Challenging Our Assumptions About Suffering
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”—James 1:2-4
Isn’t it interesting that James’ way of growing into our sainthood— “perfect and complete”—is through trials and suffering? In the next few posts, I’d like to dig a little more into this idea.
Honestly, I wish God found another way to do the job. And trust me, I’ve tried to find it! It usually involves escaping into another world through Netflix until I can’t avoid my life any longer and then swinging to the other extreme of scouring every possible way to remove it from my life. If you can’t avoid it, beat it!
Most of the time it worked. Until the one time it didn’t.
This came to me most clearly within the first few years of our adoption. I remember the despair I felt when it became evident that there was no amount of hard work I can do to avoid the suffering that came with welcoming a disabled orphan into your home. It will be a lifetime pain. I did everything I could to free myself from the despair I felt, but none of it worked.
So I do not write these words from an ivory tower. But I also believe that even if I cannot avoid suffering, this painful reality can still be used by God to perfect and complete me. But how will being a saint, a child of God change the way I deal with the suffering in my life?
Come to Grips With the Reality of Suffering
One of the ways we deal with suffering is to pretend it isn’t real. We downgrade them to obstacles or challenges to work through. No problem. Or we just try to escape them altogether, like I did.
But this is not going to help us. There will eventually come a time when we hit an obstacle we cannot get through or one we cannot avoid. Even if we are one of the few who are able to skirt through pain in life, we cannot escape the pain of death.
Because of Adam and Eve’s original sin, we experience both moral evil (Rom. 5:12) and natural evil (Gen. 3:17). Not only are our inner hearts damaged, the outer world we live in is under a curse, groaning in misery (Rom. 8:20-23). Nate Brooks describes, “Every single sigh, every single thorn, every single anguished tear is a very real product of very real fruit taken from a real tree in a real garden.”
While this may seem like an obvious fact to some of us, we need to start here because if we don’t, it will affect how we perceive and interpret the hard times in our lives. This then affects how we deal with our sufferings and hardships—often in ways that dilute God’s good purposes for those very painful issues we face.
From losing our keys to losing a friend, life here is hard. It is painful.
And you’re not imagining it.
Identifying Our False Assumptions
Not only does sin touch the world we live in, it touches all humanity at the very fundamental nature of our being.
As we talked about in previous posts, saints are people who know they are damaged by sin but humbly receive Christ’s gift. From that moment, our natures are changed.
But because God does not choose to transport us to heaven right away, we remain here. During our time here on earth, He completes the full transformation into the saints we truly are—and often by means of suffering.
Christ may have conquered the power of sin in our lives, but we still deal with its presence. That will not be removed until He comes again. We will still feel its pressure and pull. The presence of sin, therefore, can impact how we look at and respond to suffering.
So what are some of those false assumptions? Nancy Guthrie, in her Bible study on Job in The Wisdom of God, notes four main ones:
Assumption 1: If I am godly, I won’t have to suffer.
Assumption 2: My suffering is about me and my life in the here and now.
Assumption 3: My suffering is the result of God's punishing me for my sin.
Assumption 4: What I need most from God are relief for my suffering and answers to my questions.
Which ones resonate with you?
Challenging Our False Assumptions
Though we are saints, we are not shielded from the hardship of this world. He has left us here, and He plans to use the very painful situations and circumstances of our lives to make us more like Jesus. Our pains will perfect us.
So though we are not shielded from pain, we have been given something even better—a new mind. God has enlightened our minds to a new way of thinking. Our part is to take our thoughts captive (2 Cor. 10:5) and examine our assumptions in light of the truth He now has revealed to us.
So let’s take a look at how those assumptions mentioned earlier stack up against Scripture.
Truth #1: Suffering happens to saints as well as sinners.
The first one is fairly easy. It directly contradicts what Jesus says in John 16:33. We will have trouble in this world.
Throughout Scripture, we see trouble come to the godly, even unfairly. Just look at the book of Psalms and you will see that this is a common experience of the righteous.
Truth #2: My suffering is tied to an eternal war between good and evil.
Secondly, Ephesians 6:12 makes it clear that the battles we face here are not just about life here on earth. Our suffering is connected to an unseen spiritual dimension, like Job’s story or Peter’s in Luke 23:31-32.
The truth is this: in this spiritual battle, Satan wants to “sift us like wheat” to diminish the greatness of God. But God has a higher purpose: to glorify Himself even as He makes us like Christ through our suffering.
This is the ultimate battle behind all our suffering: the glory of God against the pride of Satan. But rather than seeing ourselves as pawns in this battle, God is using the suffering of this world to defy and defeat him, and in that way bring Himself glory.
And that totally changes how we participate in our sufferings!
Truth #3: Christ has already fully and completely borne the punishment I deserve for my sin.
The third assumption was one I wrestled with. Like Job’s friends, I was sure that my suffering in my adoption of Anah was because I had done something wrong that I was unaware of and it was now catching up to me.
The truth of that assumption is that yes, I was a sinner. And yes, I deserve to be punished.
But this is where the Gospel comes in: Though I deserve to be punished for my sin, that punishment landed on Christ, not me. That’s the good news!
Therefore, when I assume that my suffering is punishment for my sin, then I also believe that Christ’s work on the cross was not sufficient. God needed to add more to make it complete. My suffering is that “extra".”
And that, I know, is not true. Christ’s sacrifice covers sin once for all (Heb. 10:10).
As Guthrie notes, "There's a difference between enduring divine punishment and experiencing the natural consequences of our choices.”
By His grace, the Lord has revealed to me my sinful motivations in my adoption—people pleasing, pride, vanity. My suffering is not the punishment of God for my sin; they are natural consequences of my sinful choices. It may seem like splitting hairs but learning to interpret them that way has changed everything about how I now look at my suffering.
Truth #4: What I need most from God is knowing Who is sovereign over my sufferings, not Why.
As for the fourth assumption, I dealt with this too. I thought that if God could explain what He was doing, then I could bear it better.
But like Job, God answered my “Why” questions with something even greater. When God finally speaks in Job 38-41, He counters Job’s questions with ones of His own: “Who?”
The truth is, in times of suffering, what we need most is not reasons. What we need to know is Who is in control. Who holds the power. Who knows what’s really going on.
Even if He should tell us why, I think our finite human minds would not be able to compute. They would short-circuit!
So the best thing He does is tell us about Himself. We see Job get the message as he repents—not once, but twice (Job 40:3-4, 42:1-6).
Commit to Know God Truly
I’m going to stop here for now because that’s a lot to grasp.
But in order to properly think about, process, and faithfully endure suffering, we need to start by challenging our beliefs about it.
Suffering is real. You’re not imagining it.
Though we are saints, we will not escape it.
But because we are saints, we can learn to think rightly about it.
In my next post, we will continue by seeing who God is and His big picture on suffering. Until then, let us commit ourselves to knowing Him, the Who, who holds all suffering in His good and powerful hands. He is far greater than we can ever imagine.
Will you do that with me?
