Why God makes me suffer
Answered from the commentary of An Outline of Sound Words, J. T. Mawson, J. N. Darby and 9 others
God allows suffering because sin has brought misery, sorrow, disease and death into the world, and people reap the consequences of disobedience and evil. But your suffering is not necessarily punishment for something you have done: the authors repeatedly say that faithful and blameless people may suffer, and that suffering can have more than one cause.
For those who belong to God, He uses suffering for good: to test faith and work endurance, to break self will, and to form holiness and Christlike character. Sometimes it is chastening for sin; sometimes it is preventive discipline, or training that helps a person know God and serve Him better. When suffering comes because of faithfulness or doing what is right, it is suffering for Christ’s sake, and sharing His path. The authors differ in how readily they describe suffering as chastening: some speak broadly of trials as the Father’s training, while others stress that suffering is not always for sin and must not be treated as proof of personal wrongdoing.
God’s purpose in your particular suffering may not be clear now, but the authors say He allows no needless trial and can use suffering for His glory and your good. He is not indifferent to your grief: He comforts and sustains His people through it, and promises that suffering will give way to glory.
Verses: Job 1:20, Job 1:21, Job 1:22, Job 2:9, Job 2:10, Job 3:1, Job 3:2, Job 3:3, Job 3:4, Job 3:5, Job 3:6, Job 3:7, Job 3:8, Job 3:9, Job 3:10, Job 3:11, Job 3:12, Job 3:13, Job 3:14, Job 3:15, Job 3:16, Job 3:17, Job 3:18, Job 3:19, Job 3:20, Job 3:21, Job 3:22, Job 3:23, Job 3:24, Job 3:25, Job 3:26, Job 38:1, Psalms 34:18, Psalms 119:67, Psalms 119:71, Psalms 119:75, Isaiah 48:10, Lamentations 3:31, Lamentations 3:32, Lamentations 3:33, Matthew 5:10, Matthew 5:11, Matthew 5:12, John 9:1, John 9:2, John 9:3, John 16:33, Romans 5:3, Romans 5:4, Romans 5:5, Romans 8:18, Romans 8:28, Romans 8:35, Romans 8:36, Romans 8:37, Romans 8:38, Romans 8:39, 2 Corinthians 1:3, 2 Corinthians 1:4, 2 Corinthians 1:5, 2 Corinthians 1:6, 2 Corinthians 1:7, 2 Corinthians 4:7, 2 Corinthians 4:8, 2 Corinthians 4:9, 2 Corinthians 4:10, 2 Corinthians 4:11, 2 Corinthians 4:12, 2 Corinthians 4:13, 2 Corinthians 4:14, 2 Corinthians 4:15, 2 Corinthians 4:16, 2 Corinthians 4:17, 2 Corinthians 4:18, 2 Corinthians 12:7, 2 Corinthians 12:8, 2 Corinthians 12:9, 2 Corinthians 12:10, Philippians 1:29, Philippians 3:10, 2 Timothy 3:12, Hebrews 12:5, Hebrews 12:6, Hebrews 12:7, Hebrews 12:8, Hebrews 12:9, Hebrews 12:10, Hebrews 12:11, James 1:2, James 1:3, James 1:4, 1 Peter 1:6, 1 Peter 1:7, 1 Peter 2:19, 1 Peter 2:20, 1 Peter 2:21, 1 Peter 2:22, 1 Peter 2:23, 1 Peter 3:14, 1 Peter 3:15, 1 Peter 3:16, 1 Peter 3:17, 1 Peter 4:12, 1 Peter 4:13, 1 Peter 4:14, 1 Peter 4:15, 1 Peter 4:16, 1 Peter 4:17, 1 Peter 4:18, 1 Peter 4:19, Revelation 21:4
The above is AI generated summary based on the writers below.
What the commentators say
The passages the answer is drawn from, the most direct first, with the words that bear on the question marked.
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."
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.
While God uses sickness, accidents, and other trying situations to chasten His children, we must never conclude that God is disciplining us only because of sin. (This was the mistake Job's friends made regarding his suffering.) The Lord often uses sufferings and trials to draw us closer to Him. He may seek to strengthen our faith by putting us in situations where we have to depend upon Him.
