What is the Point of Suffering?

Is anyone interested in helping lead the Book of Job?

The question was posed to our Women’s Bible study group, as we continued to work through Max Lucado’s “10 Men of the Bible” series. Our group had already studied Noah, Jacob, Joseph, and Matthew, but not many people were thrilled to start reading about the life of Job.

In all honesty, who enjoys reading about a man’s immense suffering? And not only that, what was the purpose of his immense suffering?

Without hesitation I raised my hand.

I actually like the Book of Job, I stated.

While I was a bit nervous to help co-lead the study, I knew God opened this opportunity for me to step up and do it even if I was afraid.

I’ll be the first to admit the Book of Job is a difficult read, but sometimes the most challenging and long-suffering books are the most important and impactful.

In my own years of suffering, I was drawn to the Book of Job. I wanted to understand the purpose of suffering. And since then, I keep coming back to read it each year. I think I’m drawn to it because suffering is inevitable in this life. We not only experience suffering, we see immense suffering in the world around us that often seems unexplainable.

Just in the last year, within the United States, we have seen school shootings, mass drug overdoses, trafficked victims within our nation, hurricanes that have devastated communities, wildfires that have ravaged homes and peoples lives, and pure evil acts that don’t seem to have any explanation other than proof that evil is at work.

It’s hard not to ask,

God, why are you letting this happen?

God, where are you in this?

God, are you punishing me?

God, why didn’t you…?

God, how much longer will you let this evil persist?

Within the Book of Job, we see Job asking the same sorts of questions. When we first meet Job, we learn he is an upright and righteous man. He had it all- a wife, many children, wealth, power, and status in his community. Not only that, he used all he had for the glory of God.

It’s at this point in the story, that God sees Satan roaming the earth and asks him if he’s observed his servant, Job. Satan claims Job is only following God because God’s blessed him immensely, and he claims if all of these things were taken away, Job would turn on God. In God’s immense wisdom, He allowed Satan to take away everything of Job’s- his children, his livelihood, his home, wealth, and status. And eventually Job is even afflicted physically with sores covering his entire body.   

In his immense grief, Job wants to rationalize his suffering. He wants to understand why it’s happening. He questions God and curses the day he was born. In his mind, he did everything for God and His Kingdom, so why was God punishing him? Job felt that God abandoned him by giving him everything and then taking it away. Was God toying with him? To Job, his suffering had no meaning.

Job’s friends were of no help either in supplying “answers” and “solutions” for Job’s suffering. They assumed Job wasn’t so righteous after all. They began accusing him of having unrepentant sin in his life. They said if he would just turn back to God, all of his sorrows would go away. While sin can bring horrible consequences into our lives, this wasn’t the case for Job. Their explanations were of no help, and they failed to comfort their friend. Job’s friend, Elihu, believed Job’s suffering was happening so that God could refine, teach, and discipline him. And while part of this explanation was true, it was still an incomplete explanation of Job’s immense suffering.

The truth is, none of us has a full explanation of suffering. While we can have a partial truth to the suffering that takes place in this world, we don’t have God’s view of suffering.

As believers, we understand that we are sinful, we live in a sinful and broken world, and that Satan is at work continually causing strife and chaos until Jesus returns. But knowing these things doesn’t necessarily make suffering any easier to experience or witness. 

We can look to Jesus’s example, and understand that Christ did not avoid suffering. Jesus came down, suffered, and died a horrific Roman crucifixion. And for many, Jesus laying down His life and suffering when He was God made absolutely no sense. They couldn’t see the full picture of what this suffering was for or how a loving God could allow this to happen.

In His suffering, Christ continually turned back to God the Father in trust. He overcame sin and death for our sake, and ultimately rose from the dead! His trust in God the Father was greater than His circumstances. God used what was meant for evil for our good. And because of what Christ did for us on the cross, we will one day be reunited with our Father in our true heavenly home.

We don’t trust God because of our circumstances, we trust Him because of Who He is.

And this was the lesson that Job was learning through his own suffering. Trust in God is more important than understanding the full picture.

Because we are not God, we will never understand the grand plan in our suffering, at least not on this side of heaven. But we can trust that God is working together for our good and the good of those who believe and trust in Him.

As I look back at some of my own sufferings in my adult years- from my horrendous car accident in 2010; my father being diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in 2017, and then passing away in 2018; to recognizing and starting to heal from narcissistic abuse in 2019, and then stepping away from a long-suffering, unhealthy relationship with my mother; to my husband then having Guillain-Barre syndrome in 2020 while working as a first responder during the chaos of those years; I don’t fully understand why I(we) went through various years of immense emotional and physical pain. And some of these past wounds will never be fully healed on this side of heaven. But through each of these past sufferings, my hope and trust in God has only grown. I had to lean on Him because no one understood my pain like Jesus.

Since those suffering years, I’ve seen glimpses of the Lord at work- healing me and helping me to become more like Christ through my own suffering. My old ways of life and thinking have died through those sufferings, and God’s brought new life and truth on the other side of it.

Suffering is an opportunity to lean into God. On the other side of my suffering years, I now have a better understanding of what healthy relationships should look like and who to keep close and who to keep at a distance. I have a stronger desire to write, share my story, and learn how to navigate difficult relationships through a Biblical lense in order to help others. The Lord’s helped my husband and I hone in on what’s really important in life, avoiding worldly distractions. We’ve become better parents to our children and more resilient to what the world throws at us. Our family does not take for granted what we have, and who we have in our lives.

And while all of these things are wonderful and praiseworthy, it doesn’t negate how hard our sufferings were or what and who we lost. But we continue to trust in God because He is worthy of that trust. And we know that our suffering is not in vain. We are not God, God is.

And what about Job, you ask?

God blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first part. The Lord restored his fortunes and gave him twice as much as he had before. He had more children, more animals, and he lived one-hundred and forty years and saw his grandchildren to the fourth generation.  

While our lives may not be completely restored on this side of heaven, we can hold on to the promise that Jesus will return, and He will make all things new and beautiful in His sight. And we will be without pain, suffering, fear, or death, and all things will be made perfect in with our Heavenly Father.

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