The Purpose in Suffering

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I’m sure that many of you were doing the same thing that I was doing on Thursday evening. We had finished with the evening session of the pastors conference and I was planning on going back to the room and doing some studying. My laptop had other plans. It crashed. So I turned on the TV to catch up on the news. I’m sure that I was as shocked as you were when I saw what happened at Fort Hood. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was very early in the coverage, so the details were very sketchy. The only thing they knew for sure was that somebody had shot a bunch of soldiers on Fort Hood. The reports were that 12 were dead and several more were injured. I flipped back and forth between several news channels to see if anybody was coming up with any more details. And as I did that, I was amazed at what was going on. Periodically the base leadership was giving press conferences which was the only real source of accurate information any of the media outlets really had. But each network had lots of airtime to fill up. So each of them did something fascinating with all of that airtime. Each of them took their preconceived notion of what was going on, and ran with it. They each had their template, and began to try to wedge the few details they had into that template. One network’s preconceived notion was that soldiers who come back from war are crazy people who are suffering from PTSD. So PTSD and mental health issues were all they talked about. One network was completely opposed to the war. So they turned the whole thing into an excuse to bring all of our poor, unstable, overdeployed troops home. Only one of the channels did so much as even ask the question about whether the guy’s Muslim background might have had anything to do with it. Never mind the fact that any time an abortion clinic is bombed, they immediately begin to call the crazy killer a “fundamentalist Christian.” Why do all the news outlets do that? Because they all have an agenda. Whether you agree with their agenda or not, you can’t argue the fact that they all have an agenda. That agenda shapes the way they cover the news. It shapes the stories they cover. And it shapes their reporting of those stories. But when you know their agenda going in, you know how to watch them. You know what to do with the individual stories. You know how they all fit in to what they’re trying to accomplish. Did you know that God has an agenda too? He created everything and is going to bring everything to the ends that He has determined. And the ends that He has determined will ultimately bring Him the most glory. That means that the ends that God is bringing everything to are good. A good God is actively bringing all things together for good. That is His agenda. When we begin to realize that, it can shape the way we look at all the individual stories of our lives. Even suffering.

The chapter we just read is Job’s first discourse in the book. And when he speaks, he is kicking off the dialogue section of the book. It kicks off a series of rambling back and forth between himself and his three friends. But I want you to notice what he keeps going back to in this chapter. In the midst of his grief and anguish, one thing is foremost in his mind. And that’s a question. He asks it in verse 11. He asks it in verse 12. He asks it in verse 20. And he asks it in ... next page »