How could a loving God allow a woman to be raped by her own husband, and then raped by dozens of men, only to be shocked by police who revealed to her how those men ravaged her body while she was unconscious? The New York Times Magazine published Mme Gisèle Pelicot’s horrid story told in an interview in the February 22, 2026 issue, the weekend of the release of her memoir, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides.

Is it not true that God loves us and allows us to have pain? Is it easier to say that God does not exist than it is to understand how it could be true? Perhaps it is easiest is to believe that the God of the Bible is not real, but that the almighty power that is above us is energy, or love, or some other thing. How could Christians and Jews claim that God is above all beings and that He (with masculine pronoun) loves mankind while allowing these atrocities to occur?

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. -Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NIV)

There is a lot of pain in the Bible. Gisèle’s story has similarities to Job, who lost his business, all of his children, his health, and then his wife. Because of their stories, people question how the God of Christianity and Judaism can possibly love us. As the story of Job goes, Satan asks God for permission to wreak havoc on Job’s life, and God says okay with an exception. God did not give Satan permission to kill him. The similarities are in the shock, devastation, pain, and sense of loss.

But the difference between Gisèle and Job — aside from the obvious difference in sex/gender — is the betrayal, violation of one’s most intimate parts, and the shame from the depravity of the heinous acts that reject the purity that sex was designed to have. Gisèle’s body went through again and again what women have experienced probably since homo sapiens walked the earth.

Flee sexual immorality. Every sin, whatever if a man might do, is outside the body, but the one sinning sexually sins against the own body. -1 Corinthians 6:18 (Berean Literal Bible)

Nearly every other English translation of 1 Corinthians 6:18 refers to “the own body” as one’s own body, as if a person sins only against his or her own body. But that is not what the verse is saying. English has no translation that is readily understandable in its vernacular. We must read it in the understanding that each of our bodies belongs with each of our souls. Sexual immorality is not only sinning against one’s own body, but also against the other people to whom bodies belong. Yet too many men deny sinning, making their god their sexuality.

Jesus was aware of the human body’s weakness. He experienced it when he fasted for 40 days, disciplining himself and learning to not listen to his body’s desires and to opting to remember words to help him not give in to temptation. The apostle Paul acknowledged his own body’s weakness, referring to it as a thorn in his side and a messenger of Satan (2 Corinthians 12:7). And Jesus, the night before he would be torn to shreds and nailed to logs, said to his closest friends who were unable to stay awake with him, “The spirit is willing, but the body is weak.” Because Jesus understood that our bodies are too weak to fight against the powers of the world that want us to hurt one another, he became the ultimate sacrifice for all of mankind’s sins. He did this so that we would have an example of what love is, and to be able to have forgiveness toward one another, loving unconditionally. For God so loved the world… (John 3:16) that he became a human being, experiencing what having a body is like, and then choosing to have all of our sins in his body when he hung on the cross. Jesus didn’t have to do it. In fact, he even asked to not go to the cross (Matthew 26:39, Mark 14:36, and Luke 22:42).

Gisèle found courage to do what many women are afraid to do. She made her name and story known to mankind in order to give courage to countless women whose bodies have been violated. She sacrificed her time, energy, and herself to bring justice to the men who could not control their bodies.

God is not blind to the atrocities that happen in the world we live in:

For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil. -Ecclesiastes 12:14

Thus says the LORD: “Keep justice, and do righteousness, for soon my salvation will come, and my righteousness be revealed. -Isaiah 56:1

The judgment may not happen while we are alive on this temporal plane. It may not come until after we die. But while we are here, we can seek some understanding and experience the actual love of God Almighty.

God looks down from heaven upon the sons of men to see if any understand, if any seek God. -Psalm 53:2 (BSB)

Let’s have gratitude for the police in France, who wasted no time in enabling justice to be brought to most of Gisèle’s perpetrators. The men who deny their part of injustice may be afraid to feel shame and therefore avoid it by lying to themselves. We are not in control of these outcomes, but we can seek to understand, asking the person with the power (no sex/gender necessary) that is above all powers.

The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.
-Lamentations 3:25