Why do we suffer, according to Jehovah's Witnesses?

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.

The problem handled in the book is the moral government of God: how to conciliate His righteousness with the sufferings, and even extreme sufferings, of a just and godly man? how to understand the permission of evil, in its worst form of malignant persecution, with His own good, and this before and apart from His revelation in Christ and by redemption? The books of Moses prepare the way for His government of a people, His own elect Israel, where all was to be manifest and a testimony before the world. Here it is His dealings with a soul before the true light shone, and the veil was rent, and sin condemned in the cross, along with the expression of exercises of heart and conscience under God's dealings. Now that we are reconciled to God by Christ's death and know ourselves to be in Christ before God, there is or ought to be a wholly new experience. But it is of the deepest interest and profit to see how the believer was enabled, not merely to walk uprightly when things were prosperous in an evil world but to confide in God spite of adversity and crushing affliction, and not only to submit to His will as chastening but to measure and abhor himself in dust and ashes before God. The beginning teaches that not Satan but God is the source of the action, the middle that He only and effectually carries forward the true lesson for the soul, the end that He is exceeding pitiful and of tender mercy. A whole long book devoted to the exercises of a soul in suffering, and he a Gentile, and this in the canon of the Jewish scriptures from the first! But it is not yet what some call the "mystery of the cross:" this was reserved for Christ.

God does not cause the suffering to His own, but He allows it to happen, so that His servants can benefit from the experience (e.g. increase their faith), and also for His own glory. Two examples are: Job, whom Satan tested to the uttermost, see Job 1 & 2, and Peter, whom Satan desired to sift as wheat, Luke 22:31.

In 1983 a famous Rabbi in the US, Harold Kushner, published a book about the problem of suffering. In it he suggested that we should not blame God for sufferings (which is right); then he goes on to say that God is good, but that He cannot help it when evil befalls His people (which, of course, is a wrong thesis). Perhaps we may remind ourselves at this point of Romans 8:28, where we see the very opposite of Kushner's claim. God not only allows adverse circumstances, He is even in full control and uses them to form believers in His school' (Rom. 5:3-5; Jam. 1:3). His ways ultimately, and surely lead to the fulfilment of His purpose, that we should be conformed to Christ, the Firstborn among many brethren (Rom. 8:29). Why do we have sufferings? Is it not also, to make us realize that we are living in a world which is in direct opposition to God's will? (cf. 1 Peter 2:15).

For it is untrue, on the other hand, that evil has nothing to do with man's suffering in this world. If there were no evil, there had been no suffering. Sin then, no doubt, has an immense deal to do with it as the general rule. Take man here below; take any one indulging in any evil: does he not suffer? Of course he does. Thus it is a positive principle of God's righteous government that evil never can be indulged in without entailing the solemn dealing of His hand, though room be left for the distinct working and even suffering of grace. It is true, not only in the future, but also in the present, that one reaps as one sows. But is it the sole or the whole truth? Is God limited to His government? In no way. There was where Eliphaz and his companions were wrong; and Satan knows well how to bend to his own purposes that particular side of truth which we either choose or overlook.

Let no one suppose that those who suffer most in this world are the greatest sinners; it is often not so, though undoubtedly the greatest sinners will suffer the most in the lake of fire, for at the last great judgment they are to be judged every man "according to their works" (Rev. 20:13). We have no intention of charging the poor and suffering with the greater guilt. What we desire to do is to show, in a few words from the Bible, what is the cause of the universal misery, and it is plainly taught there that the world's misery springs from the world's sins, and the fact that it rejected and killed the only One who could have put it right.

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 is it so? There was once a garden that God planted "eastward in Eden and there He put the man whom He had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And a river went out of Eden to water the garden" — and there was no tomb there. But that old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, entered into that enclosure of life, and secured the ear of the man's wife and stirred the ambitions of the man, and they thought that the devil's lie was better than God's truth, and with the hands that God had made the gate was opened wide for the destroyer, "and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned" (Rom. 5:12). And since that day the tomb has been with us. No matter how full of promise and hope and prophecy a garden may have been, the tomb was there, for sin was there, and death came in with sin and will not retire so long as sin remains. That is why.

Through one man, says the great apostle, sin entered into the world, and death through sin. When man fell, "dying thou shalt die" began; and Adam was only a father after he sinned. The race is a fallen one. Physical maladies are the symptoms and evidence of the mortality that is the portion of every child of Adam. Nor did he deny the sufferings of this present time, though he counts them not worthy to be compared with the coming glory to be revealed toward us. For we know, says he, that the whole creation groans together and travails in pain together until now.

Secondly, we are reminded that there is a need for these sorrows, for these trials are for “a season, if need be”. The Father does not cause His children a needless tear. The needs be is to prove our faith. This does not mean to prove whether we have faith, but rather to make manifest the preciousness of the faith we have. Gold is not put into the fire to prove that it is gold, but to bring out the precious qualities of the metal. So God proves our faith by various trials to bring out the precious qualities of our faith. Faith, counting upon God in the trial, leads to submission to what God allows: faith in God enables the soul to wait in patience (James 1:3). Faith in God enables the believer to be steadfast against the attacks of the enemy (1 Peter 5:9). The soul may have true faith, but when the trial comes these blessed qualities of faith — submission, patience, steadfastness, confidence and dependence upon God — become manifest.