A tractor-trailer driver gets out of his truck to conduct a safety check; under the influence of a mind-altering substance, he forgets to set the emergency brake, allowing the truck to roll down a hill and smash into the vehicle of a missionary family on furlough, tragically killing the wife, the mother of three young children.
Where was God?
A church planter leaves his vehicle to rescue the driver of a vehicle burning beside the road, is struck by a semi-truck and killed.
Where was God?
A young missionary couple in Haiti is attacked by gang members and both are fatally shot, snuffing out a candle of gospel ministry to people who desperately need it.
Where was God?
A demonically gender-confused man enters a Christian school with firearms and guns down three 9-year-old students and three faculty members before he is shot and killed by police.
Where was God?
There was 9/11 and the Holocaust and tornadoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and hurricanes — even Helene — that have destroyed millions of lives, both Christian and non-Christian, throughout history.
Where was God?
The above scenarios aren’t hypothetical; each of them summarizes real-life tragedies, and each of us has our own stories, some of them horrific, of suffering and affliction in this
fallen world. If we haven’t, we will; it’s only a matter of time.
But in instances of “unjust suffering,” what is God doing? Is He present in that fiery furnace or on a coffee break? Is He using it for my good and His glory?
This is a question that has troubled Christians and non-Christians alike: If God is both all-powerful and good, how can He permit unfathomable evil to take place in the world He created? Or to express it in a more brass-tacks way: Why do bad things happen to good people?
The Bible does not back away from what many see as the most difficult of all theological/philosophical conundrums. God’s Word even asks that question — what theologians call “theodicy” — in numerous places such as the psalms, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, Elijah, and particularly, in Job.
God’s Paradigm Sufferer
Job is Scripture’s paradigm for gratuitous suffering and God’s sovereignty. The story, particularly the early part, is well-known: Job is a faithful God-fearing man. Satan twice appears in heavenly cabinet meetings and accuses Job of loving God only for the wealth and health the Almighty has given him.
God sets the rules and allows Satan to administer a gut-wrenching test in which Job loses his wealth, his health, and sees a tornado kill his 10 children. Even Mrs. Job tries to get her husband to curse this unjust God and die. Job proves faithful despite some questions later in the book. God never tells Job (or us) why he was dropped into the cauldron of suffering.
Job provides many lessons that help us with the issue of evil’s machinations alongside God’s goodness and meticulous rulership. Here, I offer 10.
1. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” may not be the right question.
There are no truly good people, only sinners saved by grace or sinners in need of saving grace. What if we got what we deserved? If we got justice, what is fair, all would be in hell. But millions across history have received the gift of God’s redeeming grace. Justice is owed. Grace is not. Beware of charging God with unfairness and demanding to give you what you deserve.
2. Satan isn’t sovereign — God is.
Note who set the rules when Satan wanted to test Job. Satan is a lion, yes, but a lion on a leash, and God gives him slack and reigns him in according to His purposes.
3. Job worshiped God out of his suffering, not in spite of it.
Amid grinding loss, Job responded, “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away — blessed be the name of the Lord” (1:21). Only later did he ask the inevitable, “Why?” Worship was his first impulse.
4. Our suffering is ordained by God for our good and His glory, especially on the last day.
Job’s question at the end of his trial is profound: “Shall we receive good from the hand of God and not evil?” No, God is not the author of evil, but He is sovereign over it. Look at Isaiah 45:7, “I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the Lord, who does all these things.”
Suffering is designed to strengthen our faith. 1 Peter 1:6–7, “In this you rejoice, though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been grieved by various trials, so that the tested genuineness of your faith — more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire — may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.”
5. Suffering as a believer doesn’t mean we won’t have doubts or won’t fall into discouragement.
Not long after he lost it all, Job lamented the day of his birth. He whined a good bit until the final four chapters when God confronted his questioning out of the whirlwind. The best of us would do the same, if not worse.
Job didn’t have the book of Job as we do, so he was completely unaware of the conference that met in heaven between God and Satan to discuss him. This was only a test, but he didn’t know it. Our hero started well, but discouragement eventually set in. There was a happy ending: God restored Job’s family and fruit twice over, but it arrived after significant hand-wringing.
6. It’s easy to be a Christian when the sun is shining.
In the end, Job trusted God through the darkness, but not all have fared so well. Suffering made one theologian reject biblical theism for open theism — the (false) notion that God does not know the future actions of His freewill creatures and will respond as best He can. Another man I knew left the faith when God failed to heal gout in his foot. Anybody can be a faithful Christian when life’s skies are blue and filled with sunshine, but who I am when life hits the fan is who I am.
7. God’s glory is more important than my comfort.
You want to learn the truth about your heart? All you have to do is see how you respond when God takes everything away. Do you live in verses 1:21 and 2:10, or do you love God merely for what He has given you? Do I love the gifts or the Giver supremely? What is the chief end of man?
8. Testing is temporary, and God won’t allow you to fail to your eternal ruin.
God restored Job at the last. Testing was temporary. Job emerged from the crucible of suffering as a hero of the faith. God employs suffering as an anvil on which to strengthen and temper the faith of His man, and that faith will endure because Jesus is ever at his Father’s right hand praying for His people.
Peter, in Luke 22:31–34, is a stellar illustration. Satan sifted Peter like wheat, but he didn’t fall away because his Savior prayed for him. Mercifully, He is praying for us.
9. Affliction is not always God’s discipline for sin.
Suffering is a product of the fall. Our tendency is to think adversity is God’s payback for some sin we’ve committed: We’re reaping what we’ve sown. That is, of course, sometimes true, but not necessarily in every case.
John 9 shows this to be true. There, Jesus’s disciples asked who sinned in the family to cause a man to be born blind. Jesus’s answer is telling: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
10. Job separates the armchair theologian from the wheelchair theologian.
Armchair theologians read what Scripture says about suffering but live remote from it. Those whom the late R.C. Sproul called “wheelchair theologians” have persevered in faithfulness out of their suffering.
Does your theology leave your head? Does it land on the ground in real life?
Here Was God
The ultimate theological problem unfolded on Golgotha when God, sitting on the throne of the universe as usual, nailed His sinless Son to an old rugged cross. Christ’s death at the hands of godless men (Acts 2:23) was the ultimate act of evil, but one that brought the light of salvation to a dark world.
Job’s faithfulness through affliction points like a giant finger to Christ’s endurance on the Calvary Road all the way to the empty tomb and our redemption. Praise the Lord for Job and its inclusion in sacred Scripture.
JEFF ROBINSON is editor and president of The Baptist Courier. He also serves as an adjunct professor of church history at North Greenville and Anderson universities.