Introduction — The Rumble of Panic Beneath Everything
When huge numbers die at once — the 1970 Bhola cyclone, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the 2010 Haiti earthquake, each killing 300,000 or more — the world reels. But statistics mislead: such disasters do not change the suffering rate. Tens of thousands die every day in unexpected tragedies, because pain is the norm in this world.
Ernest Becker warned against denying this. Bereavement, illness, betrayal, financial reversal, and moral failure will come upon anyone who lives a normal span. Human life is fatally fragile, which makes the question of God urgent. When suffering comes we see that we never were in control. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain,” and doctrinal truths seldom reach the heart except through loss. As one man losing his career and family said, “You don’t really know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”
Suffering is one of Scripture’s main themes, yet the Bible’s great theme is that God brings joy not despite but through suffering, as Jesus saved us through the cross. Scripture likens trials to a “fiery furnace” (1 Peter 1:6–7) — really a forge, whose heat does not destroy but refines and beautifies. Each chapter ahead is one strategy for that walk — as in Daniel 3, where three men are thrown into the fire but the watchers see a fourth figure beside them, “the son of the gods,” and they walk through unconsumed.
Chapter 1 — The Cultures of Suffering
Dr. Paul Brand, who treated leprosy in India and then America, was stunned by the contrast: the United States, he wrote, “seeks to avoid pain at all costs,” and its people were “far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.” He noticed that American patients often became disabled by relatively minor pain, while Indian patients with far more severe damage continued working and relating — a difference he traced not to biology but to culture and meaning.
The secular worldview explains why. If this material world is all there is, life’s meaning is the freedom to choose what makes you happy — so suffering is a pure interruption, a malfunction with no purpose. Contrast this with every pre-modern and non-Western tradition: Hinduism sees suffering as karma, a consequence that can be endured toward a better rebirth; Stoicism sees it as a test of rational self-mastery; Islam sees it as God’s trial of a servant. All of these, however different, share the conviction that suffering has a purpose — and so, faced wisely, it can speed you toward your destination rather than halt you.
As C. S. Lewis observed, the ancients’ problem was how to conform the soul to reality; modernity’s is how to subdue reality to our wishes. Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, real; contra karma, often unfair; but contra secularism, meaningful. Other worldviews leave us sitting amid life’s joys foreseeing the sorrows; Christianity lets us sit amid the sorrows, tasting the coming joy.
Chapter 2 — The Victory of Christianity
What do we desire above all? To be loved, and “not to die and not to have our loved ones die on us.” Suffering strips away the loves and comforts we rely on for meaning, so we keep our peace only if we locate meaning in something death cannot touch.
Early Christians insisted their lives proved this. Rodney Stark’s historical research showed that Christianity won the ancient world partly because believers stayed in plague-struck cities that pagans fled, caring for the dying at the risk of their own lives. Cyprian wrote that the difference was eschatological: when you believe in the resurrection, death loses its ultimacy. Only when our greatest love is God, which we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace.
And the Christian hope goes further: other faiths offer consolation for a lost life, but Christianity offers its restoration. We get our bodies and lives back — better than we had — for the resurrection reverses death’s irreversibility. Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 15 that if Christ was raised, then everything that death takes from us will be returned. The resurrection is not mere metaphor; it is the load-bearing beam of Christian hope. In his resurrection Jesus’ scars became his glory, and God has promised to make our scars our glory too.
Chapter 3 — The Challenge of the Secular
”You desire to know the art of living? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering” — an instinct modern Western life has forgotten. Viktor Frankl, who survived three years in the Nazi death camps, saw that some prisoners endured while others could not, and the difference was meaning. Those who had a “why” for their existence could bear almost any “how.” Frankl observed that the men who comforted others in the camps, giving away their last piece of bread, proved that everything can be taken from a human being except the freedom to choose one’s response to circumstances.
