Why do gods children suffer

Gift Certificates. Ligonier Ministries. Supporting Ligonier. Renewing Your Mind. Ligonier Connect. Reformation Study Bible. And those ends are happy. God is heaven-bent on inviting me to share in His joy, peace, and power. God shares His joy only on His terms, and those terms call for us, in some measure, to suffer as His beloved Son did while on earth. When suffering sandblasts us to the core, the true stuff of which we are made is revealed.

Suffering lobs a hand-grenade into our self-centeredness, blasting our soul bare—but then, we can be better bonded to the Savior. Our afflictions have helped make us holy.

And we are never more like Christ—never more filled with His joy, peace, and power—than when sin is uprooted from our lives. Does this mean God delights in my spinal cord injury? Was He rubbing His hands in glee when I took that dive off the raft into shallow water? Of course not. Besides, how God allowed for my accident to happen is not the point. These thin, tired bones are beginning to bend under the weight of decades of paralysis. My pain and discomfort are not His ultimate focus—He cares about these things, but they are merely symptoms of the real problem.

The one who called stars into being will also call them from death to life. I believe it is the only hope we have in the face of our inevitable end. But what fascinates me about this story is how little focus there is on Lazarus himself.

Rather, the narrative draws our gaze to profound questions: Why, if Jesus planned to heal Lazarus, did he not just do so in the first place? Why did he let Lazarus die, and leave Mary and Martha mourning for days? Why not tell Martha what he was planning to do right away? In this strange stretching of the story, we get a glimpse of the whole biblical framework for suffering.

This story illuminates both suffering and prayer. But the story of Lazarus upends this idea. Jesus is not a means to an end, a mechanism through which Martha can change her circumstances. He is the end. Her circumstances drive her to him. But it matters like a first meeting matters to marriage, or like birth matters to motherhood. It is an entry point to relationship, a relationship formed through suffering as much as through joy.

If, as Jesus claims, the goal of our existence is relationship with him, finding him in our suffering is the point. Recognizing the role of suffering in our relationship with Christ helps us see through a common misconception about suffering from a Christian perspective. We are tempted to believe that suffering is a punishment for sin.

But the Bible is clear that—while sin and suffering are clearly connected in a universal sense, and living in rebellion against God can cause us heartache now—the amount of suffering a person endures is not proportional to his or her sin. The Old Testament book of Job dramatizes this point. Jesus reinforces it. Then Jesus heals the man. This teaching sets Christianity apart from the versions of Buddhism that teach karma and reincarnation.

Within that logic, our present circumstances are the result of past actions: sins in a past life can determine suffering here and now. Not so in Christianity. Indeed, if anything, Christianity reverses that paradigm: those who live in privilege now are warned of an afterlife of suffering if they do not take the radical medicine of Christ.

While we can absolutely look for meaning in our suffering, we should not use it as a measuring stick for guilt, or think that if we only prayed harder or had more faith or did better, our lives would be suffering-free. From a biblical perspective, we must also reject the idea that if God loves us, he cannot intend for us to suffer. This premise crumbles on every scriptural page.

Time and again, we see those who are chosen and beloved by God suffering. Indeed, our beliefs about God and suffering expose the fault lines between our natural assumptions and the biblical narrative.

The loving, omnipotent God of our imagination would move swiftly from creation to new creation, from the garden of Eden of Genesis to the heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation. But the God of the Bible charts a different course. One of the factors that has added to the perplexity and complexity of the problem is the unbiblical sales pitch to the unsaved that is given in some quarters.

It is claimed that if you will only trust Christ you will move into the green pastures where all is calm and the problems of life are solved. Even prosperity and healing abound as a bonus for believing. Another addition is joy without any sorrow and with no cloud to darken the sky.

In other words, Christianity has been made an inoculation against disease and trouble. One book that was sent to me recently showed how you could make a million dollars by coming to Christ. At least the author did it, and he said that anyone could do it. Such promises are, to my judgment, totally unscriptural. They sound, however, very good. They appeal to the natural man. And they even sound scriptural. There is joy in the Christian life. There is peace.

And there is healing. I know. I have experienced all three of these, and I can testify that all of them are certainly true. There is no escape from it. In fact, the Word of God is very clear in this connection.

If you go back as far as Job, which would take you back probably to the time of Moses or even to Abraham, you will find that he illustrates this truth by a great law of physics:. Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. Job According to the laws of aerodynamics, because of the heat being generated, sparks will fly upward. Just as that is true, man must experience troubles. We will face trouble in this world. David wrote:.

Many are the afflictions of the righteous; but the LORD delivereth him out of them all. Psalm These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. John Yea, and all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. There is no if, and, but, or perhaps about that at all. Annie Johnson Flint has expressed it in a lovely way.

You see, God did not promise we would miss the storms of life. He only promised that we would make the harbor at last. My friend, trials would be meaningless, suffering would be senseless, and testing would be irrational unless God had some good purpose and sound reason for them.

It is not a simple question that can be answered with one verse of Scripture. After I had been laid aside for several weeks one summer with severe illnesses, I had an opportunity to study Hebrews, chapter