Why Suffering? (Part 2 of 2)

When we read in the Bible about Job, we find that believers are not immune to the human experience of pain and suffering.

Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg turns to Job's story to explain five reasons why God allows righteous people to face trials. We're continuing a message titled, Why Suffering? Why do the righteous suffer? Why do good people suffer? Why do those who embrace God and say they follow his Son—why do they suffer?

Well, let me tell you. Let me tell you five reasons why. Number one, because suffering is the common human condition. The first reason why Christians suffer, the same as non-Christians, is because we live in an imperfect world. And because we live in an imperfect world, the impact of sin means that there is suffering, that there are eventualities, we get hurt, we get sick, and we also die. Therefore, in light of that, we do not need to read into all of our sufferings some great cosmic meaning. Oh, you know, I stood on the rake, and it belted me right on the side of the head. Oh, God, what are you teaching me in this great circumstance?

Look where you're going, clown! In other words, we don't have to immediately theologize into some great cosmic plan the eventualities of human existence. The righteous and the unrighteous see the sun. The righteous and the unrighteous feel the rain. The righteous and the unrighteous live with the implications of suffering.

So that's the first thing. Secondly, we experience suffering sometimes because God plans for it to be corrective. This is the expression of the psalmist, where he says in Psalm 119, Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word. When everything seemed to be fine, when the sun was out, the sky was blue, when I just had life in front of me, I frankly was going my own way.

I was doing my own thing. But now that you have afflicted me, I obey your word. And this, of course, is iterated there in the book of Hebrews, when the God the Father is described as a gracious Father who would discipline his children and correct them by means of his discipline in order that it may be that they get back on the path of God's Word. And each of us, if we've lived life at all, with any sense of sensitivity to what's happening to us, will recognize at least the possibility that some of our experiences of pain and suffering have been as a result of God's gracious, wonderful, corrective plan. So in other words, this pain, as painful as it was, this emptiness, as real as it was, has been a means of blessing to us. For God has used it to correct. Thirdly, God uses suffering not simply as a corrective but in order to be constructive.

Constructive, Romans chapter 5. Paul writes, and he says, suffering produces perseverance—perseverance character and character hope. How does this person become so hopeful? How does this lady have such wonderfully tender eyes? How is it that this gentleman seems so empathetic with my pain, with my brokenness, with my wanderings, with my stupidity?

How did this guy get like this? God used suffering in his life to construct him. He wouldn't be the man he is had God not chosen to employ pain in this way—not punitively, not even correctively, but constructively. Fourthly, we experience some suffering simply in order that God might be glorified. Isn't that the lesson of John chapter 9, when the disciples come to Jesus with a man born blind, and they say, Who sinned, this man or his parents? And Jesus says, Neither the parents nor the man. This man is the way he is in order that the work of God might be displayed in his life. And there are circumstances in each of our lives through which we come and we say to ourselves in the experience of them, I don't know what in the world this is about.

I would run from this if I could, and understandably so. But then all of a sudden, somewhere along the journey of our days, in a great denouement, it becomes apparent, Oh, that's why I went through that. It is for this exact moment that God may be glorified. If I may use a personal illustration, and I don't know how good or bad it is, when my mother died and left us behind, me twenty, my sisters eleven and fifteen, I couldn't find a redeeming feature in the event at all. I couldn't make sense of it. I stood at her open grave and tried to theologize it as best I could in relationship to 1 Corinthians 15, and yet is still laying hold of God and saying, I believe you and I trust you. Still, it seemed to me like a bad idea, you know. When I was invited to be the assistant minister at Charlotte Chapel in 1975, and I was twenty-three, I looked really mature. I looked like I was about sixteen. And the great fear on the part of the elders was, how can this cream-faced loon ever be any use in the context of a variegated congregation, many of whom are old?

A justifiable sarin? How will this kid, green around his ears, ever be able to walk into suffering and into pain and into bereavement? And I found the first time I had to go to the home where someone had lost a loved one. And I walked in the door, and I sat down, and I took the person's hand. This is not the whole answer, but it's part of the answer. I said, Thank you, Lord.

This is part of the reason. Because you couldn't give me empathy. You couldn't give me sympathy. I couldn't know what this… I couldn't even get close to thinking what it feels like in this home right now for a mother to be grabbed away in the middle of the years, for a dad to be lost in a car accident, for somebody to be unrecoverable from a tragic accident, were it not for the fact that somehow or another you determined that you would be glorified as a result of pain, which you allowed as a result of suffering which you brought into my experience. You see, the question is, Are you prepared to trust God?

That's the question. Will you believe God? Will I bring my mind beneath him?

Will I submit to him? And fifthly, the purpose of suffering is, in certain cases, cosmic. Having said that every experience of pain should not be regarded as a cosmic event, I need at the other end to say that the purpose of suffering is cosmic. And Job is the most profound and detailed exploration of it. Because the experience of suffering in the life of Job is to demonstrate before Satan and the angels that a person can love and trust God for who he is in himself and not merely for what he gets out of him.

