Suffering and the Christian

You get the call at 10 p.m. Someone from your group. A diagnosis, or a marriage ending, or a child. You drive over and sit with them in their kitchen, and the question hanging in the room is not abstract: where is God in this, and what are you supposed to say? A theology of suffering is not a topic for an academic discussion. It is the equipment you walk into that kitchen with.

God governs what he did not author

The first thing to say is the most important, and it is the hardest to hold without bending it in one direction or the other. God is not the author of evil. He does not cause suffering in the sense of willing wickedness into existence. And yet he governs everything that happens, including what he did not author. Joseph says this out loud after years of betrayal, slavery, and imprisonment: "You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good" (Genesis 50:20). Two causes, both real, in one event. The brothers' malice was real, and God's purpose was real, and neither one cancels the other.

Romans 8:28 makes the same claim as a promise: "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." Not that all things are good. Not that suffering feels purposeful in the moment. But that in the hands of a God who governs all things, nothing is wasted.

The permission to grieve

Scripture does not require a cheerful response to suffering. The Psalms give us something more honest. Psalm 22:1 opens with abandonment: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?" Jesus quoted this from the cross. It is not the language of weak faith. It is the language of faith under extreme pressure, bringing its full weight to God rather than performing composure.

Lamentations 3:1-20 is rawer still: "He has driven me into darkness and not into light." The entire opening section of Lamentations 3 is a litany of God-directed accusation before it turns, in verse 21, to hope. The turn is genuine, but it comes through the grief, not around it. Job 3 records Job's cursing of the day of his birth. God does not rebuke him for it. He rebukes Job's friends.

Suffering as participation

Paul describes something stranger than comfort: the fellowship of Christ's sufferings (Philippians 3:10). He is not looking for an escape from suffering but for a way to be conformed to Christ through it. Colossians 1:24 presses further: Paul speaks of filling up in his flesh what is lacking in Christ's afflictions. He is not adding to the atonement. He is saying that the suffering of the church in the mission is a participation in the shape of Christ's own pattern.

Romans 8:17 puts the logic plainly: "fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him." The suffering is not the anomaly along the way. It is part of the path.

The weight and what outweighs it

Paul does not minimize present suffering to make the future hope work. Romans 8:18 acknowledges that the present suffering is real and weighty; it is just outweighed: "For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us." The comparison only holds because the future glory is real and weighty too. A vague optimism would be an insult to someone in real pain. A specific, bodily, irrevocable future changes the equation.

Revelation 21:4 names what will be absent: "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." These are not poetic promises about feeling better. They are the reversal of the specific griefs that characterize life in a broken world.

The pastoral task

Job's friends sat with him in silence for seven days (Job 2:13). That was the right thing to do. Their failure began when they opened their mouths to explain. The first pastoral task in the face of suffering is presence, not explanation. You do not need to resolve the tension between God's sovereignty and human pain before you can sit with someone in a kitchen at 10 p.m.

But you do need a theology that does not collapse under the weight of the question. God governs what he did not author. He gives us language for grief. He meets us in suffering through a Christ who suffered. And he promises an end to the suffering that is more than a metaphor.

This week, read Psalm 22:1-5 with your group and ask: what does it change about how you pray if God can receive this kind of language from his people?