Why Do Black People Suffer If God Is Good

This guide takes up a question that is both old and specific. If God is good and all-powerful, why have Black people suffered so much? It works from Chapter 5 of the Jude 3 Project curriculum Through Eyes of Color. That chapter gives a clear answer. The cry behind the question is legitimate. The source of suffering is human sin, not a flaw in God. The prosperity gospel cannot carry this weight, because it promises what Jesus never promised. The hope that can carry it is a God who entered human suffering and has committed himself to ending it.

You can work through the guide alone in one sitting or with a group over one long session or two shorter ones. Each section moves from something to observe, to Scripture, to a test. Read the passages from an open Bible rather than relying on the snippets here. Groups should plan time for the side-by-side exercise near the end, because that is where most of the learning happens.

Start with the cry, not the argument

The curriculum does not open this subject with a philosophy lecture. It opens with a scene from a Jude 3 Project HBCU tour at Southern University. Two Hebrew Israelites came to challenge the speaker publicly. After making their case, one of them shouted, with tears in his eyes, a question about why Black people are suffering the way they are. The curriculum’s comment is that “This man’s cry echoes the cries of the psalmist in Psalm 22, who also felt abandoned by God.”

Notice what the curriculum does with that moment. It does not treat the man as an opponent to beat. It reads past the street-corner style to what sits underneath it. Through Eyes of Color says that “underneath all of that vibrato is a deep sense of pain, confusion, and abandonment they long to explain.” The point applies far beyond one group. Most people who ask this question are not testing a syllogism. They are carrying a history and asking whether God was present in it.

Now read the psalm the curriculum points to. Psalm 22:1 in the KJV reads: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?” Verse 2 continues: “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.”

Observe before you interpret. Who is the psalmist speaking to? Is this a complaint about God or a complaint addressed to God? What does the word “roaring” tell you about how polite this prayer is? The answer matters. Scripture keeps this prayer in the worship book of Israel, and the Gospels place its first line in the mouth of Jesus on the cross (Matthew 27:46). Asking why is not a sign that faith has failed. It is one of the ways faith speaks.

Three answers people hear

When someone asks why Black people have suffered, they usually already have answers from somewhere, and those answers compete. The curriculum names at least three, and comparing them shows what each one assumes.

The curse answer. The curriculum explains that Hebrew Israelites treat Deuteronomy 28 as foundational. They read its curses on a disobedient Israel, compare them to slavery, and conclude that suffering is a sign identifying the true Israel. This answer takes suffering seriously and gives it meaning. The cost is high. Suffering becomes the proof of identity, and the curriculum observes that this reshapes Scripture so that blackness and suffering become the way to God, excluding everyone else.

The prosperity answer. This answer says that faith, giving and declaration bring blessing, health and wealth. The curriculum cites Dr. Eddie Glaude’s argument that one sign of decline in Black churches is a shift away from a gospel centered on Christ and his sufferings toward a gospel centered on prosperity. It agrees that this is a false doctrine with influential public advocates. It is also careful about where it places the problem: “the prosperity gospel is not unique to black churches and is prevalent in churches of every ethnicity.” That distinction matters. The problem is a teaching, not a race, and blaming Black churches as a whole would be a stereotype dressed up as critique.

Consider what the prosperity answer implies for this question. If faith reliably produces blessing, then centuries of enslaved and segregated believers must have lacked faith. That is the answer’s hidden premise, and it turns grief into shame. The curriculum asks its readers to think it through: “How do you think someone wrestling with the problem of evil might respond to the prosperity gospel?”

The gospel answer. The curriculum’s own account starts earlier than the cross. God made a world he called good. Genesis 1:31 says, “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Human sin broke that world, and Christ’s first and second coming are God’s work of setting it right. Through Eyes of Color puts the claim directly: “Bad things don’t happen because something is awry with God.” It adds: “Bad things happen because something is awry with humanity.”

Unlike the prosperity answer, the gospel answer does not promise a way out of suffering in this life. The curriculum says that those who trust Christ “will still experience trouble in this life,” even as they wait for his return. Unlike the curse answer, it does not make suffering the mark of a chosen ethnicity. It treats suffering as what a broken world does to everyone, and it locates hope in what God has done about it.

Reading the texts the easy answers lean on

Each competing answer depends on how a few passages are read. The curriculum’s tool here is the difference between exegesis, drawing out what the author meant in his own setting, and eisegesis, pressing our setting onto the text.

Its main example is a favorite prosperity verse. Jeremiah 29:11 in the KJV reads: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.” People often claim this verse as a personal guarantee. The curriculum answers: “That promise was made to the people of Israel when they were defeated and taken captive by the Babylonians.” It does not tell readers that God has no plans for them: “Now, I’m not saying that the Lord doesn’t have a plan for your life or that He doesn’t want you to prosper, but that promise was not made to you.”

Read in context, the verse undercuts the prosperity reading. It was spoken to exiles who would not go home soon. The “expected end” came after a long captivity, not instead of one. Promises of good from God sit alongside suffering in this text, not as an exit from it.