Contemporary people think life is about finding happiness — but to live for happiness is to try to get something out of life, so when suffering removes its conditions, your reason to live collapses. To live for meaning is the reverse: life expects something of you, something you would gladly sacrifice your happiness for. Christian teaching turns this around: how we suffer is a main way we become Christ-like and show the world our Savior’s love, and almost no one grows into greatness or finds God without suffering. C. S. Lewis wrote that God whispers in our pleasures but shouts in our pain — not because he is cruel, but because pain is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.
Psalm 34:18
Chapter 4 — The Problem of Evil
If God is all-powerful and sovereign yet perfectly good, the existence of evil poses a problem. Epicurus put it sharply: if God is willing to prevent evil but unable, he is impotent; if able but unwilling, malevolent. Many call this the strongest objection to God’s existence.
The classic answer is the free-will defense: God made us free agents able to choose, and so to love — but to choose good freely we must be able to choose evil. Augustine and Aquinas taught that evil is not a substance but the corruption of some good thing God made. Yet the Bible shows the free-will defense has limits: Jesus’ crucifixion was foreordained, yet all who brought it about acted freely and were responsible (Acts 2:23). And if God is infinitely knowledgeable, he could have morally sufficient reasons for allowing evil that we simply cannot think of. If a butterfly’s flight is too complex for us to trace, how could we look at one seemingly senseless death and know its effects across history? Problems remain, but God replaces their sting with hope, fixing our eyes on the One who will someday end heartache forever.
Chapter 5 — The Challenge of Faith
The evil we see was not part of God’s original design, which means even a peaceful death at ninety is not the way things were meant to be. The “rage at the dying of the light” is our true intuition that we were not made for mortality — when we tell the grieving that death is perfectly natural, we ask them to repress a profound and right instinct: that love was meant to last.
The doctrine of Judgment Day lets us live with both hope and grace: it gives incentive to work for justice, since all wrongs will finally be redressed; and it frees us to forgive rather than avenge. One day there will be no more unmerited suffering; every tear will be wiped away. This is what Tolkien meant: a day when “everything sad is going to come untrue.”
That hope does not let us interrogate God now. We do not know why God allows evil, but we know what the reason is not: it cannot be that he does not love us, for he plunged into the depths of suffering himself. Had Jesus come the first time with a sword to destroy every source of evil, no human being would be left. He came not to bring justice but to bear it — not with a sword in his hands but with nails through them — so that one day he can return to end evil without destroying us all.
Chapter 6 — The Sovereignty of God
When Adam and Eve fall, God describes a world that is virtually a catalogue of suffering — spiritual alienation, inner pain, social cruelty, natural disaster, disease, and death (Genesis 3:17) — all flowing from the rupture of our relationship with God. This is the Bible’s answer to why suffering exists: not that God designed it into creation, but that it cascades from a broken relationship. That matters, because a relationship can be restored.
God is not detached: the sight of Lazarus’s tomb enraged Jesus even though he was about to raise him, because the family’s grief brought home the evil of death, its “violent tyranny,” as Calvin says. The Greek verb John uses — embrimaomai — is translated “deeply moved” but means something closer to indignant fury. Jesus does not gaze calmly on suffering from above; he recoils from it. Joseph tells his brothers, “You intended me harm, but God intended it for good… the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20). Exodus says God hardened Pharaoh’s heart about as often as it says Pharaoh hardened his own — and the biblical answer to both is yes. No one can say exactly how divine sovereignty and human freedom fit together, yet good human leaders guide people without violating their wills, so why not the infinite God perfectly? Romans 8’s promise that “all things work together for good” is therefore an incomparable comfort to those who seek, not stability, but total dependence on God.
Chapter 7 — The Suffering of God
The gospels show Jesus living the ordinary pains of human life — weariness and thirst (John 4:6), grief and being “troubled in heart,” prayers offered “with loud cries and tears” (Hebrews 5:7), misunderstanding by friends, rejection by his hometown, and temptation by the devil. Amazingly, he even “learned” from what he suffered (Hebrews 5:8).
