Mark Palenske, pastor of Greers Ferry First Assembly of God Church in Arkansas, and his wife, Dena, were sick with Covid-19 for two weeks. Dena was hospitalized for several days but is recovering at home as of March 25.
Even before the virus struck him and 34 members of his congregation, Palenske took the warnings seriously and suspended services at the church. Even so, the virus spread. Tuesday, March 24, one of their beloved members, 91-year-old Bill Barton, who served as a greeter at the church, died that morning at Conway Regional Medical Center. Barton was the second of two known deaths in Arkansas as a result of Covid-19.
When bad things happen, even something that spreads worldwide, shouldn’t Christians be given a pass? Admit it. You wonder, don’t you?
Even Christians are often confused about suffering. But our confusion tends to stem from our transactional perspective on our relationship with God.
A “transactional” relationship with God goes something like this– if I am a good person, then somehow God is obligated to make my life pleasant as well. And if my life is not pleasant, then it must mean God is not happy with me. I have a transaction, a contract of sorts, with God, and this is how it is supposed to work.
But the problem with that is obvious. And uncomfortable. A transactional perspective on our suffering makes it all about us. It’s me-centered and puts God on our level.
But the truth is, most of us assume this kind of relationship with God. We assume that God’s benevolence is somehow tied to our performance. If I am good, God is good to me. If I sin, God punishes me. It is a conditional, transactional relationship that is performance-based. And it is a recipe for disappointment, in yourself and in God.
So what is the biblical response to suffering and pain? And if God loves us, why do we experience such suffering in this world?
The biblical response to suffering rotates around three immutable truths.
- First, the Christian life is not about what happens to you. It’s about how you respond to what happens to you.
A transactional perspective on our relationship with God focuses intently on the circumstances—on what is happening to us. We ask “Why me?” because we assume that our contract with God should prevent any harsh circumstances, or at least soften our suffering.
And then we come to the Bible and we find that over and over, the people in the Bible suffer, and we are privy to their unnerving, raw, and emotional responses to their suffering. And inevitably, suffering brings them back to God, helps them handle the future, and even, if not especially, grows them in character.
In fact, there are some character traits that can only, and always, be cultivated in our suffering. For instance, perseverance (James 1:2-4). How can you grow in perseverance if you have nothing to endure?
And faith—how will your trust in God grow if it is never stretched? We want life to be all sparkles and sunshine, but faith grows when the mess is more than we can handle, because that’s when we tighten our grip on God and we won’t let go (Rom. 8:29).
That’s the point. Focusing on the circumstances implies God has some obligation to make the circumstances better. We never see that in the Bible. Why? Because God’s goal is not to make the circumstances better. God’s goal is to make us more like Christ (Rom. 8:29, 1 John 2:6). How can that possibly happen if we never suffer, since Christ’s most defining characteristic was His suffering (Luke 9:22)?
- Second, we live in a fallen world, but this is not all there is.
Bad things don’t happen to good people or bad people. Just people (Matt. 5:45). In other words, if you live on planet earth, you are susceptible to the coronavirus, to cancer, or to financial crises, regardless of whether you are a Christian or not.
It’s true that sometimes we contribute to our own pain and suffering by poor choices or bad habits. And human beings can inflict a staggering amount of suffering on other human beings. But for the most part, suffering is a part of the universal human experience because we live in a world tainted by sin (Rom. 5:12, 8:19).
But our salvation, and our hope, is not dictated by the temporal heartache we experience now. This world, fallen and messy and worsening by the day, is not the world God intended or the one we anticipate (Rom. 8:18). And what is to come matters more than what we experience right now. Remember, the very fact that you recognize suffering to be something wrong tells you that it is not meant to be this way, and that God’s plan far outweighs this present suffering. Hope is cultivated through eyes of faith (Rom. 8:24-25).
- Third, more than answers, we need God.
A transactional view of suffering makes us think we are greater than we really are. “Why me” really means, “I don’t deserve this.” Pride is our problem, which deludes us into believing that God is somehow obligated to own up to all this and give us some answers.
So, God reminds us we are not quite so awesome as we think we are. And suffering has a way of leveling the pride-curve (2 Cor.12:1-10). Don’t misunderstand. God doesn’t slap us with some suffering to get us back in line, but He allows it to remind us who we are. Fallen, broken, imperfect, and unsaved sinners in need of a gracious Savior.
And then God does the unthinkable, the extraordinary, the only thing He can do and the one thing we need more than answers. He shows up.
Job, a man in the Bible described as “a man of complete integrity, who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1), suffered more than most people could possibly endure. But his suffering didn’t turn him away from God. It weaned him from his transactional perspective, and he emerged with his faith stronger than ever (Job 19:25-27).
In other words, he realized, rather than answers, he needed God (Job 38-41). And he needed God to be God.
See, at the end of the day, in the middle of your pain and suffering, you don’t need God to fulfill some contrived, human-centered contract. You don’t need God to behave on your terms, to fluff your pillow and answer all your questions and babble health-and-wealth clichés. You don’t need God to soften your world. That’s not what you need.
You need God to do the one thing that only God can do. You need God to be God.
In the middle of your suffering, you need God to fulfill His promise that He will never leave you, abandon you, or forget you (Deut. 31:6). And He doesn’t.
You need God to strengthen your faith, to restore your perspective, and to meet your needs (John 16:33, Heb. 13:5). So He does.
And you need God to remind you that nothing in this world is stronger than Him or His love for you. And His love for you is not a transaction. It is a fact, a part of His nature, an unbreakable, eternal condition. It’s not based on the circumstances or tied to your performance. You can’t mess it up, and the world can’t defeat it.
You need God to remind you of that. So He already has.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Rom. 8:35-37).