Suffering: Gospel Hope When Life Doesn't Make Sense

by Paul David Tripp

Like fear, doubt is not in and of itself a bad thing. God has given us the ability to wonder and the desire to know and understand. He has wired into us the quest to have our questions answered and our confusion cleared up. He created in us an intolerance of irrationality and contradiction. Doubt can cause you to ask profoundly important questions. Doubt will make you think deeply about very important things. Doubt will allow you to expose and reject falsehood. Doubt can ignite a life that is reasoned, wise, and protective. Doubt can keep you from being all too naive or an easy target for deception. Because doubt drives us to know and understand, it has the power to lead you to the One who knows and understands everything. Your capacity to doubt can drive you to God, but not always. This is why we need to talk about doubt, because this God-given capacity, wrongly functioning, can be disastrous.

Truth.

In fact, the vast majority of psalms were written out of a real-life struggle of faith.

The minute your functional theology tells you that God is not good, it’s very hard to hold on to the confessional theology that declares he is.

You need to question your own assumptions. You need to argue with your own heart. You need to confront evidences of unbelief in your private conversation. Fighting the Devil’s lies means being aware of the talk of your own heart and defending your heart against any perspective that would call into question the wisdom, love, goodness, grace, and faithfulness of God. Pray that God would give you insight into your own heart and the strength to fight this spiritual battle even in moments when you feel profoundly weak.

God’s honesty about life in this broken world is a welcome to each of us to be just as honest. In fact, an entire book of the Bible (Psalms) is a script of the honest cries of God’s people—cries of confusion, doubt, and fear in the midst of the painful trials of life. God never reprimands us for being afraid. He never mocks us in our weakness. He never minimizes what we’re going through. He never turns his back on us when we wonder what he’s doing or why we’re facing what we’re facing. Not only can your Lord handle every bit of your honesty, but his Word is a welcome to be honest.

God knows that we are incapable of carrying the burden of sovereign knowledge that he carries, so he lovingly protects us by telling us what we need to know: we are to rest in him and live as he has ordained, while he protects us from what would overwhelm us.

Wow...this is important stuff