When Life HurtsPrøve

It’s not (always) your fault Sometimes our suffering is self-inflicted. As the book of Proverbs frequently warns us, gossips lose friends, hotheads increase drama, and adulterers get burned by the fire of their own passions. But sometimes our suffering isn’t our fault. While the devil would love for us to assume that God must be punishing us for our past sins, that isn’t always/often the case. The death of your loved one wasn’t God’s payback for those years you didn’t prioritize your faith. Your infertility isn’t God’s judgment for your premarital sexual behavior. And cancer is just cancer, not God’s way of evening the score for what you did last summer. How do I know this? Because of Job. Job suffered unspeakable pain (the death of his children, brutal health complications, etc.), yet the very first verse of the book tells us, “[Job] was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1). Just in case you thought the author was exaggerating his character, God himself says the same things about Job in both chapter 1 and chapter 2—Blameless. Upright. God-fearing. Evil-shunning. The point? Job’s upcoming pain wasn’t God’s payback. I won’t claim to know why you suffer in the way you do. But I do want to free you from the false belief that all suffering is connected to personal sin. Sometimes the world is just broken. Sometimes God uses the pain that you didn’t cause for a higher purpose. It’s not always your fault. That was true for Job. And it is true for you.