God’s People Will Feel Pain

What I always feared has happened to me. What I dreaded has come true. I have no peace, no quietness. I have no rest; only trouble comes.   Job 3:25-26

The book of Job exposes the lie that if we “take it to the Lord in prayer,” then that will somehow remove the pain. Job discovered that prayer doesn’t act as a painkiller.

God reveals himself in Scripture and in Christ in order that we may know him, love him, and trust him, but he also hides himself (see Job 34:29; Isaiah 45:15). There will be times when we ask why but get no answer.

Job’s friends said many things—some misguided and some true—but Job was not able to hear them. In the past, Job might have enjoyed their theological discussions, but now he was overwhelmed by pain. The comfort of God eventually broke through, but it was a long time coming, and Job never pretended he was experiencing comfort when he was not. There is a relentless honesty about this man.

God’s people are not always so honest. Perhaps the reason is that we are afraid of “not having the answers.” Job’s testimony releases us from the pressure of feeling we have to say that things are going well when they are not. There are times of pain and turmoil, when peace seems to be beyond our grasp. And we must not be afraid of this; this was the experience of the greatest man in the East.

If the Christian life is portrayed as a life of victory, where the triumphs are always greater than the pain and the certainties are always greater than the questions, then Christians will not be able to make sense of their experience when the pain seems greater than the victory and the questions greater than the answers.

I thank God for a book of the Bible that tells us how the greatest man of his time struggled in the dark with unresolved questions and battled a level of pain even his closest friends could not begin to understand. Yet in all this, he did not turn away from God.

For further reading, see Job 3