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5 Reasons Christians Might Suffer and How to Respond to It
Categories of Suffering
One necessary prerequisite for suffering well involves wise discernment about the different kinds of trials we undergo, how to recognize them, and what response our Lord wants from us in each. Steadfast and patient hope in God is appropriate in every season, but there are certain times of trial in which repentance is necessary—and other times in which we absolutely should not change. God’s word helps us in this. It reveals to us distinct experiences of suffering, deepening us in wisdom as to their distinct reasons in God’s wise providence, what God expects from us in each, and what happy closure God has waiting as he enables us to endure.
It is crucial to remember that the categories developed here are not airtight, and the last thing I want is for readers to trouble themselves wondering exactly where their own story fits. Life is messy, and we may not always be able to tell. At the same time, the sufferings of God’s people in both Testaments are varied. Some distinctions are possible, and they are helpful to have in mind as we think about our own Christian journey and reflect with others about theirs.
Suffering for Sin
It’s unwise to underestimate the profound depths of human misery that exist for no other reason than our sin and rebellion against God. It takes one’s breath away to imagine how much of the world’s misery is our own fault.
Biblically, sin always leads to suffering, and the suffering always outweighs whatever fleeting pleasure the sin gives. David mourns the wounds that “stink and fester” because of his own foolishness (Ps. 38:5); the exile towers over the historical and prophetic books like an Everest as the greatest trauma of the Old Testament, but it happens only because of Israel’s betrayal of their covenant Lord and persistent devotion to the gods of the nations (2 Kings 17:7–23; 25:1–21).
Suffering Wisely and Well
Eric Ortlund
In Suffering Wisely and Well, Eric Ortlund explores different types of trials throughout Scripture, particularly the story of Job, revealing the spiritual purpose for pain and reassuring readers with God’s promise of restoration.
Even if it is happily not God’s final word to us, perhaps each Christian will have times when he echoes Moses’s agonized question: “Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?” (Ps. 90:11).
As profound a matter as this is, however, discerning whether suffering is due to sin is simple. Have you sinned? The question here is not whether you are a sinner. Rather, if the normal course of your life has been interrupted by suffering, it is pastorally appropriate to ask the more specific question of whether your suffering has been allowed by God as a natural consequence of some specific and unrepented sin, with which your conscience has made peace or your memory has deliberately forgotten.
When pain brings unrepented sin to mind, God’s only expectation is repentance: that we take God’s stand against ourselves, renounce our sin and cut ourselves off from it, offer ourselves afresh to God, amend our lives as best we can with God’s help, and “restore fourfold” to anyone we have harmed (Luke 19:8).
Such repentance is very precious to God. He promises to restore anyone who will repent to fullness of life and joy in his presence. Broken bones will rejoice (Ps. 51:8); the prodigal is embraced by his happy father and feasted and celebrated (Luke 15:22–24), and heaven itself explodes in joy (Luke 15:7). When God meets a penitent so joyfully, who could resist?
Spiritual Growth and Suffering
Suffering for sin is punitive: its goal is healing, but the pain involved counts as (not unloving) discipline from our heavenly Father. But as often as the Bible shows us sin leading to suffering, there are many other examples of suffering deepening us as Christians—suffering that is not punitive but a catalyst for growth. Paul connects suffering with endurance, endurance with character, and character with hope, such that we can rejoice in trials that might otherwise break us (Rom. 5:3–4); James encourages the same joy for the same reasons (James 1:2–4).
Even here, of course, the distinction between suffering for sin and suffering for spiritual growth is not absolute. Nevertheless, distinguishing these two kinds of affliction is valid. Joseph’s suffering is not presented in the same way as Israel being sent into exile, nor the unfortunate fate of the Corinthian man being handed over to Satan (1 Cor. 5:4–5) as that hardship which toughens us up in Christ’s service (Heb. 12:4–11).
