Why Does God Let Good People Suffer so much Pain?
Why does God allow good people, His own children, born-again believers—to suffer? The problem of pain and suffering is as old as mankind, and so is the consistent answer God has always given. We all share something in common, the painful problem of afflictions.
Listen carefully and mark your Bibles with me. This one lesson you learn this morning may impact you all the rest of your life. Today we are looking at pains and problems, trials and troubles, and afflictions and adversities. What they are and why they come. And when they do come – how to respond.
The Christian life will sometimes be painful and full of problems. To get an idea of the scope of affliction just interview a few characters from the Bible. Does following the Lord have a price attached?
Ask Abel, his blood still cries from the earth where it splashed as a wicked brother murdered him in the first religious war. Abel was a man of simple faith and Cain the murderer was a man of human achievement.
Or you may wish to listen to Enoch about how painfully hard it was to walk all alone with God when the whole world wasn’t. Again you might hear the voice of Noah rising above the hostile crowd who pressured and pestered him for 120 years as he obeyed God even when no one else in the world listened, believed or even cared. The Christian life will sometimes be painful and full of problems.
Scriptures are filled with the painful troubles that follow God’s saints.
Abraham had to leave all his loved ones and culture behind, to follow God. He wandered in the desert and lived in a tent awaiting a son whom it never seemed was going to come. And then he nearly had to kill that son of promise as an offering to God. Being in God’s family doesn’t mean a life of leisure. The Christian life will sometimes be painful and full of problems.
Moses chose to follow God and lost everything, was hunted as a criminal, mocked by his own people, belittled by his wife, and nearly stoned to death by the rebellious people of God.
David, the man after God’s own heart was betrayed by friends, pursued by foes, wracked with depression, attacked by his own wife, nearly murdered by his father-in-law, and hunted like an animal. All that while writing some of the sweetest portions of God’s Word and singing the songs of highest worship to God. The Christian life will sometimes be painful and full of problems.
The New Testament follows the same pattern. The greatest man ever born until Jesus is mocked, imprisoned, forgotten, and then silenced by beheading in a dark dungeon. The Owner of the Universe visits His own and they receive Him not. Instead, they revile and mock Him, calling Him a drunken, illegitimate, demonized fake. They try to stone Him, push Him off steep hills and interrupt His ministry. Finally, after infiltrating the very inner circle of His earthly family His enemies set up a kidnapping murder plan that works and the Lamb of God is slain for the very sinful ones that killed Him. The Christian life will sometimes be painful and full of problems.
After the Crucifixion things only continue to deteriorate. The apostles are imprisoned, roughed up, beaten, and harassed nearly 50 times in the book of Acts alone. And those are only the recorded incidents, doubtlessly there were many more. In the end, all of the apostolic band are hunted down and either crucified, beheaded, shot through with arrows, or skinned alive. Only one survives his execution attempt. John is boiled in oil and lives to go on for Jesus in exile on a barren prison colony island called Patmos. There he writes the last Word from God that promises only more of the same to the end of the world. The Christian life will sometimes be painful and full of problems.
God has written a code, a program, a set of plans that operates to guide our daily lives as humans.
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