This is very, very important. God doesn't want people to become Christians just as an insurance policy against trouble. And he doesn't want us to live our lives free from suffering, because he wants to show the world that his people are sufficiently tough to suffer with the world's suffering and still trust God. You see, this is why we have a very poor theology of suffering, certainly in terms of the public persona that is represented in television evangelists and teachers, who are all the time hyping the idea of a Christianity that is all about health, it's all about wealth, and it's all about prosperity. Now, the fact of the matter is, God blesses when we apply his principles.

There is an attendant blessing that accompanies it. But he does not have his hand up his back in relationship to this, and we cannot manipulate a sovereign God. And the same God who chooses to bless us with a lovely sunset may choose to bless us with the experience of suffering. Now, loved ones, if we do not know how to suffer, then how in the world will anybody know how to suffer? If we cannot, in light of the realities of eternity, face the issue head on, then what are our friends or our neighbors going to do? You see, because Christianity is not about how to escape from the difficulties of life, but it is how to face the difficulties of life.

This is what we need to be saying to our friends and neighbors. Doesn't it come, follow Jesus Christ and escape everything? It has come, follow Jesus Christ and live!

And as you live, you will experience all of these things. And the difference that Jesus makes is not that he removes us from the circumstances but that he grants us grace in the midst of the circumstances. And people say, Well, you know, why is it that when the 747, the TWA flight goes down there, why did the Christians go down?

Well, what is that supposed to mean? Is the inference being that God should only allow those who do not know him to go down? I mean, let's face it, the people who don't know him, they go down to the ultimate down. You see, people have got this idea that somehow or another we're going to be floating to the ground while everyone else hurls to destruction.

No. Christianity is not an insurance policy against suffering and pain. And God uses it—pain, illness, crushed and crushed hopes, stupid choices, bereavement—to test the faith of Christians to make them stronger, better, and wiser.

Now, loved ones, when you begin to grapple with this, when you read the story of Job and think it out, then you will realize that the Bible is eminently wise in relationship to these things. And we need to be able to dialogue with our friends in relationship to a worldview that is cogent. They may not accept it, but we ought to still at least be able to make the case. For example, when they're pressing us into a corner about all the suffering in the world, ask them this question, By how much do you think suffering would be reduced in the world if everybody obeyed the Ten Commandments? The Ten Commandments that our culture is so keen to remove from school walls, office walls, walls of justice. Get rid of all of this nonsense. We don't want this up here. The church needs to be over here.

The state needs to be over here, and so on. All of that nonsense. Well, just ask them, How do you think we'd do without lust? Do you think that would make a difference to suffering? How do you think we'd do without greed, without lying, without stealing, without murder? How much do you think we would make an impact on suffering if a society were to obey the Ten Commandments? And the answer is unavoidable.

It would radically change things. Push them back a little bit. Shove them into the corner, kindly. We don't want to win the argument and lose the war, but we want to be able to push them back just a little bit.

Hey! And then also, understand this so that you can convey it. Pain and growing old are blessings, not curses.

Pain is one of God's great blessings. Children understand this. Ah! Ah! they say, as they jam their fingers or whatever it is.

And then what do they do? Mom! Why does God use pain? The exact same reason that confronting this, facing this suffering, men and women might say, Ah! God! So if we were to take away pain, we remove one of the great potential levers by which God reaches into the soul of a matter of women, and he says, Hey!

I wanted to talk to you! And the same is true of old age. Old age is great. You heard it here.

Write it down. Gray hairs and wrinkles. Look in the mirror and say, Yes!

Why? Why gray hair and wrinkles? Because God has given us a personal visual aid. And so that every time you look in the mirror, it says this to you, You're on your way out. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the fairest of them all?

Not you. You look in the mirror, and you see it coming back at you. Your shelf, your sell-by date is closer than yesterday. That's one of the reasons that God gives us gray hairs and wrinkles. If you think about it, the process of creation could have been that people were made… They looked like something out of Star Trek or one of those weird things or those horrendous heads and faces so that you were unable to distinguish age at all, and then you lived a kind of ageless existence, and all of a sudden you fell down a trap hole in the ground and you were gone.

It could have been that way. God in his grace produces suffering, allows pain, and allows the degenerative processes of our lives in order that seeing the fact that we are not going to last forever, we say to ourselves, My, my, I better prepare for the final journey. So I look at my gray hair, and I look at my wrinkled face, and I look at the fact that when you used to be able to just—when you jumped off the two-foot wall, you used to just do it, and now you're like, Mm-hmm, way! Just like that. Where does that come from? Every time that happens, God says, Aha! See, Alistair? You've got less in front of you than you've got behind you.

You ready to meet me? Let me just make a couple of summary statements. What's a biblical worldview in relationship to this?

It is this. In the beginning, God made everything perfect. He gave Adam and Eve some rules destined for their best welfare. They broke those rules, went their own way. As a result of this sin, disease, and suffering of all kinds—and finally, death itself—came into the experience of mankind, because all of us have followed their bad example of trying to go it alone.

