Why does God want us to suffer?

The message of the book of Job is concerning the suffering of the righteous. Why do the godly suffer? How can their suffering be harmonized with the righteousness of God? if God is love and He loveth His saints why have they afflictions? In one word the theme of the book is the mystery of suffering. The answer to these questions concerning the suffering of the godly is twofold. God permits their suffering for His own glory. This we learn in the first two chapters. God received glory to Himself when Job, enabled by His grace and by His power, sinned not in the midst of the fiery trials through which he passed. Then God permits the righteous to suffer for their own good. It was a wholesome experience for Job; the sufferings chastened him and he received great blessing. This is the double answer in the book of Job as to the suffering of God's people. And yet there is a mystery of suffering which will only be fully bared when God's saints are in His presence and "know as we are known." Till then we walk in faith, trusting Him who has told us "that all things must work together for good to them that love God."

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.

And what is in mind is to bring us to the appreciation of the blessed fact that "all things work together for good to those who love God." The activities of the Father, the activities of the Son, and the activities of the Holy Spirit, would bring us to this definite conclusion that "We do know that all things work together for good to those who love God," (Rom. 8:28 N.T.). And what is the "good" that God has in mind? I believe we must take this section as a whole. The great thing in mind is that God will conform us to the image of His Son. I ask, could you think of any greater thought than that? Divine love has set itself solidly and constantly to bless us. Divine love has entered sympathetically into every circumstance we could pass through. And what has it in mind? To bring us to the realisation of this very fact that God will conform us to the image of His Son; every feature of the first man gone, and we fully conformed to the Second.

The Will Of God And Sufferings

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.

1886 143 Everyone recognises the necessity for discipline — except perhaps for himself — in order to mature character and correct faults: "If folly were a pain," says the Spanish proverb, "there would be shrieking all over the world": it seems ingrained in human nature, and in the servants of God not less than others; and it is because He is their Father that God chastens His children (Heb. 12:5-12); not because He dislikes them, but because He loves them; not to injure us, but "for our profit." All the world knows how great a benefit suffering may be: "He who harasses one teaches him strength," says the African: Crescit sub pondere virtus, virtue flourishes under adversity, says the classic, alluding to the palm being more fruitful when hung with weights. Sechele, chief of the Bakwains, said to Livingstone that he thought his subjects would all become good Christians when they had been well beaten. Another proverb from the savage tribes is, "The sword does not know the head of him that made it:" if it did, it would understand the reason of all the terrible blows with which he smites it; it glows with burning indignation as he puts it into the fire, it clamours mightily when he hammers it, it hisses a bitter disapproval when he plunges it into the chilling flood, it shrieks over the grindstone. But its maker knows what he is doing all the time: it cannot do its work without all this rough dealing; nor will he strike it one needless blow. Behold it at last keen, strong, symmetrical, glittering and tempered as Excalibur or Balmung. "No chastening for the present seems to be joyous, but grievous; nevertheless afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness."

Of course all suffering is not sent in the way of chastisement for faults: much of it may be as persecution for Christ's sake or righteousness' sake, and to be welcomed as a high honour (Matt. 5); much of it may be of the ordinary casualties of life, incident to all, but "to them that are exercised thereby" all kinds of tribulation work, patience, experience, hope. The word tribulation is itself taken from the tribulum, the little instrument which separated the corn from the chaff; and this is the effect discipline will have on the devout mind. "Certainly virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant where they are incensed or crushed; for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue."§ [ Trench on words. § Bacon' Essays.]

