This year I’m trying to focus on the idea of training — hence the name of the podcast. And any time you start getting serious about training, the question of pain comes up. We all know the cliché “no pain no gain,” the idea that if you aren’t pushing your muscles hard enough to develop tiny tears in the fiber resulting in sore muscles, then you probably didn’t push yourself very hard, and you may not get that much out of your workout.
You can look at that metaphorically as well — it’s true across just about any area of life! If you’re not willing to commit time, energy, resources, and even emotional investment into a project, you likely will end up with an average result. And if you DO put in the required energy, it’s going to cost you some type of pain – whether it’s mental, financial, social, or yes, even physical.
Our problem comes when we experience pain in our lives that we can’t trace back to some greater good. The age-old question of mankind is “Why am I suffering?” “How can a good God allow good people to experience such tragedy?” Plenty of people have lost their faith because they haven’t resolved the question of their own pain and God’s seeming unwillingness to help.
What does Job teach about suffering?
The book of Job spends a lot of time talking about dealing with extraordinary and unexplained hardship. As most of you probably know, Job is the story of a good man who loses his family, his wealth, his health, everything God had blessed him with except for his life — all because Satan asked God a question: Does Job serve God for no reason?
God decides to show Satan that a righteous man will stand strong in his faith against any type of pain or suffering that he might experience. And he ends up being right — but not before Job undergoes incredible hardship and agonizes over why God has allowed him to suffer when so many people who are much worse sinners than he is have peaceful, successful lives.
Job’s friends are of little help. They come to him and remind him that God always lifts up the good and strikes down the wicked. And if Job is suffering, he surely must have done something to warrant it. It’s kind of like if someone came to you in your pain and said “But remember what Psalm 91 says: “No evil shall be allowed to befall you, no plague come near your tent!”
The problem is that not only do good people suffer, but God allows them to suffer!
Why does God let “good” people suffer?
That can be hard to reconcile, even understanding that the Psalms are meant to show God’s love of good and rejection of evil, and the general promise of good over the course of our lives both through physical and spiritual blessings — NOT that nothing bad will ever happen, or that we’ll always succeed in whatever we do. The Bible is filled with stories of righteous men and women who suffered and even died either from persecution, war or illness.
So how do we deal with suffering? And what does it have to do with training? Well in Job, Elihu makes a point to Job that I think is worth considering:
Elihu argues that we ought to hear God’s voice in our suffering — not in a condemning way, not because of any specific sin that we’ve committed. But as a reminder to us that pain and suffering are the consequence of sin in the world, and as righteously as we may live, all of us have sinned. None of us can stand before God and say “I don’t deserve this.”
Our pain is a reminder, as Elihu says, “to conceal pride from a man and keep his soul from condemnation.” And when we do suffer, we’re reminded of our need for someone to redeem us. When God does deliver us from pain – just as he delivers us from sin, we can rejoice by saying:
‘I sinned and perverted what was right,
and it was not repaid to me.
28 He has redeemed my soul from going down into the pit,
and my life shall look upon the light.’ – Job 33:27-28
Our problem often starts with the phrase “I don’t deserve this.”
Suffering points toward a savior
We start believing that God owes it to us to “build a hedge around us” as Satan accuses God of doing for Job. After all, we haven’t cheated on our spouse or killed anyone or abused or extorted from the poor, as if those things somehow entitle us to life with a lesser degree of pain than life hands people through the everyday workings of the world.
But the Bible teaches us that God may allow us to suffer, but he doesn’t waste those opportunities, and he doesn’t want us to, either. We can always see our difficulties as opportunities to grow closer to God. Our trust grows. Our humility grows. We learn to appreciate that our lives aren’t in our hands, but in the hands of our Father in heaven.
I depend on God to be merciful to me, and I have faith that even when it seems like nothing is good in my life, God still sees, and God is still ready to redeem me through the sacrifice of Jesus, the Christ. The one that Elihu foreshadows when he describes the mediator – the “one in a thousand” who asks God to deliver us from the consequences of sin and into the grace of our Lord.
Enduring the discipline of the Lord
Hebrews 12 talks about suffering in terms of “discipline” — not as punishment for wrongdoing, but as an exercise to make us stronger, to bring us closer to God. The writer quotes “The Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son he receives.”
Philippians 4:13 gets misused a lot, but it applies here: “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” There are no hardships that life can give me that will separate me from God’s grace, as long as I keep trusting him.
Every obstacle we overcome spiritually, every arrow our faith withstands, every time we say “not my will but yours” and endure just as Jesus endured, is one more exercise as we continue training for godliness.
