From N.T. Wrights On Eartb as in Heaven:
“If the earth is full of God’s glory, why is it also so full of pain and anguish and screaming and despair?
Isaiah has answers for all these questions, but not the sort of answers you can write on the back of a postcard. The present suffering of the world- about which the biblical writers knew every but as much as we do- never makes them falter in their claim that the created world really is the good creation of a good God. They live with the tension. And they don’t do it by imagining that the present created order is a shabby, second-rate kind of thing, perhaps (as in some kinds of Platonism) made by a shabby, second-rate sort of God. They do it by telling a story of what the one creator God has been doing to rescue his beautiful world and to put it to rights. And the story they tell indicates that the present world really is a signpost to a larger beauty, a deeper truth.”
– N.T. Wright
The Stories of my Life 