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.
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).
The question has been often asked, Why does God allow the people on whom He has set His love to suffer in this way? and the answer is simple. It is because He loves them. There may be, there are, other reasons, but this is the chief. Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and if the heart wander chastening is necessary. The wise man tells us, "By sorrow the heart is made better," and experience teaches us the truth of this. How readily will evil attach itself to the best of us! but in the furnace of affliction the dross is separated from the purer metal, and consumed. Moreover, when we endure chastening, God deals with us as with sons; and every trial which visits us, were we but patient under it, would be fruitful in blessing to our souls. True, the experience of passing through the trial is not pleasant; it would be no trial if it were; but a morning of joy succeeds the night of sorrow, and in the quiet after-time we say with David, "It is good for me that I have been afflicted."
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.
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.
Why does God allow a child to burn its finger when it thrusts it into the fire? To teach it to avoid fire in the future. To avoid a recurrence of the pain. To avoid a greater catastrophe. The child knows no better, and yet it has to learn its lesson.
362 But there is a government of God in this world over those who are thus redeemed, and ever has been. "Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth." And when God exercises this discipline, which is always for our good in love, when a soul is truly humbled, He in His wisdom often takes it away, forgiving, as to His present government and ways, the sin which made it necessary. Not that all such visitations are because of sins. The world is in a state of misery through sin, and all are liable to be subject to this servitude of corruption. This the Lord states in John 9:3.
Nor even when they are sent of God in reference to the state of the soul, are they always because of sins committed; they may be to prevent them, break the will, humble us as to our state. Thus Paul had a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet him, lest he should be puffed up through the abundance of revelations. Thrice he asked the Lord to take it away, but the Lord had sent it for his good; so He would not.
Verses
- Job 1:20–2220And Job rose up, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down on the ground, and worshipped; 21and he said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither Jehovah gave, and Jehovah hath taken away; blessed be the name of Jehovah! 22In all this Job sinned not, nor ascribed anything unseemly to God.
- Job 2:9–109And his wife said to him, Dost thou still remain firm in thine integrity? curse God and die. 10But he said to her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. We have also received good from God, and should we not receive evil? In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
- Job 3:1–261After this, Job opened his mouth and cursed his day. 2And Job answered and said, 3Let the day perish in which I was born, and the night that said, There is a man child conceived. 4That day — let it be darkness, let not +God care for it from above, neither let light shine upon it 5Let darkness and the shadow of death claim it; let clouds dwell upon it; let darkeners of the day terrify it. 6That night — let gloom seize upon it; let it not rejoice among the days of the year; let it not come into the number of the months. 7Behold, let that night be barren; let no joyful sound come therein; 8Let them curse it that curse the day, who are ready to rouse Leviathan; 9Let the stars of its twilight be dark; let it wait for light, and have none, neither let it see the eyelids of the dawn 10Because it shut not up the doors of the womb that bore me, and hid not trouble from mine eyes. 11Wherefore did I not die from the womb, — come forth from the belly and expire? 12Why did the knees meet me? and wherefore the breasts, that I should suck? 13For now should I have lain down and been quiet; I should have slept then had I been at rest, 14With kings and counsellors of the earth, who build desolate places for themselves, 15Or with princes who had gold, who filled their houses with silver; 16Or as a hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants that have not seen the light. 17There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the wearied are at rest. 18The prisoners together are at ease; they hear not the voice of the taskmaster. 19The small and great are there, and the bondman freed from his master. 20Wherefore is light given to him that is in trouble, and life to those bitter of soul, 21Who long for death, and it [cometh] not, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures; 22Who rejoice even exultingly and are glad when they find the grave? — 23To the man whose way is hidden, and whom +God hath hedged in? 24For my sighing cometh before my bread, and my groanings are poured out like the waters. 25For I feared a fear, and it hath come upon me, and that which I dreaded hath come to me. 26I was not in safety, neither had I quietness, neither was I at rest, and trouble came.