Why does God allow me to suffer so much?

The trial is sometimes very severe. For instance a fatal disease, throwing the patient into paroxysms of pain night and day, and making death a sure thing in the immediate future, is fairly testing to both the afflicted one, and to the relatives, who watch with breaking hearts the long-drawn-out agony, and in anticipation endure the bereavement. Often the cry is wrung from hearts, Why does God allow all this?

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).

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.

But there was something still more perplexing, for there were times in the lives of the most honoured servants and saints, when they were suffering, and being made to pass through the deepest trials when the wicked were prospering, and at their ease. This was, to the righteous, most baffling. The patriarch Job, who was perhaps the greatest sufferer in the Old Testament — but there were many others (James 5:10-11) — had to say: "Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes. Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them. …" (See Job 21:7-13). So also with David "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree" (Psalm 37:35). Such things these men could not reconcile with the justice of God's moral government. In His revealed will, the order seemed to be joy and happiness for the good, but sorrow and suffering for the evil. The law had laid this down very fully and clearly, and it had been said, "He that will love life and see good days, let him refrain his tongue from evil, and do good; let him seek peace, and ensue it" (1 Peter 3:10-11; also Psalm 34:12). Yet those who sought to live according to this were kept in suffering. Think of a man like Job of whom Jehovah could say to Satan, "Hast thou considered My servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth," yet his suffering were prodigious. It is just at this point that we may learn the wonders of God's wisdom, and see the richest and choicest of His dealings with His children in the world. The wicked may prosper for a brief season, as we have seen, but in a moment their candle goes out, and then for them it is the blackness of darkness for eternity. The righteous may suffer in a world where sin and death are permitted, but, this, in the hand of a Father, is educative in view of forming the character, and making them morally Christ like in view of future glory.

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.

Down the ages, God has often allowed His own to be evilly entreated, and it is not always possible for us to understand why He should allow wicked men to persecute and slay His saints and His servants. We do know that God allows these things for the purifying of His people, and that all His actions towards His own are in the perfection of His love and wisdom; and even if wicked men seem to prosper, and the righteous are put to grief, yet the day is surely coming when, at the judgment seat of Christ, we shall understand as we cannot now, the ways of God, which are past finding out.

But Zophar had no difficulty at all. That is generally the case with people who know very little; they fancy they know everything. Zophar, therefore, keeps up this — that there is the great fact, there is a righteous God above, and there are unrighteous, wicked people below, and God invariably deals with these wicked people now. That was not true. A large part of the world has always been allowed of God to apparently prosper in their evil, and the reason is that the time of judgment is not yet come. There may be judgments; there may be exceptional dealings with the wicked just as Job's case was a very exceptional dealing in the severity of his trial, and in the manner in which Satan was challenged by God to do his very worst; and God was secretly keeping up Job even when he was finding fault with God and thinking He was very hard upon him to allow all this. But he was kept up not only for his own good, but for ours. Now we have the Book, and are meant to profit by it for ourselves and for other people. "Though his excellency mount up to the heavens, and his head reach to the clouds; yet he shall perish for ever like his own dung; they which have seen him shall say, where is he?"

All this is deeply touching. To speak after the manner of men, it was enough to make reason totter to be thus, in a moment, bereft of his ten children, and reduced from princely wealth to absolute penury. What a striking contrast between the opening and the closing lines of our first Job! In the former we see Job surrounded by a numerous family, and in the enjoyment of vast possessions; in the latter, we see him left alone, in poverty and nakedness. And to think of Satan's being allowed — yea, commissioned of God — to bring about all this! And for what? For the deep and permanent profit of Job's precious soul. God saw that His servant needed to be taught a lesson; and, moreover, that, in no other way, by no other means, could this lesson be taught, than by passing him through an ordeal the bare record of which fills the mind with solemn awe. God will teach His children, even though it be by stripping them of all that the heart clings to in this world.

The second thing that lies in this scripture is, that even now God is working towards this end. In all His present dealings with us, in all our varied experiences, in all the trials, sorrows, dangers, and persecutions that attend our path, God is leading us, and using all these seeming adversities, as the sculptor employs his chisel, to produce conformity to the image of His Son. The full result, as will hereafter be seen, is never attained here, but this is the end God has always in view. Knowing this, for He reveals it in His own word, we can with confidence adopt this language, and say, "All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose." What an unspeakable consolation to our souls! All things — not one is excepted, but all things, the bitter and the sweet, adversity and prosperity, sickness and health, yea, tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril or sword — all are but instruments in the hands of our God to work out His purposed end. How calmly then we may repose in Him and in His love! Like Jacob, we may often be tempted to say, "All these things are against us;" but no, they are for us, working together for good. We may not see the need of this trial, or the reason of that sorrow; but God is watching, noting everything — what we require, and what the effect produced upon us. Our future condition is before Him, and He leads us by a right way to secure the blessing for us.

The characteristic of comfort is that it strengthens the soul to bear its burden with fortitude as well as resignation; and it accomplishes this result by considering the trial in the light of the glory of God. When sorrows overtake and overwhelm the soul, it gives itself many a bitter pang by reiterating the question — Why do I suffer this? Why has this come upon me? And under these circumstances there can he no real comfort, until such a one lays hold by faith upon the fact which scripture abundantly reveals, that the clouds and storms are but agents in the development of the beneficent purposes of God. All things are working together for the accomplishment of good; and this to those who love God and who are the called according to purpose. This we had not known but for the word of God; but He has given it for our comfort, and that we may thereby trace His hand in each event, minute or mighty, which befalls us. Leave God out, and all is confusion and anarchy: a crowd of pitiless misfortunes grinding man to the very dust of the ground from whence he was formed. Bring God in, and the man of faith can rejoice in tribulations also.