The problem of suffering is usually stated as three claims in conflict: God is good, God is powerful, and terrible things happen. A fourth claim often rides along underneath without being noticed: if God had a good reason for allowing my pain, a good God would tell me what it is. That fourth claim carries much of the argument’s force, and it is the weakest of the four. Dr. Robert Smith Jr. rejects it from inside his own losses. His answer is that God’s goodness shows up in what God does with suffering, and that a person can trust who God is even when the reason stays hidden.
Smith is not speaking from a safe distance. He has two children in heaven. His son Tony was murdered at the restaurant where he worked, on a night he had taken a shift so a coworker could be home with family. Smith has had two strokes and three cancer diagnoses, and Lisa Fields notes that he also lost his first wife. When he says the explanation may never come, he is describing a life he has lived.
What does the argument against God actually need?
Put the skeptic’s case in its strongest form. A wholly good being would prevent any suffering it could prevent, unless it had a morally sufficient reason to allow it. An all-powerful being could prevent any suffering. Suffering exists. So God lacks power, or lacks goodness, or has reasons we have not been shown.
Many believers take the third option and stop there. The skeptic has a fair reply: a reason no one can name starts to look like a placeholder. That reply has real weight. It does not prove God is absent, but it makes the believer’s position harder to hold with confidence if nothing else supports it.
The person in grief usually asks a different question, though. It sounds less like a syllogism and more like this: if God loved me, he would tell me why. That is the hidden premise. It says goodness requires disclosure, so a God who stays silent about his reasons cannot be trusted.
Test that premise against a real case. A murder can be explained in exhaustive detail: who did it, how, where, at what hour. Every one of those facts can be known, and none of them gives a father his son back or tells him whether the loss gets the last word. Explanation answers the question of cause. The grieving person is asking something else. Of his own survival and Tony’s death, Smith says: “I’ll never understand that question.” The facts are known. Knowing them does not resolve what he is actually asking.
Lisa Fields makes the same observation about the classic philosophical defenses: “there is nothing about the philosophical argument of free will that mends the broken heart of someone that’s at their child’s funeral.” That is a claim about what explanation can do, and it cuts against the hidden premise. If a complete explanation would leave the deepest wound untouched, then a God who withholds one has not, for that reason alone, failed to be good.
What does Smith mean by transformation?
Smith credits his central sentence to Dr. William Hall, who once served as provost at the university where Smith taught, and he returns to it more than once: “Tragedy is not redeemed by explanation, but by transformation.”
He describes the change he has in mind this way: “What happens to you, how you are changed so that it doesn’t change you to make you bitter, but it changes you to make you better.”
Redemption, on this account, happens in a person and over time. The tragedy itself stays a tragedy. A later change does not make the murder acceptable after the fact. What changes is the ending: suffering is denied the final word about the one who suffers, because something can still be made of the life it struck.
Smith’s own account shows this is more than a mood. After Tony’s death he had to accept that his son had been loaned to him rather than owned, and he admits the gap between knowing that and living it: “conceptually, I knew that, but existentially, experientially, I wasn’t accepting that.” The conclusion he drew is one of the most honest sentences in the conversation: “you don’t know what you believe until it’s time to believe it.”
The change eventually included forgiving the man who killed his son, writing to him, speaking with him by phone, and telling him he loved him. Smith is plain that months of deep anger came first, that the change was gradual, and that real forgiveness is impossible without God. He gets no account of why. He gets a life that did not end where the injury tried to end it.
Does this mean God gives no explanation at all?
No, and the distinction matters. Smith does offer an account of suffering in general. The world is fallen, he says, broken through human free will and through Adam’s fall, and the brokenness reaches all creation, which will one day be set right. What he declines to offer is an explanation of particular cases: why this child, why this night, why this diagnosis.
He grounds the general account in a small detail from Mark 7:31-35. Before Jesus heals a man who is deaf and can barely speak, the text records, “And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened” (Mark 7:34). The text reports the sigh without commenting on it. Smith reads it as grief over a world gone wrong: “This is a broken world. That’s not what God had in mind.” That reading is an interpretation, not something the verse states outright, but it fits a narrative in which Jesus treats disease as something to undo.
From there Smith draws a conclusion many sufferers need to hear. Hurricanes, cancer, and early deaths, he says, “all of that was not part of God’s plan.” He adds right away: “but God is going to redeem that.”
So the position is that God has reasons, and that a general account of a fallen world can be true while the particular explanation stays out of reach. Trust does not wait on the second.
Scripture gives that pattern some weight. Lisa Fields observes that Job never knew why. The book is wisdom literature framed by narrative, and the reader is shown a heavenly scene in chapters 1 and 2 that Job never sees. When God finally answers from the whirlwind in chapters 38 to 41, he speaks at length, yet he never tells Job about that scene. Job receives an encounter instead of a briefing.
