Perhaps you are suffering right now. Perhaps you are watching someone you love suffer, and you do not know how to help. Or perhaps suffering is the reason you have never been able to believe, because it seems to you that a good God would never allow what you have seen.
This article is for all three of you. The Bible’s answer to the question is stranger and better than a tidy one: a God who stepped into suffering himself.
One note before we begin. If you already trust Jesus and you came here hurting, the part of this article written most directly for you comes after the prayer, near the end. It is worth the journey.
Jesus Said Trouble Would Come
Jesus saw it coming. On the night before he died, he gathered his closest friends and told them the truth about the life ahead of them.
| “I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33, ESV |
Read the middle sentence again. In the world you will have tribulation. Jesus said this to the people who loved him most, and he offered them no exemption. He promised them his peace and he promised them trouble in a single sentence, and he has kept both promises. His followers in every generation have met the trouble, and in the middle of it he has kept offering the peace.
So a follower of Jesus who is suffering has not wandered off the map. Jesus drew the map with trouble on it. Some voices teach that faith brings health, wealth, and a smooth road, and that pain in your life means something is wrong with your faith. Jesus taught the opposite, in plain words, on the most solemn night of his life. Any promise of a suffering-free life is a promise he never made.
At the bottom of this page there is a button that reads I Need Prayer. If you are carrying more than you can hold today, you do not have to finish this article first. Press it, and a person on our team will pray for you and reply.
Where Suffering Came From
The Bible’s answer starts earlier than most people expect, at the beginning of everything. God made the world, and everything he made was good. Bodies were good. Work was good. Food, friendship, rest, sunlight: God looked at all he had made and called it very good.
None of it is still as he made it. When people turned away from God, the damage ran out into everything, so that the world we live in now is a good world that has been spoiled: bodies that fail, work that exhausts, love that wounds, people who wound each other, beauty that does not last. Suffering lives in the spoiling. It entered through rebellion against God, and the damage has never stopped spreading.
Human rebellion is only part of the story. The Bible says a spiritual being called Satan rebelled against God before people did, and drew others with him, and their influence still stirs evil and suffering in this world. God made every spiritual being good, and evil began in a creature’s choice, never in him. Every rebel power now stands under the authority of Jesus, who came, in the Bible’s own words, “to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8, ESV).
One of the Bible’s writers described the world this way:
| “For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.”
Romans 8:22, ESV |
Groaning in the pains of childbirth. The picture is pain that is deep and present, and yet points forward, pain that ends in something being born. We will come back to that. For now, hold on to both halves of the truth: the world is good, because God made it, and the world is spoiled, because we turned. Your suffering belongs to the spoiling. It is one more thing that is not the way it was made to be.
We wrote more about this spoiled world, and about how Jesus sets people free within it, in Can Jesus Liberate Us from the Things of This World?.
What God Does Not Tell Us
Here we must be honest with you about what we cannot tell you, because the Bible is honest about it first.
Scripture explains where suffering came from. It declares what God has done about suffering and what he will do to end it. What scripture does not give is the reason for your particular suffering, and neither will we. The Bible never hands out private explanations, and it reserves some of its sharpest words for people who do.
The Bible contains an entire book about this. A man named Job lost his children, his health, and everything he owned, and three friends came to explain his suffering to him. They were certain it had a reason, and certain they knew what it was. When God finally spoke at the end of the book, the friends were the ones he rebuked, for speaking wrongly about him. Job himself was never told why. He was given something greater than a reason: God himself, present and speaking.
The Bible also refuses the opposite certainty, that suffering arrives as punishment matched to your sins. When Jesus met a man blind from birth and was asked whose sin had caused it, his or his parents’, Jesus answered that it was neither (John 9:2-3).
So be gentle with the question of why, and be wary of anyone who claims to read God’s purposes in your pain, even when the voice is kind, and even when the voice is your own. Job’s friends meant well too.
Some Suffering Comes Because You Follow Jesus
There is one kind of suffering the Bible does explain plainly: the kind named in this article’s title. Some suffering comes to a person precisely because they follow Jesus. He said this too, on the same night:
| “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.”
John 15:18-20, ESV |
When Jesus speaks of the world here, he means humanity organized in rebellion against God, the same rebellion that spoiled creation. People who belong to Jesus step out of that rebellion, and the rebellion notices. Across the centuries, and in many places today, following Jesus has cost people their reputation, their work, their family, and sometimes their life. Yet Jesus placed a quiet hope inside the warning: some will keep his word too. Some who watch a follower suffer become followers themselves.
If this is your situation, or could become your situation, we will not tell you from a distance what to do, whom to tell, or when. Those decisions belong to you, made with God’s help, in God’s timing, and silence chosen for safety is not a failure of faith. What we can say is that Jesus sees, and that a servant is not greater than the master who was hated first. If you would like to write to someone about it, the I Have a Question button at the bottom of this page sends us a message, and a person on our team will write back to you.
