You’ve been facing a perculiarly agonising trial – death, sickness, persecution, rejection, or betrayal. The suffering is palpable, the tears are your food day and night, the grief hangs over you like a WW2 bomber, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Then someone asks the question, “What is God teaching you?” It’s an annoying question. Maybe you’ve received the question. Maybe you’ve asked it. It’s safe to assume that the person is asking with the best motives. Sometimes you can provide an immediate answer to it, but not always. Sometimes the question feels impossible to answer. Sometimes the question feels like an arrow in the heart. Sometimes the question makes you want to cry out with Job, “I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all…”¹

In certain trials, why is this question so hard to answer? Maybe its because there isn’t a good answer. If you asked Job that question what would he say? I would imagine he would say, “I don’t know, that’s what I want to know!” Suffering always has a purpose in the hands of God; we believe in his sovereign perfect providence. However, sometimes the reason for trials are not some tangible lesson that you must learn. While risking being a miserable comforter, let me provide you with three biblical reasons for your suffering, when the suffering makes no sense.

First, you are growing in your understanding of the character and attributes of God.² Sunshine and roses are a wonderful blessing, but they often cause us to become complacent and self-dependent.³ Trials and tribulations cause us to search intently into the character of God. In our desperation we lean heavily upon the Lord and discover that he is always good, kind, and gracious.

Second, you are entering into the suffering of Christ that you might know him and the power of his death and resurrection.⁴ Suffering, in a perculiar way, enables us to understand more of what our blessed saviour went through on our behalf. God in his goodness, through our suffering, gives us a taste of what our saviour has walked through perfectly and sinlessly. In doing so, he enables us to know more of Jesus Christ.

Third, you are being sanctified, transformed, and glorified into the image of Christ through your suffering.⁵ God uses trials and pain in order to make us more like Christ. In a type of proleptic christology⁶ we share in the same pain that our saviour did, and in doing so the Lord is slowly making us into the image of Christ. As the disciples said, it is through many tribulations that we must enter the kingdom of God.⁷

Next time you are suffering and you do not know why, and someone asks you the annoying question, look at them and say, “That I might know God, his Son, and become like Him.”

1. Job 16:2 ↩︎
2. Job 42:5 ↩︎
3. See yesterdays article on why greatness is a double edged sword ↩︎
4. 1 Peter 4:13 ↩︎
5. Romans 8:17 ↩︎
6. Proleptic christology refers to the way that Christ is seen in the OT through figures and patterns. ↩︎
7. Acts 14:22 ↩︎