Our hearts and prayers go out to our brothers and sisters in Brussels, where terrible acts of violence have killed and injured dozens. The survivors and families of the victims will have a long road of recovery ahead of them, so please keep them in prayer in the weeks and months to come, after the global media attention has moved on.

The “problem of evil”—the fundamental challenge of explaining the existence of evil in a universe ruled by a loving, all-powerful God—is one of the great spiritual and intellectual challenges facing Christians. There’s no easy answer (if there were, we wouldn’t still be grappling with this question two thousand years after Christ’s ministry on Earth), but there is hope to be found in the Bible for those who seek it out. Here are some insights we’ve published in the past about the problem of evil, and specifically the challenge that terrorist violence presents:

• Why Does God Allow Tragedy and Suffering?
• What Does the Bible Say About Religious Extremism?
• What Does the Bible Say About Violence?

I’ll close (as I have in the past) with Romans 8, a remarkable Bible passage points to a higher perspective on human violence and evil:

The sufferings we have now are nothing compared to the great glory that will be shown to us. Everything God made is waiting with excitement for God to show his children’s glory completely. Everything God made was changed to become useless, not by its own wish but because God wanted it and because all along there was this hope: that everything God made would be set free from ruin to have the freedom and glory that belong to God’s children.

We know that everything God made has been waiting until now in pain, like a woman ready to give birth. Not only the world, but we also have been waiting with pain inside us. We have the Spirit as the first part of God’s promise. So we are waiting for God to finish making us his own children, which means our bodies will be made free. We were saved, and we have this hope. If we see what we are waiting for, that is not really hope. People do not hope for something they already have. But we are hoping for something we do not have yet, and we are waiting for it patiently. — Romans 8:18-25

So please, continue to pray for the victims of violence in Belgium today, and watch for opportunities for you and your church community to peace. In the days and weeks to come, discussion about the relationship between Christianity and Islam is sure to become heated, and a prayerful Christian perspective could be an important voice in those discussions.