It deepened from there: abandoned and betrayed by those he had poured his life into, and on the cross forsaken even by his Father (Matthew 27:46). The cry of dereliction — “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” — was the real thing, not theater. God the Son experienced the final alienation that is the consequence of sin, so that we need never face it. Jürgen Moltmann argues that the cross means God has been inside every dungeon, every hospital room, every moment of abandonment — not as an observer but as a fellow sufferer.
And still he enters his people’s suffering — confronting Saul the persecutor, he asks, “Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9:4), so fully does he identify with them that their hurt is his. That entry into our suffering is love arriving at its highest point — “greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). The God who asks us to walk through fire has already walked through it himself.
Chapter 8 — The Reason for Suffering
God has purposed to defeat evil so completely on the cross that all its ravages will one day be undone, and we, though caught up in it, saved. A man facing a terminal diagnosis put it this way: in the middle of many operas there is a crucial aria in which the hero turns sorrow into something beautiful. “This is my moment to sing the aria. I don’t want this chance, but it’s here now, and what am I going to do about it?”
Because the ultimate purpose of life is to glorify God, the first and hardest purpose of our suffering is God’s glory — and Scripture links suffering and glory again and again (Romans 8:17–18). When the Amish forgave and loved the family of the man who shot their schoolchildren, their response became the talk of the country, a powerful testimony to the grace of their God. Joni Eareckson Tada wrestled with the purpose of her friend Denise’s death until a friend showed her that angels rejoice over a repentant sinner (Luke 15:10) and watch what happens in the church (Ephesians 3:10). If Christianity is true, everything we do is done before unseen beings, and God sees it too. As Joni wrote of her friend, “Angels and demons stood amazed as they watched her uncomplaining and patient spirit rising as a sweet-smelling savor to God.” No suffering is for nothing.
Chapter 9 — Learning to Walk
A principle at the heart of the Christian life shows up in two of Jesus’ sayings: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled” (Matthew 5:6), and “Whoever loses their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Seek God as your nonnegotiable good and you get happiness thrown in; aim mainly at happiness and you get neither.
We must never see suffering primarily as self-improvement — that slides toward masochism — but as a way to know God better. In good times, how do you know whether you love God or only his gifts? Only in suffering can we hear God ask, “Did you get into this relationship for me to serve you, or for you to serve me? Were you loving me, or only the things I gave you?” There is also a beautiful reciprocity: God “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Those carried through deep waters can stand beside others as no training alone can equip them to. Growth is not automatic, though; suffering must be faced patiently, and it is one thing to have an explanation for suffering, another to find a path through it so that, instead of growing bitter, you grow wiser, humbler, and even content. That is the distance this book means to help you travel.
Chapter 10 — The Varieties of Suffering
”The same sun that melts wax hardens clay.” One trauma can ruin one person and strengthen another, so we must never assume every sufferer needs the same medicine.
Some suffering is caused by our own failures — when David committed adultery and had Uriah killed, the child of that union died. It is crucial to tell such a “David” experience apart from a “Job” one. Other suffering comes from good and brave behavior: Paul catalogues prison, floggings, shipwrecks, and hunger. In grief, Christians are not to “grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Job-type suffering calls for honest crying and deliberate trust.
Simone Weil named the marks of affliction in its deepest form: first, isolation — a barrier rises between the sufferer and even close friends; second, implosion — pain makes you helplessly self-absorbed; then a sense of doom, anger, and finally complicity — affliction can inject a “poison of inertia” until we grow comfortable with our discomfort. The Bible’s many truths must be applied in a different order by circumstance and temperament; there is more than one path through the valley of the shadow, and the Lord, the perfect Guide, will help you find it.
