The suffering and untimely death of innocent people, even babies, is one of the most painful issues. Many people, not finding an answer to it, turned away from faith. Meanwhile, it is the believer who is capable of both understanding and accepting the answer to this question.
A person who recognizes the existence of God knows that He is the basis and primary source of the Universe, ideally intelligent, ideally just and the source of endless love. The love and suffering of innocent people seem to be incompatible with this characteristic.
Suffering, death and sin
“The punishment for sin is death,” says the Holy Scriptures. This is not denied by any Christian, but often people understand this formulation in a simplistic way. Punishment is presented as a legal concept: an act - a court - a sentence. It even pushes people to condemn God for the "cruelty of the sentences." In reality, the punishment for sin is not "criminal" but "natural."
God established the laws of nature, according to which the material world exists - physical, chemical, biological. It is well known what happens when people refuse to comply with these laws - for example, if a person smokes, they end up with lung cancer. No one will call this "an unnecessarily cruel heavenly punishment", everyone understands that this is a natural consequence of the actions of the person himself.
The direct culprit does not always suffer from a thoughtless violation of the laws of nature. For example, because of the negligence of the Chernobyl NPP employees, thousands of people suffered, and it cannot be said that someone "punished them with senseless cruelty" - this is a natural consequence of human frivolity.
The spiritual component of the universe also has its own laws. They are not as obvious from a human point of view as the laws of physics or biology, but they order the world in accordance with Divine design. Initially, man was conceived as an immortal creature created for happiness. It was not God who destroyed this state - man himself decided to deviate from the will of God.
Considering that the will of God is the primary cause of the universe, which organized it, then a departure from it provokes chaos in the world, plunges it into a series of accidents, terrible in their absurdity. And here it is no longer possible either to ask or answer what this or that person suffers for, be it an adult or a child: this is because the world has been thrown into a state of chaos through human sins. And everyone contributes to the creation of this "spiritual Chernobyl" - after all, there is no such person who would not sin.
"For what" and "for what"
And yet it is impossible to imagine the world as absolute chaos, in which God would not intervene at all - especially after the events of the Gospel. But this intervention can be different.
As the English theologian CS Lewis aptly put it, man wants to see God as a "good-natured grandfather" who created the world solely to "pamper" man. But God is not a “good-natured old man”, He is the Heavenly Father who wants to see his creation not “happy at any cost”, but in His Image and Likeness, approaching God in dignity.
It is known to what loads a person puts his body in order to develop it, bring it to perfection. The soul also needs loads for development - and for this, fasting and prayers are clearly not enough. In some cases, the soul even needs "shock therapy". Therefore, a Christian does not ask the question “for what” - he asks “for what”.
… The woman was biased towards the disabled, called them "flawed", persuaded her daughter to break off friendship with a disabled girl, fearing that her daughter "herself would become flawed." But this woman had a disabled grandson - and her attitude towards terminally ill people changed forever. The child had to suffer so that the way to salvation was opened for man. And this is just one conclusion, "lying on the surface" - after all, no one can know how the life of this child and his loved ones would turn out if he was born healthy.
And no one knows how the life of people who died in infancy could have turned out - but the Omniscient God knows this, He knows what he saved these children from. After all, for God - unlike man - death is not the final ruin and the end of everything.
