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Bible Studies Life & Challenges
Suffering
The oldest question there is. What Scripture says, and what it refuses to say.
The oldest question there is. Scripture takes it seriously enough to give it a whole book and not answer it.
What you’ll explore
- 01 The question stated plainly
- 02 Job, and the answer he does not get
- 03 What Job’s friends get wrong
- 04 Suffering that has no visible purpose
- 05 Comfort that gets passed on
- 06 The cross, and a God who is not distant from pain
- 07 Hope without tidiness
The question stated plainly
Read Psalm 10:1; Habakkuk 1:13
Why do you stand far off, and hide yourself in times of trouble? Why do you idly look on at treachery? These are in the Bible, addressed to God, unretracted. The Bible asks the question more sharply than most sceptics do.
Job, and the answer he does not get
Read Job 1:1-22; Job 38:1-11; Job 42:1-6
The reader is told in chapter 1 what is happening; Job never is. When God finally speaks it is seventy questions about creation and no explanation at all. Job says he is satisfied — "I had heard of you, but now my eye sees you" — which is an encounter, not an answer.
What Job’s friends get wrong
They argue that suffering follows sin, which sounds pious and is the position God explicitly condemns at the end: "you have not spoken of me what is right". Any explanation of somebody else’s pain that makes it their fault is on the wrong side of this book. Their one good stretch was the week they said nothing.
Suffering that has no visible purpose
The disciples ask whose sin caused a man’s blindness and Jesus rejects the premise. Asked about a massacre and an accident, he refuses both times to treat the victims as worse sinners. He declines the direct link that people keep wanting to draw.
Comfort that gets passed on
Read 2 Corinthians 1:3-7
Paul calls God the Father of mercies who comforts us in affliction so that we can comfort others with the comfort we received. This is not a reason for the suffering; it is something that can come out of it. The people best at sitting with the suffering have usually suffered.
The cross, and a God who is not distant from pain
Read Isaiah 53:3; Hebrews 4:15; Matthew 27:46
A man of sorrows, acquainted with grief; a high priest able to sympathise; and from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me" — a quotation of Psalm 22. Christianity’s answer to suffering is not primarily an explanation but a person who entered it. That is a claim about God’s character, not a solution to the logical problem.
Hope without tidiness
Read Romans 8:18-25; Revelation 21:4
Paul does not minimise — he weighs present suffering against future glory and has the whole creation groaning. Revelation promises tears wiped away, which concedes that there are tears until then. Christians have offered several serious answers to why God permits suffering — free will, soul-making, a mystery reserved to God — and none has ever commanded agreement. Anyone handing you a tidy answer is offering something the Bible withholds.
Questions to sit with
- Have you been given a Job’s-friends answer? Did it help?
- What do you do with the fact that Job never learns why?
- Where has comfort you received become comfort you gave?
Every passage in this study
Go deeper
Where this connects
This study sits inside a larger story. Read the passages above in their own books, and follow the thread back through Scripture as a whole.