The curriculum applies the same reading to Deuteronomy 28. It points out that Israel’s own later history shows those curses playing out in the Babylonian exile, and that the book of Lamentations grieves over exactly that. The text has a history already. Reading slavery in the Americas into it requires skipping the story the Bible itself tells.

Two more passages carry the curriculum’s hope. Romans 8:28 says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” Read the verb carefully. Paul does not say every event is good. He says God works all things together toward good, and the surrounding chapter talks about groaning, waiting and suffering. Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.” The curriculum’s point is that God did not watch human suffering from a distance. In Jesus, he entered it.

The hardest part: whose sin?

Here the guide needs to slow down. The claim that suffering comes from human sin can be heard in a dangerous way, as if the people who suffered were being punished for their own sins. That is not the curriculum’s argument, and it is the opposite of what the history requires.

The curriculum describes sin as something that runs through all humanity, and it quotes Paul’s account of a world in which, as Romans 3:15 puts it, “Their feet are swift to shed blood.” Slavery and racism are examples of exactly that. The suffering came from what people did to other people. Some of those people claimed to follow Jesus. The curriculum faces this. It cites Jemar Tisby’s historical argument that racism has been present throughout American expressions of Christianity, and it admits the church has carried “historical baggage” that makes the gospel harder to hear. It separates the faith from the institutions that used its language, arguing that today’s doubts come partly from never getting to know Christianity beyond its American roots, and that the same faith fueled the Civil Rights Movement.

The strongest objection is still standing. Even if human beings caused the suffering, why did an all-powerful God let it go on so long? The curriculum names this question in plain words, asking why God did not intervene and punish the oppressors. Its answer has two parts. God did intervene, in Christ. And judgment is coming: Psalm 96:13 says the LORD “cometh to judge the earth: he shall judge the world with righteousness, and the people with his truth.” What the curriculum does not do is explain the timing. No one should pretend it does. A group that finds this unsatisfying has noticed something real, and Psalm 22 gives room to say so.

There is also a tension inside the curriculum worth naming. It says that “God is not the one to fault or question for the brokenness of this world,” yet it also affirms crying out about Black suffering: “So yes, we cry out with the Hebrew Israelite about the sufferings of black folks in America. It’s appropriate.” A useful way to hold both is the psalm’s own pattern. The psalmist questions God without accusing him of causing the evil. Lament argues with God from inside trust.

For facilitators: some participants may carry painful family or personal experiences of racism. Invite their insight, but do not require personal stories. Keep the group from treating anyone’s experience as an exhibit in the argument. If someone says the answers here feel thin, let that stand rather than rushing to fix it.

Practice: put three answers side by side

This exercise takes about twenty-five minutes. Alone, use a notebook. In a group, divide into three teams, one per answer.

1. Write the three answers at the top of three columns: the curse answer, the prosperity answer, the gospel answer as the curriculum presents it.
2. For each, write one sentence stating where suffering comes from, in the fairest way a believer in that answer would say it.
3. Write what each answer says the sufferer should conclude about himself or herself.
4. Write what each answer promises about the future, and when.
5. Name the main passage each answer rests on, and check it in context: Deuteronomy 28 with Lamentations 1, Jeremiah 29:11 with Jeremiah 29:1-10, Romans 8:28 with Romans 8:18-25.
6. Finally, mark which answer leaves room for lament, and which answer would have something to say to a person enslaved for life who was faithful to Christ to the end.

The curriculum’s own conversation advice applies here. It urges readers “to empathize with their pain and engage their hard questions.” It also suggests a way to gently test a view: notice when someone says two things that do not fit, and ask how they hold them together. Try asking that question of each column, including the gospel one.

Discussion questions

• Psalm 22 is addressed to God, not about him. What is different about bringing a complaint to God compared with making a case against him?
• The curse answer and the prosperity answer both give suffering a clear meaning. Why might a clear meaning be attractive, even when it is harmful?
• Where have you seen the prosperity message shape how people interpret hardship, in any church of any background? What did it ask of the person suffering?
• When the curriculum separates Christianity from the institutions that misused it, what evidence would you want before accepting that separation?
• The curriculum does not explain why God’s judgment has not yet come. Does an answer have to explain everything to be trustworthy? What would make you trust it less, or more?
• Hebrews 4:15 claims Jesus shares our weakness from the inside. What does that change, and what does it leave unchanged, about the original question?

Lament that ends somewhere

The curriculum closes its section on suffering with a group prayer in two movements: lamenting before the Lord about past and present injustices in America, and asking God to draw to himself those who have come to distrust him because of those injustices. That pairing is worth trying, alone or together.

Read all of Psalm 22 first. Notice how far it travels. The same psalm that begins with forsakenness says, in Psalm 22:24, “For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; neither hath he hid his face from him; but when he cried unto him, he heard.” The psalmist does not get there by denying the first verse. He gets there by saying it.

Then write your own lament in that shape. Name a specific injustice, past or present, as plainly as the psalmist does. Say to God what you do not understand. End with the second movement: a request for someone you know who has walked away from faith because of how the church treated Black people. Keep Revelation 21:4 open beside you while you write: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.” That verse does not erase the history. It is a promise that the history will not have the last word, and that is a heavier promise than the prosperity gospel ever offered.