What God Is Doing in the Suffering of His People
Every trial that reaches a Christian has first passed through God's hand, and although some suffering follows from sin, God appoints the afflictions of his people to prepare them for glory and to display his goodness to the world.
Every Harm Passes Through the Hand of God
God keeps his people, and the psalmist who lifted his eyes to the hills heard the promise in full: “The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life” (Psalm 121:7). Preaching that psalm at the start of a new year of ministry, Chris drew the conclusion Scripture requires of anyone who has believed the promise and then watched harm come anyway: “Any harm that does befall us is allowed to befall us from the hand of the Lord.”[1] The God who could shield his people from the sun by day and the moon by night sometimes lets the blow land, and Chris said as much to the church: “But yes, at times, God does allow seemingly bad things to happen to us.”[1]
Job learned this in a single afternoon, when raiders carried off his herds and a desert wind brought the house down on his children, and he fell to the ground and worshiped: “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). Preaching on Job, Chris named the conviction beneath that confession: “nothing, and absolutely nothing, comes our way that has not first passed through the mind of God. God remains in control in the midst of our trials.”[13]
The book of Job never hands its sufferer the explanation he asks for, and Chris summed up its movement this way: “The whole point of the story of Job is Job is sitting there going, Why? Why is this happening? And God says, Who are you? Who are you, O man?”[16] Psalm 88 goes further into the dark and closes with no word of rescue at all, and Chris preached it as a lesson in how “to acknowledge His sovereign hand in all our hardships, even and especially when His purpose and hope seemed to remain hidden.”[16] The psalmist keeps speaking to God while God's purposes stay out of sight, which is its own kind of faith.
What Jesus Said About the Galileans
An old intuition holds that suffering tracks hidden sin, so that the one who suffers must have disbelieved or disobeyed until God finally caught up with him. The intuition feels like justice, and it offers the comfort of control, since a person who can trace every sorrow to a sin can hope to avoid sorrow by avoiding sin. When some reported that Pilate had mingled the blood of Galileans with their sacrifices, Jesus answered the intuition directly: “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:2–3). He turned the question away from the victims and onto the people asking it, since every one of them stood in need of repentance.
Chris has called the belief that sin is always the prerequisite for suffering “a fundamental and profound misunderstanding of the gospel itself,” one “owing to a view that God is perpetually angry.”[12] The belief slanders God's character, and it cuts the sufferer off from the comfort God means him to have.[12] Sin does carry consequences, as Proverbs shows on nearly every page, and some suffering follows from it, so a Christian in trouble may rightly search his heart before God while refusing the picture of a God who stands over him waiting to strike.[12]
Trials Measured Before the Foundation of the World
God prepared the trials of his people before any of them drew breath. Preaching the first beatitude, Chris said that “before the foundation of the world, God appointed seasons of suffering for us that are perfectly prescribed in dose and duration.”[17] Paul told the Thessalonians that no one should be moved by their afflictions, “for you yourselves know that we are destined for this” (1 Thessalonians 3:3), and Chris drew the conclusion for every Christian: “For the believer, it's inevitable.”[18] Charles Spurgeon wrote, “Jesus does not suffer so as to exclude your suffering. He bears a cross not that you may escape it, but that you may endure it. Christ exempts you from sin, but not from sorrow. Remember that and expect to suffer.”[17]
The same providence that appoints the trial gives it a purpose. “In the providence of God, suffering is often the means used by God to work out His purposes in His people. He uses it to teach us valuable lessons and to develop in us character and faith and perseverance.”[18] Paul's promise leaves no trial outside that purpose, since “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28), and Chris lingered on the scope of it: “not some things, not just the good things, but all things work together for good.”[18]
Inside a trial, the measure God set rarely feels right. Chris has acknowledged that “the dose always seems too strong and the duration always seems too long,”[17] and he explained what God intends by the strength of it: God “means to break through the mere idea, the mere facts of spiritual poverty, and restore to us a sense of felt spiritual poverty. God is letting us taste the truth. It's just a little bit stronger than we would like it to be.”[17] The poor in spirit, whom Jesus calls blessed in Matthew 5:3, often learn their poverty in this way, much as a man learns his weakness when the load on his back exceeds what he thought he could carry.
