What About Suffering?Sample

Hopefully, this plan has helped you recognise why we’re still suffering even though we have a God who cares and who’ll remove suffering from His creation. But there’s one more complexity we can explore together in this plan.

Even in suffering, we can trust that God is doing something good.

Jesus sees a bigger picture in Lazarus’ sickness: God’s glory. When Jesus healed a blind man, He said that the man’s blindness was so that ‘the works of God could be displayed in him’. The crucifixion demonstrates how God brings something good out of something evil. The brutal murder of an innocent man is a terrible thing, yet God turns that horrific event into the moment in which sin and evil receive a death blow.

At the death of Lazarus, Jesus holds together grief and thankfulness for the way God brings something good out of something evil.

All that’s not to say that it isn't good for us to mourn the suffering that’s being experienced in the world. It’s our right to grieve it, and it’s good and healthy to long for a better world! We also want to acknowledge that there might be instances of suffering where this way of looking at things will still feel totally dissatisfying. If you’ve experienced something like that in your life, we really hope that you’re able to find healing in what you’ve experienced.

But these examples of suffering that we’ve been reading about can at least contribute towards giving us some confidence in God’s compassion and goodness. They can help us to try to trust God’s reasons for not always intervening in our lives. The crucifixion and resurrection show us that we can marvel at God’s ability to take evil and brokenness and actually redeem them. He can take brokenness and from it produce new life! That’s essentially what the story of the Bible is.

As with these stories from the Bible, God can also use the suffering that we experience for our ultimate good too. Or, as He did with Joseph’s suffering, He can make use of our experience to enable us to bring relief to others in their suffering.

What do you think about this explanation for God’s decision to sometimes not intervene in our suffering? Do you think it still allows us to trust that God is ultimately good? Have you had any unjust or painful experiences that you could ask God to help you redeem?

Thanks for completing this plan with us. If you've been affected by suffering, you might find issuesiface.com a helpful resource. If you want to keep thinking about questions like this, check out the Discover Jesus podcast, or keep an eye out for the other plans in this series: Who is Jesus?, Did Jesus Really Exist? , Is There An Afterlife? , and What is the Purpose of My Life? .