What Jesus Did About a Spoiled World
Everything to this point has been diagnosis. Now comes what God did about it. God entered the suffering, in the person of the Son.
Jesus is God the Son, fully God and fully human. The eternal Son took on a human body and a human life with everything that includes. He knew hunger and weariness. He wept at the grave of a friend. He was betrayed by someone he loved, abandoned by his friends, and executed unjustly. Whatever suffering means, Jesus knows it from the inside.
Then he did what he had come to do. He went to the cross, the wooden structure the Romans used to execute criminals, and he suffered there on purpose, for us.
| “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit.”
1 Peter 3:18, ESV |
The righteous for the unrighteous. That is the heart of it. Every person has sinned. Every person has joined, in their own way, the turn away from God that spoiled the world. Sin carries a penalty, because God is just and sin cannot be waved away. The penalty is death, and a separation from God that lasts beyond death, forever, unless it is healed. On the cross, Jesus stood in the place of sinners and paid that penalty himself. The Father sent his Son, and the Son went willingly, and the two acted as one, because the Father and the Son are one God.
Why would God do that? The Bible answers plainly:
| “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Romans 5:8, ESV |
Love that did more than feel for us from a distance. Love that walked into the spoiled world and took the worst it could do. We explain the cross more fully in Why Did Jesus Die?.
On the third day, the Father raised Jesus from the dead, bodily. The tomb was empty. His followers saw him, touched him, ate with him. The resurrection is a fact of history, and it means death itself has been defeated. The one who said “In the world you will have tribulation” is the same one who said “I have overcome the world,” and the empty tomb is the reason those words hold.
Here is what he offers you: forgiveness of sin, peace with God, and eternal life. Eternal life is unending life with God. It begins the moment you trust him, and it continues beyond death into his renewed world. Receiving it takes faith, so let us be clear about what that means. Faith is trusting Jesus himself. It is leaning your whole weight on who he is and what he did, the way you lean on a bridge rather than standing back and admiring it.
Faith is more than agreeing that these things happened. Jesus is the only way to God, and everyone who trusts him is received, from any nation, any background, any past. Trusting him begins a new life of following him, and turning from sin grows out of that trust the way fruit grows on a tree. None of that new life is paying him back for the gift, because the gift was never for sale.
Even the desire to trust him is something God stirs. The Bible says the Holy Spirit, who is God himself, is the one who draws people to Jesus and opens their eyes to who he is. If you feel that pull as you read, take it seriously.
Maybe you are still looking. You do not have to pretend to be further along than you are. If you are willing, you can pray something like this:
| God, I am carrying pain, and I am carrying questions. If what I have read here is true, show me. Help me see who Jesus is. Amen. |
It is an honest prayer, and God welcomes honesty.
If you are ready for the gift itself, you can tell him so right now, in your own words or with these:
| Jesus, thank you for entering this suffering world for me. I have sinned and I need your forgiveness. I am truly sorry for the wrong I have done. I believe you died on the cross in my place and rose from the dead. Today I put my trust in you. Be my Savior and my Lord, and lead me from this day forward, whatever comes. Amen. |
Here is what God says to everyone who calls on him:
| “For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.’”
Romans 10:13, ESV |
If that prayer was your trust in Jesus, the Father heard you. You spoke to Jesus, and the Father heard, because the Son and the Father are one God. He made that promise in his own Word, and he always keeps his promise. Your assurance rests on him, on his promise and his character. It does not depend on how strongly you felt while praying, on whether you said the words perfectly, or on how well you will walk in the days ahead.
A Man Who Asked God to Take the Pain Away
The Bible is one book made of many, written across centuries by writers carried along by God, and one of them knew suffering closely. His name was Paul. Following Jesus cost him beatings, prison, and shipwreck, and alongside all of it he lived with something he called a thorn in his flesh, an ongoing affliction he never names. He wrote:
| “Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
2 Corinthians 12:8-9, ESV |
Paul asked. He asked again. He asked a third time. The answer was no, and the no came wrapped in a promise: my grace is sufficient for you. Grace means God’s kindness, given as a gift. Paul was as close to Jesus as a person can be, and the thorn stayed anyway. His ongoing pain was no verdict on his faith and no measure of God’s love for him.
What Paul received was Christ’s power resting on him inside the weakness. God’s answer to Paul’s suffering was more of God. Sometimes that is his answer to ours. Paul came to call it a greater answer than relief, though it took him time, and grace, to see it that way. If your prayers for relief have gone unanswered, you are standing where one of the most faithful followers of Jesus once stood, and the promise he received is held out to everyone who is in Jesus: my grace is sufficient.
What Is True of You Now
If you have put your trust in Jesus, whether years ago or minutes ago, this is where you stand while the world is still spoiled.
Sin’s penalty is settled. Fully, finally, now. The cross closed that account the day Jesus died, and nothing that happens to you, and nothing you suffer, can reopen it.
