Both in our churches and in our culture at large, we talk about “heaven and hell” as if they are two coequal counterparts competing for our eternal destiny, and we assume this is the way the Bible talks about them too. But this is simply not the way it talks about them.

Yes, God is rightly angry with all those who deface his beautiful creation and make the lives of their fellow humans miserable and wretched. But the reason he is angry is because, at his very heart, he is so full of mercy that his most characteristic action is to come down from the throne and, in person, wipe away every tear from every eye.

Theodicy names the abstract “problem of pain”—the logical dilemma of how God can be good and all-powerful even as horrible things regularly happen in the world. And it also names the crisis of faith that often comes from an encounter with suffering.2