Why do Christians suffer?

Question 11098

Christian suffering is the question that empties pews and fills prayer meetings, and anyone who answers it briskly has probably not sat long enough with somebody in the middle of it. If God loves his people and has the power to help, why is the believer in the next street burying a child this week?

I am not going to pretend Scripture hands us a formula. It does not. What it gives us is several genuine reasons, a firm refusal to let us apply them mechanically to other people, and a person rather than an explanation. That may sound like a poor exchange until you have needed it.

Most Christian suffering starts with a broken world

The first and largest reason is the plainest, and it is the one we most often forget. Genesis 3 describes a creation put out of joint by human rebellion, and Romans 8 says the whole creation groans and is subject to futility. Bodies fail. Cells mutate. Tectonic plates move. Drivers make mistakes. None of that is aimed at you personally.

Most Christian suffering falls into this category, and recognising it saves an enormous amount of pointless self-examination. When a believer develops arthritis, the right first thought is not what have I done wrong. It is that we live east of Eden in bodies that are wearing out, and the arthritis is the world behaving exactly as a fallen world behaves.

Being in Christ does not exempt us from the conditions of the planet. Paul left Trophimus ill at Miletus. Epaphroditus nearly died. The apostle himself carried a thorn in the flesh. If gospel usefulness could exempt anyone, it would have exempted them.

Sometimes we are reaping what we sowed

A second reason is more uncomfortable. Some Christian suffering is the direct consequence of our own choices, and Galatians 6:7 is blunt about it. Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap. Debt follows recklessness with money. Broken relationships follow habitual dishonesty. Ill health sometimes follows years of neglect.

Grace forgives the guilt and does not always cancel the consequence. David was forgiven and still lost a child. That is not God being grudging. It is the moral structure of a world where actions have weight, and a universe in which sin left no wreckage would be a universe in which nothing we did mattered.

Here is where I must add a warning that Scripture itself insists upon. This category exists, but you are not licensed to apply it to anybody else. The friends of Job spent thirty-something chapters doing precisely that, and God’s verdict on them at the end was that they had not spoken rightly of him.

The loving discipline of a Father

Hebrews 12 speaks of the Lord disciplining those he loves, training his children through hardship so that they share his holiness. This is a real category of Christian suffering, and it is presented as evidence of sonship rather than of rejection. The child who is never corrected is the child nobody is invested in.

My pastoral experience is that divine discipline is usually recognisable to the person receiving it. It is purposeful, it is targeted at something specific, and it comes with a growing conviction about what needs to change. If you are searching frantically for a hidden sin and finding nothing, that is generally a good sign that this is not the category you are in.

What discipline is not is punishment. The penalty for the believer’s sin was exhausted at the cross, and there is now no condemnation for those who are in Jesus. A father who corrects a son he loves is doing something entirely different from a judge passing sentence. I explore the wider question in my answer on whether God causes suffering or allows it.

Christian suffering as formation

Romans 5 traces a chain: suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. James says something similar about the testing of faith producing steadfastness. This is not God enjoying our discomfort. It is God refusing to leave us shallow.

I have noticed over years of ministry that the Christians with real depth are almost never the ones who have had an easy time of it. Something happens in the dark that does not happen in the light. Prayer becomes actual rather than decorative. Promises that were once wall decorations become load-bearing. Christian suffering does work in us that comfort never manages.

Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that the Lord’s power is made perfect in weakness, and he says it about a thorn God declined three times to remove. That is not a man making the best of things. That is a man who found something in the weakness he could not have found anywhere else.

Suffering that serves other people

2 Corinthians 1 gives a reason we rarely think of. God comforts us in our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves have been comforted. Some of your pain is not primarily about you at all.

The person who has lost a spouse can sit with the newly widowed in a way that no amount of training provides. The believer who has walked through depression can say to another sufferer the one sentence that lands. Christian suffering becomes equipment, and the church is full of people quietly using it.

There is also the reason given in John 9, where Jesus says of the man born blind that this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. Sometimes the explanation is not about correction or formation but about what God intends to show. That answer is only bearable from the mouth of the one who then went to a cross himself. More on the ministry side of this in my answer on how we comfort those who suffer.

The reason we are not given

Now the honest part. In a great many cases we simply are not told, and the book of Job exists partly to make that point. The reader is let in on the heavenly conversation in chapters one and two. Job never is. He gets no explanation at all, and what he receives instead is God himself, at length, asking questions about wild goats and ostriches.

That is a strange kind of answer and it satisfied him. It suggests the deepest problem in Christian suffering is not the absence of information but the fear that we have been abandoned, and the presence of God settles that in a way that data never could. See my answer on Job’s suffering for the fuller treatment.

The word Paul uses for affliction, thlipsis, carries the sense of pressure or crushing. He knew what he was talking about. And it is the same man who wrote in Romans 8:28 that God works all things together for good for those who love him. Not that all things are good. That God is working, in all of them, towards an end we will one day be glad of.

What suffering is not

Two false conclusions do more damage than all the unanswered questions put together. The first is that Christian suffering means God has stopped loving you. Paul asks in Romans 8 whether tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword can separate us from the love of Christ, and the whole point of the list is that these are the very things that feel like separation. His answer is that nothing in all creation can manage it.

The second is that faith will always remove the affliction if it is strong enough. That teaching is cruel, and it leaves the sufferer carrying their illness and the blame for it at the same time. Scripture never promises a pain-free passage through this life. It promises a companion in the pain and an end to it that is coming.

And the end is worth keeping in view. Christian suffering is real, and it is temporary. Revelation 21 describes a day when God wipes away every tear and death is no more. Paul weighed his considerable afflictions against that and called them light and momentary, which tells you how heavy the glory must be.

So, now what?

If you are in it now, resist the urge to diagnose yourself. Bring the pain to God honestly, in the language of the Psalms rather than the language of a polite church prayer, because a third of the psalter is complaint and God saw fit to preserve it. Tell somebody in your congregation. Isolation multiplies everything.

And if you are watching someone else suffer, do not explain. Turn up, stay, and keep turning up when the casseroles have stopped arriving three weeks in. Job’s friends were at their best in the first seven days, when they said nothing at all. What might it cost you to be that kind of friend this month?

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you. (1 Peter 4:12, ESV)