When is that we most doubt God’s goodness in our lives? It’s often when we are suffering, we are praying, and we don’t understand why things aren’t changing. If God loved us and cared, would he be good to allow us to continue in suffering? Why doesn’t he do something?
The book of Job., whether a real story or a parabolic one on the ways of suffering, we do not know. But the message we are certain: Do we trust God even when everything has fallen apart? And remains that way?
As the story unfolds Job is a blessed man, very wealthy, and a man who fears God and abhors evil. He is perhaps the most righteous man of the times. And yet within the span of a short time of a single day, he loses it all–his children, his farm animals, his wealth. Everything.
The question is, how would Job respond? It says he says this (Job 1:21-22):
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked will I leave this life.
The LORD gives and the
LORD takes away.
Praise the name of Yahweh.”
Throughout all this Job did not sin or blame God for anything.”
Would that be us? Or would our hearts by crying to God, “Why??!!”
In 2017 I remember a Syrian man on national tv. A bomb had gone off and in their village and in an instant he had lost his wife, his two twin daughters, his mother, his father, and his brothers. How could one man endure so much loss?
How can anyone?
We live in a tension where God asks us to be raw before him. We see that in the Psalms. We see that in God’s request to bring all petitions before him. And yet we also see he asks us to trust him. To trust Him when everything is taken away and our lives are devastated.
When crisis happens, we ask one of two questions:
- Are you good? Don’t you care enough to do something?
- Are you not powerful? If so why didn’t you stop this? Why did you allow this? Why don’t you deliver me from this?
He is both good and powerful. Yet he sees things from a different perspective than we do. And we also live in a world of sin with terrible consequences. If he intervened in every one of them, he would be taking away our free will.
Everyone in life is tested at some point by these things. What will we do in the face of suffering?
And I believe that question is answered by 1000 daily choices we make every day.
Do we trust Him?