The World Is Broken
and God Knows It

There is a phone call I think most of us can remember

The one where something changed. You picked up and the voice on the other end said something that made you realize the floor was not as solid as you thought it was. Or maybe it was not a phone call. Maybe it was a doctor's office, a conversation, a test result, a relationship ending, a door closing. The moment when you stopped being a person things were going well for and started being a person in the middle of something hard.

I have sat across from enough people in those moments to know what comes next. Not just the grief, though the grief is real. But the question underneath the grief. The one you maybe feel guilty for asking because it sounds like you are losing your faith when really you are just being honest. Where is God in this?

This series is my attempt to sit with you in that question over seven days. Not to hand you a tidy answer, because I do not have one, and I am not sure tidy answers are what hard seasons need. But to walk through what Scripture actually says about suffering, about God, about lament, about hope, one honest conversation at a time.

We are starting at the beginning. Which means we are starting with this: the world is broken. And we are going to name that honestly, because anything less than honesty would be a disservice to where you are right now.

This is not the world God made

The opening chapters of Genesis describe a world that worked the way it was supposed to. Creation was whole. Relationships were whole. God walked with the people He made in the cool of the day, close, unhurried, present. There was no language for suffering yet because suffering had not arrived.

What happened in Genesis 3 changed everything. Not just for Adam and Eve. For the ground. For the animals. For the relationship between humanity and God and humanity and each other. The fracture ran deep and it ran wide, and we have been living in the aftermath ever since.

I want you to notice something in that passage. God is the one who tells Adam that the ground is cursed. Not the people, in the final verdict. The ground. The world itself absorbed the consequence of the break. Creation was hit by something it did not choose, and it has been straining under the weight of it ever since.

This is not a metaphor. Paul picks it up in Romans and makes it plain. The whole creation groans. That word in Greek is used for the sound of physical pain, the kind that cannot quite be put into words. It is the groan of labor. Of something pressing through something hard toward something that has not arrived yet.

Paul says we groan too. Not because we lack faith. Because we are in a groaning world, waiting for something that has been promised but has not fully come. And then he says something I think we miss: the Holy Spirit groans with us. This is not a world in which God watches from a comfortable distance while His creation suffers. This is a God who groans alongside His people. Who entered the brokenness. Who has been inside it since Genesis 3.

That matters. It matters that when you groan, you are not groaning alone. It matters that your pain is not happening in a void where God is disconnected from it. He is in it with you. He has always been in it with everyone who has ever suffered, and He understands in a way that nothing else can.

Your suffering is not a sign that God has forgotten you

One of the lies suffering tells is that if God loved you, this would not be happening. That your pain is evidence of abandonment. That something has gone wrong between you and God specifically, and that is why things are hard.

I want to push back on that as gently and directly as I can. The world is broken. Not your life specifically, not as a targeted punishment, but as the ongoing reality of a creation that has been fractured since the fall. Rain falls on the just and the unjust. Illness does not check your prayer history before it arrives. Loss comes to people who have walked faithfully with God for decades. The brokenness is not personal in the way we tend to fear it is.

This does not make it hurt less. But it does mean that your suffering is not evidence that God is done with you. It is evidence that you live in a world that needs redeeming, and God has already set that in motion.

There is a dangerous theology that says if you have enough faith, if you pray correctly, if you are righteous enough, God will protect you from suffering. This is not just wrong. It is cruel. It tells people who are already suffering that they deserve it. It adds guilt to grief. It is not based in Scripture, and I want you to reject it absolutely.

Job's friends came to him with that theology, and God rejected what they said. Jesus told his disciples they would have trouble in the world. Paul wrote about being troubled on every side. The idea that suffering is always evidence of sin or lack of faith is not supported by Scripture. It is supported by human beings who want to feel like they have control over something they do not.

Jesus did not say you might have trouble. He said you will have trouble. He said it plainly, without apology, as though it were simply the honest truth about the world you live in. And then He said something that matters more than the trouble: I have overcome the world. Not I will overcome it someday. I have. Present tense. Done. The victory over brokenness exists. It is just still arriving, still being worked into every corner of a creation that is being renewed.

This is your inheritance. Not removal from the broken world before it is fixed, but participation in the kingdom that has already overcome it. That is a different kind of hope than the one that says someday your circumstances will change. It is a hope that does not depend on your circumstances changing at all.

God named the brokenness before you did

There is something I find quietly comforting about the fact that God did not try to spin what happened after the fall. He did not say, do not worry, it will all be fine. He did not minimize what had happened or pretend it was not as bad as it was. He named the thorns. He named the painful toil. He walked into the garden and spoke honest words about a world that was now harder than it was designed to be.

And then, in the middle of the curse, He made clothing for the people who had just broken everything. He covered them. He stayed. He did not abandon the world He made just because the world was not what He made it to be.

That pattern holds all the way through Scripture. God does not look away from suffering. He enters it. He meets people in their Egypt, in their exile, in their wilderness, in their grief. He does not wait for everything to be sorted out before He shows up. He shows up in the middle of the mess, which is the only place people in hard seasons actually are.

Joseph in the pit. David in the wilderness. Israel in Babylon. The Hebrew boys in the furnace. Paul in prison. Peter in the jail cell. The trajectory of Scripture is not people being removed from suffering. It is God showing up in the middle of it and carrying something forward that the suffering could not destroy.

Your suffering is not the end of the story. It is not even the middle of the story. It is a chapter in a narrative that God is writing, and He has already shown you how this story ends. It ends in resurrection. It ends in restoration. It ends with every tear wiped away. The question is not whether the story ends well. The question is whether you will trust Him to carry you through this particular chapter.

You are allowed to name it

One of the things this series is going to do, starting today, is give you permission to be honest. You do not have to pretend things are better than they are. You do not have to perform faith you do not currently feel. You do not have to find the silver lining before you have even had time to grieve.

The world is broken. Your situation is hard. Those things are true at the same time that God is good and God is present and God has not forgotten you. You do not have to choose between honesty and faith. The Psalms hold both in the same breath, and we will get there on Day 3.

For today, just this: the world is not the way it was supposed to be. God knows it better than you do. And He has never once stopped working toward the day when it will be made right.

That is the promise. Not that suffering will be explained to your satisfaction today, but that one day it will be gone. Completely. Forever. And in the meantime, you are not alone in it.