Why did God create me to suffer?

As to why believers, whose sins have all been gone into, judged, and judicially made an end of in the death of Christ, are not exempted from suffering is a cause of great concern in the minds of many who have not the scriptural answer to such a very important question. One can very well understand a rejecter of the gospel, upon whom lies the wrath of an angry God, being greatly afflicted, but to find one who is so loved as Christ is being in evil circumstances is quite another thing altogether.

Suffering comes to us from different quarters and for various reasons, but that which is testing the greatest number now, and causing the most suffering at this time is the war, and many are asking why it should be? Why, if God is good, should there be any war at all? That is a question that calls for an answer. God is good, ten thousand times ten thousand voices bear witness to His goodness, but the world as such has rejected God, and despised the riches of His goodness and forbearance and long-suffering not knowing that His goodness would lead them to repentance (Rom. 2:4) and has chosen to follow Satan, the adversary instead of God. In Eden Adam listened to the voice of Satan and turned his back upon God and by that act of disobedience sin entered into the world and death by sin (Rom. 5:13) and when sin came in, peace spread its wings and flew away. “There is no peace, says the Lord, unto the wicked” (Isa. 48:22). The world has been Satan’s world since that day and “suffering and sweat and tears and blood” are the result, they are part of sin’s foul brood.

But why should the creature be found in this unhappy ignorance of his Creator? Why should this world exist at all, with its self-love, its pride, its covetousness, its violence, its cruelty, its corruption? It forces itself upon the thoughtful mind that God, who is all-wise, almighty, omniscient, must have had some marvellous purpose in view when He allowed such a flood-tide of evil to enter His creation, and to sweep over this world of men in the way in which it has done. A benevolent Being—and everywhere do we find traces of His benevolence—would not have allowed His weak creature to be subjected to such a terrible condition of things, without having some wonderful purpose of blessing in view, and which in no other way could have been effectuated.

Solemn and dreadful thoughts cluster here. We may easily, especially under the leadership of "the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience," ask why God has brought such creatures into being, why He has endowed man with free agency, knowing that he would abuse it and forfeit the blessing connected with it? Our one and all-sufficient answer is, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" "Hath the clay power to say to the potter, Why hast thou made me thus?" Intelligent faith is content to bow and accept absolutely what God has done as perfection. Nay, more; as we have already suggested, we can even now understand the necessity of man being what he is. We can thank God for the creation of beings whose destiny to a certain extent is in their own hands, even though the fall has come in; for this very fall has been the occasion for the establishment of a relationship in grace with the Son of God who became flesh, a relationship which does not rest upon an untried, if unfallen, creature, but upon the eternal God Himself, who has in grace linked Himself with flesh and blood; and in the perfection of a will as free as that of Adam, and yet eternally incapable of evil or disobedience, yielded Himself up without spot to God, in obedience unto death, that He might bring us to Himself, not as unwilling captives, nor in the perpetual infancy of a dwarfed humanity, but with the full intelligence which goes on developing in ever greater measure — of intelligent, moral, responsible free agents, whose joy it is to recognize their absolute de pendence upon perfect grace and almighty power; who never again will dream of a freedom apart from God, and who will sing in the joy of new creation bliss, "We know no higher liberty than that of being bound to Thee."

In this world everything is full of labour. The journey through it is a sore travail given by God to the sons of men, and in the end for their eternal profit, if they will commit the welfare of their souls and the disposal of their circumstances to Him, whose omniscient eye and almighty hand are over everything that He has made. The things that befall us on the way, the evils that beset us, the woes that come upon us with overwhelming power, the bewildering tangle of untoward events, the cruel thorns that seem to pierce through the centre of the very soul, have the tendency of giving us the impression that not in the whole universe exists one with love enough and power sufficient to minister to us the mercies that we feel we require. We are liable to think that no one cares for us, or that no one can render to us either sympathy or help. But all the exercises that we are thus passed through are, as I have said, for our eternal profit, if we commit the keeping of our souls to God in well-doing, as unto a faithful Creator (1 Peter 4:19).

But I do not call these spiritual sufferings; they are what are common to man. It might be so with an unconverted man; only there was this peculiarity about Job, which he did not know at first — that God was allowing Satan to bring all these things. Satan's pleasure and hope was to entangle Job's feet and cast him down, and that he would curse God. That was what Satan dearly longed to bring about. God allowed him to have his way, but not to kill Job. That would have been agreeable to Job; but it would not have brought out the great moral of the tale, which is, blessing brought into his soul by the very things that seemed to be against him, and not merely by the things that he experienced. When he began to find fault, he had to learn that that very God was One who never could swerve from what was excellent, and that in all this He had a purpose of blessing for Job. Not merely in his having outward blessings, i.e., of a temporal kind, but blessing for his soul.

To prove that a God of infinite goodness is not the author of this world in its present state requires no elaborate argumentation, nor does it make any demand upon the least ratiocinative ability. It is everywhere, and in everything, abundantly manifest that a beneficent Creator would not voluntarily give His unoffending creature, whom He has endowed with intelligence, affections, sensitivity, accountability to Himself and to his fellows, into the darkness, the distress, the sufferings, the sorrows, the woes that are the portion of the whole human family.

"That there is abroad among us an unsound view of supreme goodness (or benevolence, as it is called), cannot, I think, be denied. It is akin to that spurious humanity, which so shudders at putting a criminal to death, as to prefer keeping him alive even where there is no human hope of his being recovered to virtue, but every probability of his incurring more and more desperate hardness. The benevolent man is supposed to shrink from inflicting bodily pain on any one, whether for his own good, or as a necessary process for defending others; and where this morbid notion prevails, we must expect people to be much shocked at the broad facts of the natural history of animals, to say nothing of man himself … Pain and suffering are undoubtedly among God's most efficacious means for perfecting all His creatures, and, not least, man; but they must needs be with Him means not ends, if we are to attribute to Him in any sense that which we are able to recognize as goodness; and consequently they must be His plans, either partial and subordinate, or finite and transitory. All theology which contradicts this, darkens and distorts the face of God to us." (Soul, p. 43-46.)}

This then is God's account of His creation, and in detail of the Adamic earth. No wise man will wonder that we are conducted silently over the vast and successive platforms of dead plants and animals, to say nothing of the debris of rocks, under water and heat. Here we have a system of life rising up, not by any necessity, but by divine power, wisdom, and goodness, to beings constituted chief of creation and made in His image after His likeness, before sin brought in death and every woe on the guilty and all subject to them: a system where our feeble eyes cannot fail, save blinded by wilful evil, to see it everywhere, above, around, below, filled with contrivances that disclose the omniscient designs and the inexhaustible benevolence of the omnipotent Designer, yet in no case absolutely, but with a view to moral government, the effects of which afford a handle of objection to those who refuse that divine word which reveals good then and still higher purposes of grace in Christ for all who believe. Even in the lowest point of view, well may we at this place exclaim with the psalmist, "These wait all upon thee, that thou mayest give [them] their meat in due season: [that] thou givest them, they gather. Thou openest thine hand; they are filled with good" (Ps.104:27-28).

John 9 opens with the case of a man that gives rise to a question from the disciples, in relation to the government of God in Israel. Was it his parents' sin that brought this visitation on their child, according to the principles God had given them in Exodus? Or was it his own sin, known to God though not manifested to men, that had procured him this judgment? The Lord replies, that the man's condition did not depend on the government of God with respect to the sin either of himself or of his parents. His case was but the misery which gave room for the mighty operation of God in grace. It is the contrast that we have continually seen; but here it is in order to set forth the works of God.