Chapter 11 — Walking
One of the Bible’s main metaphors for facing affliction is walking — through something perilous: walking in darkness (“Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me,” Psalm 23:4). The Christian balance is neither denial nor surrender: not to let suffering have its way, nor to imagine we can dodge it, but to move through it. God does not say “if” but “when” you go through the fire — and the promise is not removal but presence: “When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned… Do not be afraid, for I am with you” (Isaiah 43:2–3, 5).
This came literally true for Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who told Nebuchadnezzar before a furnace heated seven times hotter, “Our God is able to deliver us. But if not, we will not serve your gods” (Daniel 3:17–18). Those words “but if not” show that their confidence rested in God himself, not in their reading of what he would do. Many who say “I prayed so hard, but he let me down” had really set their hope on their own agenda; the three friends held to God, not to an outcome. Walking is nondramatic and rhythmic: day in and day out praying, reading the Bible and Psalms, obeying, leaning on Christian friends, sharing fully in a church.
Chapter 12 — Weeping
A great many psalms are Psalms of Lament — some voicing frustration with God himself: “Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?” (Psalm 44:23). Job models the same honesty: hearing his children are dead, he “tore his robe” and “fell to the ground” (Job 1:20), yet “in all this Job sinned not.” By mid-book he curses the day he was born and nearly charges God with injustice — and still God’s final verdict on him is surprisingly positive.
The reason becomes clear when we see what kind of God this is. Of the Suffering Servant, Isaiah says, “a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (Isaiah 42:3). The church has always read this as Jesus (Matthew 12:20): he is drawn to hopeless cases and loves the beaten and bruised. See what he does with Elijah — a mighty prophet cracking under his ministry, despondent and suicidal: “Take away my life” (1 Kings 19:4). God’s first move is not a lecture: he sends an angel to cook him a meal, saying, “Get up and eat… the journey is too much for you.” Reasoning comes second, because Elijah is also a body needing rest and gentleness. Suffering people need to weep and pour out their hearts, not be shut down with instructions. As one grieving man recalled, the friend who quoted true things left him cold; the friend who simply sat with him for an hour, saying little, left him comforted.
Psalm 88 even ends with no note of hope at all — and God did not censor such prayers from his Bible. The deepest proof is Jesus’ own cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). If the Son of God could pray that to his Father, our cries of grief are no failure of faith but the start of the same honest, clinging address to God. Weep. Pour it out. He is not offended, and he is not absent.
Chapter 13 — Trusting
A saying cuts through all the philosophizing: “If God were small enough to be understood, he wouldn’t be big enough to be worshipped.” Trust, by definition, means stepping into what we cannot see. Joseph prayed for rescue and got slavery, then prison, then the salvation of a nation — far better than he could have imagined.
The Old Testament records the honest disorientation of those who trusted and were not immediately answered. Psalm 73 begins with Asaph nearly losing his faith — the wicked prosper, the righteous suffer — until he enters the sanctuary and sees the end of the story. His conclusion is not an explanation; it is a person: “Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you” (Psalm 73:25). That is mature trust: not the certainty that God will explain, but the certainty that God is worth holding onto even if he never does.
Sometimes we wish God would send us our book, explaining every reason for every cross. But even without the reasons, we can look at the cross and know he is working things out — for there the worst thing that ever happened became, in his hands, the best thing that ever happened. That is enough to trust him with what we cannot yet understand.
Chapter 14 — Praying
When the first wave of catastrophe breaks over Job, he grieves yet bows and worships: “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised” (Job 1:21). Job’s friends string together accurate statements yet fail pastorally, because they know doctrine but not how to sit with a broken person. God’s appearance is arresting: he comes in a storm, and Job’s children had been killed by one. Job never sees the big picture; he sees only God — and that is what we truly need.
The crucial thing is that through it all Job never stopped praying — he complained, doubted, and screamed, but to God. And in the end God said Job triumphed: not because all was fine or his motives pure, but because his dogged seeking drove him toward God rather than away. We must not only listen to our hearts but talk to them: when the heart says, “It’s hopeless,” answer, “That depends on what you were hoping in.” Practice self-communion — recall who God is, what he has done, and what he has promised — for that turning toward God’s character is itself prayer, where the darkness begins, slowly, to lift.