God’s expectations for us are also distinct: not a renunciation of past sins, but rather, assured of our undeserved forgiveness and favor with God, that we would “make every effort” in suffering to add to our faith virtue, to our virtue knowledge, to our knowledge steadfastness, to steadfastness godliness, and to godliness brotherly affection and love (2 Pet. 1:5–7). According to Romans 5:3 and James 1:2, we make these efforts joyfully, because we know of the great and precious gift that God gives us through them: spiritual maturity. John Owen wisely asks in this regard whether we have received “any eminent mercy, protection, deliverance” that we have not “improve[d] in due manner,” or whether we have been “exercised with any affliction without laboring for the appointed end of it.”1 If that “appointed end” of your suffering is unclear, pray, and the same God who has allowed your ordeal will reveal to you his purposes in it and what good thing he is working into you through it. For he is indeed working something good and very good: not just moral improvement, but perfection in Christ’s image (2 Cor. 3:17; 4:16–18). He is making you a Christian in complete armor, to your perfect joy and his great glory.
Persecuted for Christ’s Sake
Even a superficial reading of the New Testament will show how common a theme persecution is. The apostles are frequently jailed for preaching the gospel (e.g., Acts 12:1–19). Part of Paul’s boast in the Thessalonian church is the Thesssalonians’ steadfastness amidst persecution (2 Thess. 1:4). Paul himself was “often near death,” whipped, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, in constant and wearying danger (2 Cor. 11:23–28). Nor is this limited to the New Testament: David was mocked for his devotion to the Lord in the midst of his suffering (Ps. 22:6–8), and those who trust in God are hated without cause elsewhere in the Psalms (e.g., Ps. 34:21; Ps. 35:19; cf. Ps. 139:21–22). The Bible treats this as a kind of suffering separate from fatherly discipline for sin. It is also different from that affliction that God uses to grow us in Christlikeness: although God may have used it for their spiritual good, the many ways that Paul and the other apostles suffered in Christ’s service is never tied in Acts to personal spiritual growth, but rather has its genesis in human hostility and resistance to God and his gospel (Acts 4:24–31).
God’s expectation for his people when persecuted is that they would remain unflinching and steadfast in their testimony and good works (Rev. 2:10), unsurprised (John 15:20; 1 Pet. 4:12–13), loving and nonretaliatory (Matt. 5:44), trusting God to redress any wrongs suffered (2 Thess. 1:6–8), and knowing that any earthly loss is more than made up for in heavenly blessing (Heb. 10:34). We can, in turn, expect from God a glory and joy far surpassing the worst of what we endure in this life, tasted now in anticipation of its final fulfillment in the new creation (Rom. 8:18; 2 Cor. 4:17; 1 Pet. 1:3–7).
I hope no one will think, in speaking briefly about suffering for Christ’s sake, that I am treating it as a light matter. My only goal is to help us discern different kinds of ordeals, and terrible as persecution can be, it is hardly difficult to recognize.
Christians should not be surprised when God leads us into a kind of desert-like experience to teach us the life of faith.
Wandering in the Wilderness
Exodus 15–17 and Numbers 11–14 narrate Israel’s wilderness wanderings as a particular time of hardship and deprivation, as well as a time of particular intimacy with God.
Israel’s relationship with God takes on a particular shape after the exodus as they journey toward the promised land. The same is true for new-covenant believers: Christians can also “wander in the wilderness” in smaller and more specific ways. God can so order our lives that we find ourselves needing to trust God through a desert-like experience for a certain time. Christians should not be surprised when God leads us into a kind of desert-like experience to teach us the life of faith.
Surveying Exodus 15–17 and Numbers 11–14, I see three emphases in particular that define a desert-like experience and detail what God expects from us in it and what we can expect from him.
First, the desert is where we learn to trust God like we never have before. Of course our whole lives are spent trusting God— but God sometimes providentially orders our lives so that certain comforts and structures, perhaps not sinful in themselves, are taken from us, and we must depend on him directly and more deeply than before.2
A second characteristic of desert-like suffering is complaining about being redeemed by God and longing to return to Egypt. We first see this in Exodus 15. Israel has just been delivered from Egypt (Ex. 14) and is soon complaining in the wilderness (Ex. 15:22–24). We are hardly different. Having been liberated from the kingdom of death and spiritual darkness, our natural home and habitat, we forgo certain pleasures and securities as we journey toward that heavenly city which is our eternal home (Heb. 11:16). But it does not take many days of doing this for us to get struck with cravings for sins we used to indulge and to misremember what it was like to be dead in sins and trespasses.
