As I have studied this, it seems to me that there are a variety of reasons why different forms of suffering come into our lives. One is that such things are just common to humanity in our sinful world. Job was expressing that idea when he wrote, “Yet man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward” (5:7). When you are a child you are going to fall down and scrape your knee. When you get into high school, you are going to have sad romances and have your heart broken. When you get into the job market, there are occasions when you are going to lose your job. You are also going to get sick. Eventually you are going to suffer the loss of family members.
But it is also true that things are happening beyond these common experiences in our fallen world, which leads to the second reason for our suffering. There are specific things God is doing with us. He sends things into our lives, such as periods of suffering, in order to refine and polish us. You see this in people from the Bible. David, for instance, was a man of integrity, and a great king. How did he endure in all kinds of hardships under the pressure of leading the nation of Israel as a righteous king? How did he learn that? He learned that in his youth as he experienced one persecution after another from Saul and other enemies. Abraham is another example. He experienced great inner anguish when God required him to take his son and sacrifice him on Mount Moriah. But Abraham grew by that experience. At the end of it, he was praised for his obedience and he became a model of the faith of obedience for Christians in all generations.
The third purpose is that sometimes suffering comes into our lives because it is a way in which God is glorified. That is something that is hard for many people to understand. Unbelievers cannot understand it at all. Christians can understand it better, but it is not always easy. There are two great examples of that, one from the Old Testament and the other from the New Testament.
In the Old Testament we have the story of Job. There came a day when Satan came into the presence of God, and God called attention to Job as a man who was righteous in all his ways. Satan replied that the reason Job was righteous was because God blessed him abundantly. But if God were to take those blessings away, Job will curse God to His face. So God allowed Satan to attack Job in the areas of his possessions and his family. The Lord wanted to prove that Job did not merely love Him because of what He had given to Job. Not only did Job not sin when his possessions and children were taken from him, but we are also told that when physical suffering later came to Job, he did not curse God for all that had befallen him. It is a great story of how one gave glory to God even in the midst of such suffering.