There are implications of going alone. When we refuse to obey God's counsel found in the Bible, he stands aside and he leaves us to it. And much of the suffering in our world today is as a direct result of this. That's the significance of Romans chapter 1. And choosing to worship the creature rather than the creator, they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and God gave them over to their choice. Now, in the midst of all of that, God is doing three things. One, he is holding back sin and suffering to a degree we can never fully know. If God were to take his hand off our culture completely, it would be hell.

Totally. And that's why we need to pray that God would place his hand upon us—that we do not go the way of the Roman and the Greek Empire. And like every other proud empire that has crumbled to the dust.

He's just coming back from Greece and walking amongst ruins that are 1700 BC and thinking, You see the people walking now on an excavated Manhattan in the year 5006? I say, Who were these crazy Americans? Look at all the things they did! Why did they turn their back on God? They had such wonderful churches.

We see the ruins of some of them. In the midst of all of it, God, still in his grace, holds back sin and suffering. Also, he allows man-made suffering to show us how desperately we need God. And thirdly, he uses natural disasters to blow a big trumpet, to remind men and women that they are not the masters of the universe or of their own fate. I'm tempted to say he uses natural disasters to blow a big trumpet, particularly for scientists—chemistry teachers in the main, physics teachers as well.

Those people that made my life so miserable. But no, there are wonderful chemistry and physics teachers, and some are here this morning. But the scientist has to get on his knees sometimes, does he not?

And look at the lightning come across the sky and its megazillion voltage and say, We can't come close to reproducing that. And to take the sting out of suffering, he's given us the Bible so that we might have a blueprint and know how to live. He's given us the prospect of heaven so that we needn't be without God and without hope in the world. He's given us the gift of the Lord Jesus that we might trust in him, and he's given us the Holy Spirit that we might be made absolutely new.

Think about it, and this is my final thought. You travel the world, and you go into all kinds of temples as they relate to all kinds of religions. You're struck by a variety of things, not least of all the sincerity of some who are there paying their vows and respects. And every so often I've found myself, for example, in the context of Buddhism, saying, This is very interesting. But eventually I just have to walk away and shake my head because I look at that little man, that little Buddha. And do you see him sitting there like this, grinning?

You're supposed to buy one and rub its tummy. No, I don't believe in a God who folds his arms and grins and asks me to rub his tummy. I don't even believe a God in a God who came to earth to lie in a deck chair. The Christian believes in a God who hanged bloodied and beaten on a Roman cross, answering the proud, defiant questions of man. God, do you know about suffering? And the cry from the cross, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He was forsaken that you and I might be forgiven.

Not that we would have the answer to all of our questions. He doesn't ask us to answer all the questions. He asks us to trust him. Do you trust him today?

And if not, are you trusting yourself? Wow. Wow.

That's incredible. Trusting in God rather than trusting in self is an essential step in finding the answer to the question, why suffering? You're listening to Truth for Life with Alistair Begg. Alistair will be right back to close in prayer so please keep listening. As we think about what we've heard today, it's clear that suffering helps us understand the eternal meaning behind significant events, including events like Christmas.

In the midst of Christmas shopping and cooking and entertaining, it's challenging for any of us to keep our focus where it belongs. And that's why author Christopher Ash has written his devotional, Repeat the Sounding Joy, to point us to the pages of scripture and remind us that Advent isn't just about preparing to celebrate Jesus' first coming, it's also about anticipating his return. You can request your copy of the book, Repeat the Sounding Joy, when you make a generous one-time gift today. Simply tap the image on the mobile app or visit truthforlife.org, or if you'd prefer, you can call us at 888-588-7884. You can also mail your donation along with your request for the book, Repeat the Sounding Joy. Write to Truth for Life at P.O.

Box 398000, Cleveland, Ohio 44139. We have another resource we'd like to recommend to you. It's an ESV Bible. It's newly available from Truth for Life, and it is specially priced. It's just two dollars, and that includes shipping. This way you can order multiple copies, give them to friends who may have spiritual questions during the holiday season. This is a complete softcover Bible, contains the full text of scripture.

You can purchase one copy or multiple copies at truthforlife.org. And if you're able, please consider adding a generous donation to your order so Truth for Life can continue to offer all of our teaching materials at these low prices. Now here's Alistair to close with prayer. Father, look upon us in your grace, we pray, as we wrestle with these great issues. Thank you that you have come to us. Thank you that you have died for us. Thank you that you ever lived to intercede for us. And thank you that through the pain of our own individual suffering, through the reality of sorrow that comes as a result of decisions that we've made, still we see your hand in it all, constructing us, correcting us, using us. Lord, we do pray you will help us then to know how to live and how to die, how to rejoice and how to suffer, and to this end we commend ourselves to you. May the grace of the Lord Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit rest upon and remain with each one of us now and forever more. Amen. I'm Bob Lapeen. Join us tomorrow as we learn about God's faithfulness in affliction. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.