Facing Suffering

Toward the end of Randy Alcorn’s If God Is God, he offers some helpful insights from Job’s story for those who are suffering:

Job has taught me many valuable lessons, including these:

• Life is not predictable or formulaic.

• Most of life’s expectations and suffering’s explanations are simplistic and naïve, waiting to be toppled.

• When the day of crisis comes, we should pour out our hearts to God, who can handle our grief and even our anger.

• We should not turn from God and internalize our anger, allowing it to become bitterness.

• We should weigh and measure the words of friends, authors, teachers, and counselors, finding whatever truth they might speak without embracing their errors or getting derailed by their insensitivities.

• We should not insist on taking control by demanding a rational explanation for the evils and suffering that befall us.

• We should look to God and ask him to reveal himself to us; in contemplating his greatness we will come to see him as the Answer above all answers.

• We should trust that God is working behind the scenes and that our suffering has hidden purposes that one day, even if not in this life, we will see.

• We should cry out to Jesus, the mediator and friend whom Job could only glimpse, but who indwells us by grace.

(See Tuesday’s post for more on If God Is Good.)

Comments

[Daniel]

I've felt that we need to endure suffering with a sense of responsibility for how we react, and to behave with as much dignity as can be mustered.

[Jim]

'We should not insist on taking control by demanding a rational explanation for the evils and suffering that befall us.'

Makes me want to try skydiving--so much of the Christian life seems like free-fall!

Only we're falling up!