Suffering Perfects

1 -2 minutes

I don’t know of anyone who has not wondered at some point in their life why bad things happen to good people. We may pray to have ears to hear but we don’t like hearing that bad things happen regardless. We don’t like being reminded that we live in a fallen world, because when God appears on the surface not to act on our behalf, it leaves us feeling vulnerable.

The result is that many who would believe choose to fall away instead, being unable to reckon with a God who would allow suffering. They would rather choose not to believe in God at all.

If you then say that you don’t believe in God, you may have removed God from the equation but you haven’t removed the problem of suffering, have you? Regardless of if you believe in God or not, people still suffer. So what then?

I choose rather to believe there is a day coming when this world will be judged by a perfect human being – one in the form of God who so loved us that He chose to become one of us, suffer as we suffer, feeling every pain we feel.

If we allow God to come into our suffering, consider that He is able to use that suffering to perfect us in the same way it perfected Him.

⁸ Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. ⁹ And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation, ¹⁰ being designated by God as a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek. ¹¹ Concerning him we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. ¹² For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food. ¹³ For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. ¹⁴ But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil. – Hebrews 5:8-14