If there’s anything in life which everyone would like to avoid, it’s suffering. Suffering is inevitably painful, disappointing, uncomfortable, humbling, and frustrating. But if there is anything which everyone knows about suffering, it is that ‘it’s not going anywhere.’
Job 14:1 resonates with us all, “Man who is born of woman is few of days and full of trouble.” In other words, suffering is a part of life. Everywhere we turn, whether to the newspapers or the newscasts, suffering is worldwide. No matter the culture, no matter the country, no matter the class, no matter the age, everyone suffers and groans under some affliction or another, and in most cases, under the weight of many afflictions.
This could lead to despair and indeed has with so many. What else drives a person into chronic depression and even suicide but the feeling that life is against them, that pain awaits them around every corner, and that there is no escape from suffering. Such people often turn to drugs and alcohol for an escape, but if this does not sufficiently numb the pain and stay the misery, then at last death presents itself as their only viable option. They reason that whatever, if anything, may be beyond the grave has to be better than the hand life has dealt them.
As Christians, we understand why this life is the way it is; why it is so full of pain; why our lives are littered with suffering; and why affliction and trial are universal. Scripture teaches us that our suffering is the consequence of the rebellion of our race in Adam in the garden. Genesis 1:31 says that when “God saw everything that he had made…behold, it was very good.” Neither suffering, nor pain, nor affliction, nor trial was a part of what God had made, but as Ecclesiastes 7:29 says, “God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.” The ‘scheme’ which Adam sought out in the Garden of Eden was sinful and rebellious. Having been forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and warned that doing so would be punished by death (Gen. 2:17), Adam did it anyway. And standing as he was, in the place of a federal representative of the entire human race, his rebellion plunged us all into bondage to sin and placed us all under the penalty of the death which God threatened (Rom. 5:12, 19a; Eph. 2:1-3).
Therefore what we face as humanity, a life of suffering and pain and trial, is not the life which God had given us at creation, but that which has resulted from our own disobedience. Indeed, we are suffering, in daily installments as it were, the very wages of our rebellion against God (Rom. 6:23a). And while being Christians does not make us immune from this ‘lot of humanity,’ it does change the entire tenor of it from that which threatens our ruin to that which prevents our ruin because the One who sovereignly apportions the trials is not our angry Judge but our Heavenly Father.
What this means, then, is that we can not only face our trials in the strength of Christ, but draw blessings from our trials by the work of Christ. And this we do by no other way than by the faithful application of the promises of God to our “various trials” (1 Peter 1:6), because our certain and abiding hope in the midst of suffering rests in what God has promised in our trials and by our trials. In our trials He has promised His presence and protection; by our trials He has promised correction and spiritual benefit. ––Check back tomorrow for Part 2.
**This post is an excerpt from my book written with Joel Beeke, Living by God’s Promises.
Very rich truth with great application.
Thank you Lenora. I pray the blessing you found in reading it will flow over into your life not only today, but tomorrow and always. God bless you!