A third characteristic of a sojourn in the desert is that it is a time of intense and sometimes uncomfortable intimacy with God. This was Israel’s experience: at Mount Sinai, a terrifying darkness and cloud and tremendous thunder and lightning (Ex. 19:16), a voice speaking from the midst of the fire (Deut. 4:12), an overwhelming presence that they could not bear (Ex. 20:19). The desert is the place where we know the Lord (Hos. 2:20) more beautifully than we ever had before. The desert is a time of mingled hunger and fullness, deprivation and intimacy with God. What he wants from us in the desert is trust in his daily sustenance; what he promises is deeper intimacy with him, sensuous views of his glory and beauty, a deeper enfolding in his embrace.
Lament and God-Forsakenness
The psalms of lament reveal a different kind of experience in which God withdraws from the one who trusts him. These psalms bewail the absence of God, both in terms of personal experience and in terms of God’s activity on the psalmist’s behalf—God does not intervene for the psalmist in ways that the psalmist can legitimately expect him to. Because of this, the psalmists suffer internally, becoming sick and sorrowful. They suffer relationally as well: friendships with other saints are strained or broken (Ps. 55:12–15), and God’s enemies are able to advance their own agendas to the detriment of God’s people (Ps. 13:1–2).
A time of lament is one in which God, in some real but not full or ultimate sense, withdraws his presence from and action on behalf of saints who trust him, exposing them to sorrow, distress, and mockery—but only for a time. The great promise in psalms of lament is that God’s distance is always temporary. He always returns to the believer and reactivates his activity on their behalf. A further promise made in psalms of lament is that this reigniting of fellowship has a wonderful ripple effect beyond the sphere of the individual believer’s life: God restores the trusting lamenter so gloriously that others see and are drawn into worship along with the psalmist. In other words, the psalms of lament connect the restoration of the psalmist with an expansion of God’s kingdom and furthering of his purposes as God wins great praise for himself through the testimony and praise of the restored psalmist.
What God expects from us when he withdraws for a time is not perfect faithfulness, but, following Christ, who has already lived through this pattern to an ultimate degree, that we would maintain our allegiance to him in the midst of opposition (e.g., Ps. 6:8), not grow wearying in crying to God to relieve our suffering, and not lose hope that God will rekindle personal fellowship with us and act on our behalf as we serve him. He promises us that these times of forsakenness are always temporary—the “how long” of lament is always “not forever”—and that many will join in our praise after he breaks his distance and silence. Many will see and fear the Lord as they see his restoring work that makes us radiant over his goodness (Jer. 31:12), believe our testimony about God’s work in our life (Ps. 40:9–10), and join us in worship.
Conclusion
This has been an all too brief survey of different kinds of suffering that are discernible within the chapters of the Bible. The goal has not been to say everything possible about biblical perspectives on suffering but to help readers identify and interpret their own trials, all the while allowing for overlap and messiness. There is, of course, an aspect of pain that is undifferentiated—one hurts and suffers and must trust and keep going, and there is not always much more to say. But the Bible does show that suffering meets us in different forms, that we should respond to it in overlapping but sometimes distinct ways, and that God makes promises specific to each.
This article is adapted from Suffering Wisely and Well: The Grief of Job and the Grace of God by Eric Ortlund.
Notes:
- John Owen, “Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers,” in The Works of John Owen ed. William Goold (repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1995), 6:48.
- I apologize if this paragraph is vague. New-covenant desert experiences are more diverse than literally walking through the Sinai wilderness; I am trying to make room for the many ways God might introduce this sort of experience into someone’s life, while highlighting what I think are the defining characteristics of it (biblically and experientially). My own desert experience came about when I moved from Edinburgh to Canada, transitioned from being a full-time student (where my time was mostly my own) to teaching full-time, and had our second child. The demands on me as a father and teacher increased significantly, and the resources I had to meet them decreased. God took splendid care of me, of course, but I had to trust him and wait on him to provide strength for each day like never before. I’ve talked with enough other Christians who have described similar experiences that I think there is a consistency to desert-like times of deprivation, but also that the external form they take can be very different for different Christians.
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