forever, in that new world where there’s no more hunger, we can say to God:

“And they cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’” (Revelation 7:10)

I can’t wait to say that to God.
Because, maybe like you, I get tired—really tired—of the consequences of my own sin.
Those “thorns and thistles” really hurt.

Hang in there, just a little longer, and then we’ll see Him.
We’ll be able to thank Him for the new chance He gave us by letting His Son die for our sins…

God cares about you that much… even today.