Far greater minds than I have grappled with this question.  C. S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain comes readily to mind.  It seems natural to man to believe that, if there is a God and He is good, He  would not allow us to suffer.  The corollary is that if there is suffering there is either no God or, if there is a God, He is not good.  This appeals to our sense of fairness but as any parent knows, our sense of fairness is warped at best.

I can well remember the times when my kids were young and they would respond to some decision I’d made with “that’s not fair!”  My response was always the same and it ultimately had the desired effect.  “I can give you fair but I promise you won’t like it.”  You see our view of “fair” is generally that we get what we think we deserve.

Of course, any Christian with the slightest understanding of grace knows that if we got what we deserve, we’d spend eternity in hell.  The Bible is quite clear on this point.  Romans 3:23 says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.  Romans 6:23 goes on to say that the wages of sin is death.  So let’s not fool around with the silly notion that it is unfair for us to suffer.  That is simply an unsupportable proposition.

Still, the Bible teaches that “God is love” (1 Jon 4:8) so why would a loving God allow us to suffer.  Here the mistake we make is that we judge what God does or doesn’t do based on our own human experience and expectations which is a fundamentally flawed approach to the question.  When we come to the realization that God is God and we are not, we also realize that we have no basis for complaint.

The classic biblical text dealing with this question is Job.  For those not familiar with the story, Job was a man who followed God in all that he did.  He was also a prosperous man with a large family and lots of land and livestock.  He would be considered rich in modern parlance.

Satan is standing before God’s throne and God begins to brag to him about His servant Job and Satan replies that Job is only faithful because God has blessed him.  He claims that if God removes His protection from Job, Job will curse Him.  So God gives Satan permission to go after Job.  The only restriction is that Satan cannot harm Job’s body.

So Satan destroys all of Job’s wealth and kills all his children, leaving him with only his wife and destitute.  At this point most readers unfamiliar with the story will be responding with how unfair all this is.  Our sense of justice is offended by this story.  How could God do such a things as to allow all this to happen to Job?

But the story doesn’t end there.  Job, in fact, does not curse God.  Rather, Job praises God, which is apparently quite annoying to Satan but pleasing to God.  So Satan makes another charge.  He claims that Job is still faithful because God has protected his health and that if God removes that protection, Job will curse Him.

God again gives His consent to Satan, this time allowing him to take Job’s health but not his live.  Those who were offended before are really offended now!  Job ends up with boils all over his body, sitting in ashes and scraping his sores with pieces of broken pottery.  At this point in the story Job’s wife comes to him and tells him to “curse God and die.”  How’s that for support from your wife?

While there are certainly people today who have suffered losses as great as Job’s, we don’t find many of them in America.  Indeed, the struggles we normally face pale in comparison and yet we feel we’ve been treated unfairly by life and by God.

The rest of the story of Job consists mainly of some conversations between Job and his friends about why all this happened.  Job’s friends believe that God is just and would never allow all this to happen to Job unless he somehow deserved it so Job must have some unconfessed sin in his life.    Job resolutely denies this but he remains faithful.  He struggles with the “why” but he never curses God.  He does, however, make the case that he did nothing to deserve what has come upon him.

In the end God joins the conversation.  For those with an overblown sense of justice and fairness, the desire is to hear God explain Himself.  You think that God now needs to justify His action.  But that is not what God does. Instead He asks Job questions designed to make him realize that he is in no position to question God’s actions at all!  Questions like “where were you when I laid the foundation of the world?  Surely you were there!”  The bottom line is that God is sovereign and is under no obligation to explain Himself to anyone.  He created us and is free to do with us as He pleases.

So where does that leave us?  For many this isn’t a very satisfying resolution.  We still want our notion of fairness, justice and love.  We want to live happy lives free of worry and struggle.  We want to be free to do what we want without consequences.  And therein lies the answer.

Our desire, at its core, is to be free of God and that is the very definition of sin.  We are hopelessly bound up in rebellion against God.  Even as Christians we need to be constantly reminded that we are dependent on God for everything.  For some this is a hard pill to swallow.

My own experience has been that it is normally through the struggles in my life that I grow.  Just as you can’t build up muscle mass without regular exercise, you can’t really grow in faith without regular struggle.  At bottom, struggle is good for us as Christians.  It forces us to rely on God instead of ourselves because we are driven to the realization that we are helpless without Him.

Struggles and suffering will inevitably lead us in one of two directions.  Either we will look to God for strength and our every provision or we will shake our fist at God and sink deeper into despair.  It’s a pretty clear cut choice.

I can’t claim that any of the struggles in my life have been comparable to what Job dealt with.  In that sense I don’t really know what suffering is.  But I know that God has always been faithful in my struggles and He has always brought me through them and focused me more on Him.  I have good reason to believe that He will continue to do so, even if the struggles become much greater, because He has demonstrated His faithfulness in the past.  It doesn’t matter if the particular struggle makes sense to me or not.  What matters is where I place my trust.  Do I rely on myself to overcome or do I accept that God has all the power and I am powerless and totally dependent on Him?