The standard of God's holy government is fixed and sure, and can never be lowered. What a man sows, that shall he reap, and punishment for sin is judicially and divinely certain, but to limit God in His dealings with His children to that is to dishonour Him, and to miss the richest and choicest of His designs. In point of fact, it displaces Him, leading to the conception of Him as an arbitrary Being, as the book of Job shews, and, coming to men, it turns the moral order of society upside down, and is accountable for the cruellest sufferings inflicted by men upon their fellows. In Job we have a man whose sufferings might well melt the hardest heart: yet, his friends (and they were men of a very high standard of life), through missing this important link in the chain of God's dealings with His servant, were turned into the cruellest and bitterest of foes. Why? Because, by limiting God's dealings to the punishment of sin, and missing the educative and promotive character of the sufferings, they could only conclude that such a great sufferer must have been a great sinner. What a solemn position these good men were found in. Condemning Job, by attempting ignorantly to justify God, instead of sympathising with the needy, they fixed upon him the cruellest charges. The position became a kind of deadlock, and those who came to help were found to hurt. The basis of their argument was wrong, their premises were false, and making a wrong start, both as to God and to Job, instead of the good that the circumstances called for, the very worst that was in them came out. It was doubtless thoughts like these that led the poet to write that "Man was made to mourn," for indeed "Man's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn." Like the ecclesiastical tyranny of the dark ages of so-called "Church History," these men belied their messages, and were turned into despots of the inquisition. Thinking they were serving God by treating an unbroken sinner in faithfulness, they went all the length to recover him, and like many to-day, who conclude that THEY are the testimony, with hearts steeled against every human and tender feeling, persecute to the death those who may be like Job in the crucible of suffering, but, like him also, may be more in the thoughts and sympathies of heaven than themselves.

Yes, God in infinite and tender goodness can, and does, bring His children through sorrow and suffering. He did it with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David and others, and He is doing it to-day. He may chasten for sin, as corrective, or He may discipline the soul as seeing danger ahead, which surely is preventive, and, as in the case of Job, He may put us through a good deal of trial, that we may learn ourselves, and enter better into the knowledge of Him — which is surely promotive.

God has often suffered, as in David's case, the soul of a Christian to taste, in a very painful way, the fruit of his own disobedience. For He is not mocked. A sowing to the flesh must produce inevitably a harvest of corruption in some shape (Gal. 6:7-8, 9). An erring saint will surely find a verification of this principle in his own experience. But the end of a believer is the God who has accepted him in Christ. It is salvation, therefore, and eternal blessing. To inherit a blessing is his calling (1 Peter 3:9). Intermediate sorrows, which he may too often have to refer to his own folly, act on him in the way of gracious discipline, that God's own gift of "precious faith" may have its fruitful exercise in the ways of righteousness. They are among the necessary means which the Father of spirits uses to make us partakers of His holiness.

The God of all grace, who called saints to His everlasting glory in Christ Jesus, is the best security against all that creature can or cannot do meanwhile; and the more, because as Father He carries on a constant, watchful, and righteous government of His children all through the wilderness (1 Peter 1:13-17). But there is another needed and weighty consideration. As Jews, they might associate with the Christ immunity from suffering and promotion to high honour; but as Christians, their portion is to share His sufferings for righteousness and love and truth. No mistake more common in Christendom than looking for present reward and distinction and ease through the gospel and the church. But it is a hateful lie of Satan. The Corinthian saints slipped easily into this snare, to the apostle Paul's pain and horror (1 Cor. 4:8-14); it was still more natural for such as had been Jews. So the apostle Peter seeks throughout to impress suffering as the necessary path of the Christian, and "after having suffered a little while," as his beloved brother to the Hebrews (Heb. 10:32-39), fortified by not a few even of old (Heb. 11:35-38) but above all by His case who sums up all as our perfect exemplar (Heb. 12:2-3). It is through suffering in faith and patience that we are disciplined and bear fruit to Him who deigns thus to prune the branches of the vine.

I would add to these one collateral observation. The Lord can unite discipline with positive suffering for Christ, though the two things are quite distinct. When Paul was subjected to contempt in his preaching it was for Christ's sake he suffered, yet the form of it was, we have seen, a discipline to prevent his being puffed up. This may be seen doctrinally in Hebrews 12:2-11. In verses 2-4 we suffer with Christ, striving against sin, even to martyrdom and death. In verses 5-11 the same process is the discipline of the Lord, that we may be partakers of His holiness. How wise and most gracious of the Lord's ways to turn our needed discipline into the privilege of suffering for Christ's sake, so that we can glory in our infirmities! There is chastening which has not this character, being for positive evil. In this doubtless we have to thank God, but it is another thing.