Chapter 15 — Thinking, Thanking, Loving
Paul writes from prison, “I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether in plenty or in want” (Philippians 4:11–12). That secret begins with his idea of peace: “the peace of God will guard your hearts” (Philippians 4:7), where “guard” is a military word for fortifying a city. This peace is not the absence of negative thoughts, but a presence: “The God of peace will be with you.” Paul names three disciplines for finding it: thinking, thanking, and loving.
Thinking: “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right — think about such things” (Philippians 4:8). One preacher put it in three propositions: bad things will work out for good (Romans 8:28); good things — adoption, justification, union with God — cannot be taken away (Romans 8:1); and the best things — resurrection and a new creation — are yet to come (Revelation 22:1). Thanking: “make requests to God with thanksgiving” (Philippians 4:6) — Paul says to give thanks as you ask, before you know the answer. Loving: the Stoics taught that we suffer because we love things too much, and prescribed reduced attachment. Augustine disagreed: “only love of the immutable can bring tranquility.” Our career, family, and fortunes can all change; but God and his love are immutable. The problem is not that you love your family too much, but that you love God too little in proportion. Cultivate a deep rest in God, and suffering can sting but cannot uproot you.
Chapter 16 — Hoping
Human beings are hope-shaped creatures: how you live now is controlled by what you believe about your future. Do you believe in new heavens and a new earth, a Judgment Day when every injustice is redressed, a future of endless joy? Your answers are not mere theology; they are the hidden load-bearing walls of your soul.
Donald Grey Barnhouse, a pastor, lost his wife to cancer. Driving his children home from the funeral, he saw a large truck pass, its shadow sweeping over the car, and asked his daughter, “Would you rather be run over by a truck, or by its shadow?” “By the shadow, of course.” “Right,” he said. “It was only the shadow of death that went over your mother. Two thousand years ago the real truck of death hit Jesus. And because death crushed Jesus, and we believe in him, now the only thing that can come over us is the shadow of death — and the shadow of death is but my entrance into glory.” That is the hope that makes defiance possible before the worst the world can do.
Epilogue
If we know the biblical theology of suffering and have our hearts engaged by it, when grief and loss come we will not be surprised but can respond as Scripture lays out — in ten things to do.
First, recognize the varieties of suffering: from our own wrong behavior; from others’ betrayals; the universal losses that reach everyone — death, illness, our own dying; and the horrendous, like mass shootings. Each carries its own register — guilt, anger, grief, confusion at God — and needs its own response.
Second, recognize differences in temperament. Do not assume God will lead you through the fire exactly as he led someone else. Third, weep. Be brutally honest with God about your pain; do not deny or over-control your feelings in the name of faith. Read the Psalms of lament and Job, and pour out your soul. Fourth, trust. Even while pouring out your heart, trust God’s wisdom, since he is sovereign, and his love, since he has been through what you face. Like Jesus, who first prayed “Let this cup pass from me,” wrestle until you can say, “Thy will be done.”
Fifth, pray. Job complained and cursed the day of his birth — but he did it all to God. Read, pray, and worship even when it is dry. Sixth, think with discipline. Gain perspective by remembering all God has done and will do; practice self-communion, both hearing your heart and reasoning with it: “Why are you cast down, O my soul? Forget not his benefits.” Seventh, self-examine. Treat every adversity as a chance to ask how you need to grow. Eighth, reorder your loves — suffering often doubles because we have turned good things into ultimate things. Ninth, do not shirk community. Find a church where sufferers are loved; you were not designed to walk through the furnace alone. Tenth, learn grace and forgiveness in both directions. These ten are not a ladder to climb but a life to walk — day in, day out, with the God who has already passed through the fire and promises to walk it with you.