Sin’s rule over you is broken, and its pull weakens as the Holy Spirit works freedom into you across a lifetime. That work is his, and he is patient.
Sin’s presence remains, for now, and the spoiled world’s suffering remains with it. This is why you can be fully forgiven and still be in pain, still grieving, still ill, still waiting. Your suffering does not mean the story has failed. It means the story is not finished.
Jesus is with you in the unfinished part. His presence is immediate and unbroken, in the hospital room, the empty house, and the long night. Listen to Paul, the man with the thorn: “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18, ESV). Paul also wrote that God works in all things for the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28). Read that carefully. It says God is at work for good in all things, which is different from calling all things good. He wastes nothing, including the things that should never have happened.
Then Paul wrote this, and if you are in Jesus, it is yours:
| “For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Romans 8:38-39, ESV |
Suffering can take much from you. It cannot take you from him.
When Suffering Ends
The Bible ends with God coming down. Its last pages show a renewed creation, the good world healed and made new, and a voice from the throne announcing what living there will be like:
| “And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’”
Revelation 21:3-4, ESV |
Look where God is in that picture. He comes down to dwell with his people, and he wipes the tears from their eyes himself. In this story, the last word belongs to God, and so does the last chapter. The former things pass away, and the good world God made, spoiled for a time, is delivered like the child that creation’s groaning always pointed to.
A follower of Jesus who dies before that day is with Jesus immediately. Resurrection day adds the risen body and the healed world to a fellowship that was never interrupted. We write more about that in Does Jesus Give You Life After Death?.
So why do those who follow Jesus suffer in this life? Because the world is still spoiled, and the story is not finished. Why do they hope? Because the Son of God entered the spoiling, carried it to the cross, walked out of the tomb alive, and promised to come and wipe away every tear. He always keeps his promise.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are you saying God caused this?
No. God made the world good, and suffering entered when his creatures, human and spiritual, turned against him, spilling damage into everything he had made. The Bible states that God cannot be tempted with evil and tempts no one (James 1:13), and that in him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1:5). Christians hold different understandings of why God permits suffering to continue for a time, and this article will not settle that question. What is settled is where suffering began, in rebellion against God, and where it ends, in the renewed world where he wipes away every tear. We write more about Satan, and about why he is no rival to Jesus, in Are Jesus and the Devil Equals?.
If God loves me, why doesn’t he stop it?
The Bible answers with what God has done and what he will do, and it leaves much of the in-between unexplained. He has already acted, at the greatest possible cost: on the cross, God the Son absorbed the worst of this spoiled world in his own body. He has promised the day when death shall be no more and every tear is wiped away (Revelation 21:4). Why he allows suffering to continue between those two points is a question scripture never fully answers, and we will not pretend to answer it for him. What we can say is that the cross has already settled whether he loves you.
Does my suffering mean I don’t have enough faith?
No. Jesus told his followers plainly that in this world they would have tribulation (John 16:33). Paul, among the most faithful followers of Jesus who ever lived, pleaded three times for his suffering to end and heard God say no (2 Corinthians 12:8-9). If suffering measured faith, Paul would stand condemned first, and Jesus himself, the only perfect person in history, suffered more than anyone. Suffering means you live in a world that is still spoiled, and God has promised to renew it.
I don’t know what to say to someone who’s suffering. Am I failing them?
You are not failing them, and you do not need an explanation to be a comfort. When Job lost everything, his three friends did their best work in the first week, when they sat with him on the ground and said nothing. The damage began when they started explaining. Your presence says what words cannot. The Bible calls God “the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who 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, ESV). That comfort is what God offers to everyone who turns to him. Sit with them. Grieve with them. The explanations were never assigned to you.
I prayed and nothing changed. Did God hear me?
A prayer being heard and a circumstance changing are two different things, and the Bible never equates them. Paul pleaded three times and the thorn stayed, yet God had heard every word and answered him with grace and with his own presence (2 Corinthians 12:8-9). Scripture also says, “The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18, ESV). God may change your circumstance in this life, and he may answer the way he answered Paul, with himself, until the day all things are made new. Unchanged circumstances are a hard answer to receive. They are never proof that no one was listening.
Other beliefs explain suffering too. Why should I think Jesus is different?
Many teachings offer an account of suffering, and most offer one of two things: an explanation to accept or a technique for escaping. Jesus belongs to a different category. He entered suffering himself, carried its full weight on the cross, rose bodily from the dead, and promised to end suffering itself in a renewed creation. Instead of a theory to hold or a method to master, he gives his followers himself. He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, ESV). No other figure in history stakes that claim with an empty tomb behind it. Jesus is the only way to God.
| Continue Exploring |
Whatever you prayed today, and even if you could not pray at all, you do not have to carry this alone. If you put your trust in Jesus, tell us with the Yes, I Prayed button. If you have a question, ask it, and a person will answer. If you are hurting and want someone to pray with you and for you, press I Need Prayer. Someone on our team will do exactly that.