Smith points to an even sharper case. On the cross Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Smith notes that angels appear at Jesus’ birth, in the wilderness, in Gethsemane, and at the tomb, but none comes to deliver him at the cross. He also notes that Jesus “held onto that possessive pronoun”: my God, even then. The Gospel records the question and no spoken answer before Jesus dies. What follows is Sunday. If the Son’s own why was met by resurrection rather than by explanation, the premise that goodness owes us an account looks weaker still. Smith draws the pastoral conclusion in three words: “So God understands.”
Isn’t trusting the who just a way to stop thinking?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. If every instance of suffering can be absorbed by saying I trust him anyway, then nothing could ever count against the belief. A belief that nothing could challenge looks less like faith and more like a wall.
Smith’s answer has two parts. The first is that God is beyond our reasoning without being irrational. He calls God absurd in the sense that God does not fit our measurements, then corrects himself: “He’s super logical.” He cites Isaiah 55:8-9: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” He adds Romans 11:33, which calls God’s judgments unsearchable and his ways “past finding out.”
He then argues that no one actually demands full explanation in ordinary life. People board planes and fall asleep before takeoff without checking whether the pilot rested. That example needs testing, because it cuts both ways. We trust a pilot without explanation only because airlines have a long record of reliability. Trust without explanation is reasonable only when it has grounds.
Smith’s second part supplies those grounds. He urges sufferers to remember how faithful God has been, to remember that in the incarnation God became human and experienced what we experience, and to remember that God sustains and keeps his people. His most compressed line is “If I know who, I don’t have to know why.” He anticipates the charge that this is wordplay: “I’m not trying to say something that rhymes. It’s true.”
Smith is also candid about the limits of his own argument. He admits “that’s not always convincing,” and goes on: “But no one is saved by argument. People are saved by faith. You can’t argue a person into the kingdom.” Reason keeps its place. He cites 2 Timothy 1:12, “for I know whom I have believed,” alongside 1 Peter 3:15, which calls believers to give “a reason of the hope that is in you.” In the same breath he insists “we must have reason, a rationale,” and then names the order: “It follows the experience.” Lisa Fields puts the same sequence in a sentence about Paul’s conversion: “the reason came after the experience.”
So the objection is answered, but not fully dissolved. Trusting the who is a reasoned act, provided there are reasons to believe the who is real and has shown himself trustworthy. For Christians, the decisive reason is the resurrection, and Paul stakes everything on it: “And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17). If that event did not happen, Smith’s position loses its footing. If it did, then the central Christian claim about suffering is a report of what God did on the far side of the worst suffering, not a theory about his hidden reasons.
Is redemption only a promise for after we die?
A second objection comes from a different direction. Lisa Fields describes critics in the conscious community who say Christianity asks Black people to accept suffering now in exchange for a better afterlife. On that view, transformation is just deferral with religious language.
Smith calls this split “a false dichotomy to talk about the already and the not yet being separate.” He borrows Kierkegaard’s observation that life is lived forward and understood backward: “We live it forward, but we understand it backwards.” Christians, he says, live the already in light of the not yet, and he defines hope with care: “Hope is that which is real, but has not yet been grasped yet.” What he describes is a foretaste in the present, enough to move a person to love in the face of hate. He points to a people sustained through slavery and the Middle Passage as evidence that Sunday is more than a future event. Whatever one makes of that historical reading, the logical point holds: a transformation that begins now cannot be dismissed as merely postponed.
What follows from this
Smith’s position leaves the hard things standing. Suffering was not part of God’s plan, he says. Asking why remains honest; Jesus asked it from the cross. Pain does not fade on schedule either. Smith says time does not heal every wound so much as redress it, and Tony still comes back to him at funerals for young men.
What follows is that God’s goodness is measured over time, by faithfulness, rather than in a single moment of disclosure. Smith calls this holding Friday and Sunday together: “you can’t have resurrection without crucifixion.” A faith that wants only Sunday becomes a prosperity theology, and his verdict is direct: “we don’t need a prosperity theology. We need an adversity theology.” He states the confidence that makes this bearable. God’s purpose “can be threatened, but it cannot be thwarted,” and “it may be delayed, but it cannot be denied.”
Lisa Fields names the practical consequence: “if you’re waiting for the why to get free, you’ll never be free.” The hidden premise fails as logic, and it also holds people hostage to an answer that, even if it came, could not do what they need it to do.
Smith ends up moving the question rather than answering it. He was once held at gunpoint as a young father and survived; Tony did not. He cannot explain that. But he names a different question, one he finds he can live inside: “The larger question is, I was spared. Jesus was not.” That question tells no one why their particular suffering happened. It tells them what kind of God they are dealing with: one who did not spare himself, and who answered the darkest why in history with an empty tomb.