Ezekiel 21:18-23. God tells Ezekiel to set up a signpost pointing in two directions - one way to the city of Rabbah of the Ammonites and the other to Jerusalem and Judah. The king of Babylon will get to this signpost and use divination to decide which way to go. God already knows that he will lead the Babylonian king to Jerusalem to bring "their guilt to rememberance," but, to the Jewish people it will seem like false divination.

So God is playing the Jews a little bit here (he does that sometimes)! He knows that he will allow the Babylonian King to destroy Jerusalem and take the people into captivity, but he wants them to think of it as the result of false divination on the part of the Babylonian king. Why? I am thinking maybe so they don't "use it against him," that is, so they don't blame God for their destruction and suffering.

We have a tendency to bring great suffering on ourselves by turning from God and choosing sin and then to blame God for the suffering, thus turning even further from him. The devil must love how he gets us to do this does - he pulls us further and further from God while at the same time getting us to cause ourselves more and more suffering.

God does not want us to suffer, but he does allow us to suffer. All suffering in this world is the result of us letting evil into the world. It is not always a result of our own sin, just look at the people of Ukraine, but it is always the result of sin itself, just look at the state of the world - we have let great evil in, and right now the Ukraine is taking a direct hit, unfortunately.

Jesus came to save us from this cycle, not in this world, but in the next. That is why we needed a Savior in the first place, because we fell and let evil into the world.