Free will allows one to have a personal relationship with God and the chance to obtain eternal life – and I believe this outweighs the suffering we see in our world today.
When God created mankind, He had two choices as far as our internal makeup is concerned. He could either have created us with wills that he totally controlled thus making us little more than robots or he could have created us with wills that we totally control – obviously He chose the latter. I believe that the thing God wants most of all is to have a loving relationship with us – his creation. In order for this to be possible God gave us free will. We can either choose to love and serve God or to rebel and go our own way. Sadly, our first ancestor, Adam, chose to disobey God by exercising his free will and as a result fellowship and relationship with God was severed. Not only was this relationship severed but as a result sin entered the world and with sin came evil, suffering and death. And like it or not all of mankind has not only been given free will but inherited Adan’s sin nature.
And while I agree the amount of suffering in our world is great there can be nothing more wonderful than to enter into a loving relationship with our heavenly Father. And the good news is that even though our relationship with God has been severely broken we can enter back into a loving relationship with God by accepting the free gift of forgiveness of sin by repenting of our sin and accepting Jesus Christ as our personal savior.
With our restored relationship with God now secure we are much better able to cope with the suffering that still exists in the world. This is so for two main reasons. First, we know that God will work good out of suffering in the long run for we read in (Romans 8:28): “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” God is clearly able to work good out of even great suffering if we trust him and allow him to work in our lives. The second reason can be found in (Romans 8:18) where the Apostle Paul shares: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.” And the reason for this is simple – all those that have a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ will gain eternal life and heaven. In the last analysis allowing mankind to have free will is indeed worth all the suffering we see in our world today.