The Lord gives his children freewill. The Lord made a perfect Garden in which his first two creations could live. The two creations named Adam and Eve were given the freedom to eat any fruit in the garden but were told they may not eat from the Tree of Good and Evil. The Lord tells them that the day they eat from this tree is the day they will die. This is the first example of the freewill we were given as the Lord’s Children. The Lord had to include the tree into the Garden so that His Children would have a choice. The Choice is one we still have today, choose God and be saved or eat the forbidden fruit (sinful life) and die.
Why would the Lord need to give us free will? The Lord had to allow for evil into this world so that we could experience true love and happiness. This is complex, and to understand this concept, we must know how God Loves us and how we love God. I believe that every person has a longing in their heart that needs to be filled one of two ways; the first is to be filled with love and happiness and the second is the longing for pain and suffering.
It is said many times in the Bible that we are made in the image of Christ, we get these longings from the Lord. The Lord is all good so He does not long for pain and suffering but he does long for our love. The first longing originated from the fact that we are made in the image of God and God is love. We are drawn to goodness. The second longing is the unfortunate shadow cast by the fact that we have freewill to choose between good and the opposite of good. We, as humans, need that contrast or else we wouldn’t know any different.
The Lord desires to be loved by his Children but, in order for him to experience true love, we need to have the freedom to choose him over something (that being evil). The Lord wanted his followers to choose to love him instead of being forced to.
Why does the Lord allow for the suffering of so many people? To try and understand this I believe it is important to know how we are persuaded by Good and Evil. The Lord is ever present but waits on his children to choose him. The Devil never rests. He is always working to convince us that he is the only way. He wants us to feel trapped, to truly believe that the Lord has forsaken us. The Devil also has a longing too. The Devil feeds off the pain and suffering of the Lord's Children. At the core, The Devil does not care how, who or why someone is in pain. True pain comes from the Devil but is allowed by the Lord. It is a trade off that needs to happen because Good and Evil are married. If we did not know what evil was, how would we know what good is? If the Lord were to stop all the pain and suffering in the world he would be taking away our freewill.
We are no different from Adam and Eve; for a while they chose God, but they explored the other choice and suffered the consequences. God placed the evil there so we as humans have the choice between Good and Evil. Our pain and suffering is from The Devil and no one is safe from it and that is not fair. God knows it is not fair. Yet he allows it because he knows the true love and joy we can feel when we choose him.