The Grind That Prepares Glory
Chris has put God's work in suffering in one blunt sentence: “God will qualify us for glory by putting us through a grind.”[3] Paul weighed the grind against what it produces and found the scales wildly uneven: “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).
Some virtues grow nowhere else. Preaching through the life of Joseph, whose years in the pit and the prison ended with him telling his brothers that “God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20), Chris said that “the only way a person learns patience is through pain. We don't learn patience if we don't have problems.”[4] He compared it to a young man who wants to become a Navy SEAL and has to get in the water to learn to swim, and he said God allows trials into our lives “only doing so because there are certain blessings that we cannot obtain without those trials.”[4]
Paul traces the whole sequence in Romans 5, where believers rejoice in their sufferings, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3–5).[5] A comfortable life would leave that chain unforged, because each link is made from the one before it under pressure.
Suffering as a Showcase
When the disciples asked whether a man born blind suffered for his own sin or his parents', Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3). Chris preached that text as a statement of what a Christian's suffering is for: “My suffering is telling the world a story about God. That's what my suffering is for.”[14] God made his people “to display, to teach, to tell, to bear image,” and their salvation and glorification display his goodness, “and the key to this passage is just that, your tribulation also displays the goodness of God.”[14]
A believer under heavy trouble shows the world “a strength that is not your strength” and “a hope that does not disappoint.”[5] Spurgeon saw the same thing: “If you do not sin while under the stress of heavy trouble, God will be honored. He is not so much glorified by preserving you from trouble as He is by upholding you in trouble.”[13] Job's trial shows why the stakes run so high, and Chris described the enemy's aim there: “Satan did not care what Job suffered or what we suffer. His hope, Satan's hope, is to make us sin or to curse God, to become discouraged, to doubt God's goodness, to lose our faith and hope and our confidence in God.”[13] Every sufferer who goes on trusting God answers the accusation Satan made in Job 1:9, that Job feared God only for what he got from him.
The same trial falls differently on the believer and the unbeliever. Preaching 1 Peter 3, where Noah's household was “brought safely through water” (1 Peter 3:20), Chris said, “If you place your faith in Christ, the same pain that judges and destroys the unbeliever will deliver and purify the believer.”[9] For the one outside Christ, “the suffering, the hardship, the calamity, it will destroy you,” while the waters that rise around the one in Christ carry him upward: “They transport you to the mountaintop. They move you to the next stage.”[9]
Christ Crucified at the Center of Our Pain
The problem of evil reaches its deepest point at the cross, where the Son of God suffered what no one has deserved less. Chris put it this way: “He who knew no sin was treated like the worst cretin on the face of the earth. He was scorned and rejected and scourged. It was the Father's good will to crush him so that through that he would make atonement for our many sins.”[2] Scripture takes injustice seriously, and Chris has said that “the central figure of the Bible is the one to whom the most injustice has occurred, namely God,” who “crucified his only begotten son who deserved nothing of it to set this world right.”[2]
The cross leaves room for grief whose explanation has yet to come. Chris has refused to hand sufferers a tidy account of their pain: “if something terrible has happened to you, I am sorry. I will not give you some kind of glib explanation as to why. I wouldn't dare to do that.” What he would say is that “God does care about pain and that he has a purpose for it and that that purpose is sometimes hidden from us.”[2]
“The basic math of contentment, the basic math of enduring suffering well, is to have treasured Christ before the trial,” Chris has said, and he wants the church to learn that love ahead of time: “I'd much rather have you learn to treasure Christ before the next trial.”[11] The Christian who loses health or a child still has Christ, whom no trial can take from him, and the Son who passed through the worst injustice ever done has risen to bring his suffering people into the weight of glory their afflictions are preparing.[11][3]