Why are there millions of starving children in the world? Does God care?
Hunger is a very real problem that seems to always be ongoing, no matter how many solutions we as humans may try to implement. According to Compassion International, malnourishment causes the deaths of over three million children annually. Twenty-five percent of children in developing nations struggle with hunger. Even in the United States, hunger is a prevalent issue that often gets overlooked. Because of these horrible hunger issues in the world, some people choose to place the blame for them on God. How could a God who is supposed to be good allow such starvation and destruction to be ongoing in the world? When we look to the Bible, we see that God does, in fact, care very much about this issue.
While it may seem like God doesn't care, the truth is that He cares very much. Jesus told the little children to come to Him and said that they are to inherit the kingdom of God. When the disciples tried to prevent people from bringing their children to Jesus, He said: "Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 19:14). Jesus actually instructed us to be like children, saying "whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven," and strongly warned against causing children to sin (Matthew 18:1–6). God highly values children.
Experts agree that there are enough food resources available in the world to feed everyone. So why are children starving? The distribution of those resources gets complicated by human failures. While all mankind should be responsible stewards of the earth and its resources, human greed, foolishness, inefficiency, bad strategy, improper infrastructure, etc., lead some people and nations to hoard and/or squander the food and money resources they have. We cannot blame God for the problems that we as humans cause by our fallen natures.
God Himself is perfect, but sin is the ruler of this world (Psalm 92:15). Romans 6:23 says "the wages of sin is death." While this is often used to refer to our own death and the results of personal sin, it does also speak to the general effects of sin. All of creation suffers as the result of the reality of sin. Sometimes we suffer simply because sin exists, not because we ourselves did something wrong. Is the weight of child deaths due to hunger partially on the shoulders of those who do nothing to help (or worse, engage in corrupt practices)? This is something to consider. It seems that one of the wages of human sin and resource mismanagement is the death of innocent children due to starvation.
God prompts Christians to help relieve the problem of hunger in this world, as is evidenced by the significant number of faith-based hunger relief organizations. Christian missionaries also do much work related to hunger relief (Ephesians 2:10). As Christians, we should do what we can to support organizations that work to remove corruption and bring relief to poverty.
Hunger will always be a problem in the world as long as sin is a problem in the world. We eagerly await the day when Jesus returns and breaks the curse of sin from the earth once and for all (Revelation 22:3).
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