The Problem of Suffering and Human Dominion Over Creation
Question
Why didn’t God protect those in Nepal instead of simply watching what happened?
Originally published in Vol. 1, Number 9, September 2026, Ask The Theologian Journal.
Answer
When we ask why God did not protect people in a particular disaster, such as the flooding in Nepal, we are often asking for two things at once that do not fit together: we want genuine human freedom and responsibility, and we also want God to intervene whenever that freedom and responsibility would lead to pain, loss, or inconvenience.
We want the ability to make our own decisions without God constantly manipulating our lives, but we also want God to manipulate the created order (such as the weather) whenever it would benefit us. We can imagine a God who always ensures good weather for our picnic while giving the farmer next door the rain he needs, but that is not how God has ordered the present world.
In Scripture there has never been an era in which God universally prevented all temporal suffering, disaster, and danger. He has intervened at points in history according to His purposes, but the ordinary pattern is that people live within a cursed creation and experience its perils. God sees and knows all of this; His failure to stop it does not mean He approves of it, originated it, or delights in it.
Consider the apostle Paul. In 2 Corinthians 11:23-27 he writes:
“Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool) I am more; in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; In journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren.”
At least some of these sufferings, especially the shipwrecks and “perils of waters,” arose not from human malice but from the hazards of weather and travel in a fallen world. We can ask of Paul what we ask of Nepal: why did God not protect him instead of “watching it happen”? Yet God allowed Paul to experience repeated, severe dangers.
The biblical picture is that God has given humanity dominion over the earth. That dominion includes real responsibility to understand creation’s dangers and to mitigate them as best we can. Many of the perils we face are bound up with the curse on the earth; we cannot remove that curse, but within it we are accountable for wise stewardship and protection of human life.
This introduces the role of human society and government. Some regions, like Nepal, face inherently dangerous conditions—monsoons, flooding, unstable terrain. Other regions face hurricanes, flash floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, or wildfires. We cannot stop such phenomena, but we can reduce their lethal impact. Building codes, land-use planning, drainage systems, levees, evacuation procedures, and education are examples of responsible dominion. When governments neglect these responsibilities, disaster mortality and damage are magnified.
In various parts of the world, including Western nations, governments sometimes expend vast energy and resources on symbolic or trivial matters while ignoring structural issues that make their people vulnerable to catastrophe. When this happens, it is unjust to fault God for consequences that arise from human failure to use the dominion He entrusted to us.
There is also an individual component. Those who live in forests must think about fire. Those in flood-prone areas must think about drainage and defensible space. Dominion is exercised personally as well as collectively. We can, of course, regulate and protect to such an extreme that life and livelihood become impossible, but that is a different kind of failure.
The desire to place all of this burden on “providence” is, in effect, a desire to shift responsibility away from humanity. We want God to give us dominion, and then we want to blame Him when we have not exercised it wisely. Scripture instead presents God as giving a real, ordered world under a real curse, and placing real stewardship into human hands.
Compassion for those who suffer in places like Nepal is entirely appropriate and necessary. But alongside compassion we must affirm that God’s usual way in this age is not to prevent every tragedy, but to hold humanity responsible to use knowledge, foresight, and authority to protect life as far as is realistically possible. Wanting God to override this order every time there is danger amounts to wanting a different world than the one He has revealed—a world in which human dominion and responsibility are largely illusions.