Suffering is a universal experience. If you have a pulse, you either have or will experience suffering. My sad conviction is that far too few Christians today have an adequate Biblical understanding of suffering. And this leaves them in an extremely vulnerable place when the waves of suffering finally do reach the shores of their life.
This post is the first in a short series in which I hope to explore some of the Biblical connections between suffering and the gospel. The word and is important. I don’t mean suffering for the gospel (as important a theme as that is). What I mean is: what does human suffering have to do with the gospel? What do cancer and natural disasters and terrorist attacks and car accidents have to do with the cross of Christ? Are there Biblical connections?
I believe there are—and, in fact, I believe these connections are as wide as the Bible itself. Not only that, but grasping these connections is key to developing a full, robust, biblical understanding of suffering.
There’s a certain urgency in developing such an understanding. Suffering is a universal experience. If you have a pulse, you either have or will experience suffering. My sad conviction is that far too few Christians today have an adequate Biblical understanding of suffering. And this leaves them in an extremely vulnerable place when the waves of suffering finally do reach the shores of their life.
For some people, suffering leads them to abandon their professed faith. This is particularly prone to take place if they have false expectations regarding suffering. If they think that God is supposed to make their life comfortable, successful and pain-free, prolonged suffering can lead them to conclude that God has either failed them, doesn’t love them, or just plain doesn’t exist.
Perhaps just as common is another kind of spiritual shrivelling—when a suffering person does not abandon Christianity, but instead redefines it along the lines of their experience. Their anemic theology can’t process how a big, mighty, sovereign Creator could allow his people to suffer so horribly. So, in order to cope, they scale back their understanding of God and His place in the universe.
They no longer worship God as the One who fills heaven and earth and accomplishes His will in everything that happens. They no longer view Christianity as a comprehensive worldview, Scripture as a complete revelation of absolute truth that is binding upon all.