Suffering

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.

— 2 Corinthians 4:17

Suffering is the pain, loss, and affliction believers experience in this life under God’s own sovereign governance, not as chance or fate but as trials he appoints for his glory and their good.¹ It differs from the problem of evil, the philosophical question of how evil’s bare existence is reconciled with God’s goodness and power: suffering is the believer’s own hardship, which Scripture treats as neither random nor a penalty for personal sin. God uses it to humble pride, test and strengthen faith, conform believers to Christ’s own sufferings, and produce a hope fixed on promised glory.²

Confessional Witness

No confession in the Reformed family gives suffering its own chapter, but the same paragraph on providence, worded almost identically across the Westminster Confession (1646), the Savoy Declaration (1658), the Philadelphia Confession (1742), and the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession, states the doctrine as follows:

The most wise, righteous, and gracious God doth oftentimes leave for a season his own children to manifold temptations and the corruptions of their own hearts, to chastise them for their former sins, or to discover unto them the hidden strength of corruption and deceitfulness of their hearts, that they may be humbled; and to raise them to a more close and constant dependence for their support upon himself; and to make them more watchful against all future occasions of sin, and for other just and holy ends. So that whatsoever befalls any of his elect is by his appointment, for his glory, and their good.¹

The paragraph names several distinct purposes at once, chastisement for past sin, exposing hidden corruption, humbling, and driving the believer to closer dependence on God, rather than reducing suffering to any single cause, and it closes by grounding all of them in God’s own appointment rather than accident. The paragraph immediately before it, in the same chapter, insists that God orders even sinful acts without himself being their author,³ the ground on which this article’s own account of suffering rests: what befalls an afflicted believer is God’s doing, but the sin or evil an affliction may involve remains the creature’s own.

Biblical Basis

Scripture treats suffering as neither meaningless nor proof of hidden guilt. The book of Job devotes its entire narrative to overturning the assumption, argued at length by Job’s own friends, that outward suffering measures inward sin (Job 4-27); Job suffers as a righteous man under God’s own governance, not as payment for some hidden wickedness, a case treated at length in its own article.

Paul traces a chain running from suffering to hope rather than despair: “we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Rom. 5:3-4), because the Spirit himself bears witness to those who “suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:16-17). Present pain is deliberately weighed against future glory rather than denied: “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18), and God works even suffering “together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose… to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Rom. 8:28-29).

Paul restates the same logic in 2 Corinthians: “this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Cor. 4:17). Van Mastricht draws out the comfort this is meant to supply: faced with any calamity, “what will be more powerful for us to think than that these afflictions are momentary and that they ‘are working for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison’… and that God presides over all these things as King to eternity.”⁴ The same letter names a further purpose, serving others rather than only the sufferer: “we are afflicted… for your comfort… so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, comforting them with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (2 Cor. 1:4, 6-7).

James and Peter both treat trials as testing genuine faith rather than punishing it: “count it all joy… when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness” (James 1:2-3); “the tested genuineness of your faith… may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Pet. 1:6-7). Peter ties suffering directly to union with Christ, “rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings” (1 Pet. 4:13), and closes with a promise beyond it: “the God of all grace… will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you” (1 Pet. 5:10). Hebrews reads suffering as evidence of sonship rather than divine neglect: God “disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness” (Heb. 12:10), the same chastening language the confession’s own chapter on providence uses.¹

Doctrinal Significance

Reformed writers describe affliction’s aim as purification, not destruction. Boston pictures the church as a household containing “not only vessels of gold, but also of earth”: both are liable to corruption, but God deals with them differently. The vessels of gold “are not destroyed, but purged by a fiery trial in the furnace of affliction, as gold-smiths purge their gold” (Isa. 1:25), where the vessels of earth are simply broken.⁵ Suffering, on this account, refines the believer rather than merely afflicting them.

Watson makes the same point pastorally. Christians are “apt to look upon the cross… as frightful things” and sometimes run into sin to avoid it, but should not “entertain too hard thoughts of affliction”: it comes “from a wise God, who prescribes whatever befalls us,” and it “hath its light side as well as its dark,” since God can “sweeten our afflictions” even as “our sufferings abound,” so does “our consolation” (2 Cor. 1:5).⁶

Charnock locates the same purpose within God’s own wisdom, not providence in the abstract. Rather than delivering his people by unmistakable miracle, God ordinarily works their deliverance through ordinary means that pass them through hardship first, Joseph’s famine-driven journey to Egypt, David’s confrontation with Goliath, Israel’s captivity in Babylon, so that his wisdom, not only his power, is displayed in “their deliverance from that furnace of affliction.”⁷

A recent restatement of the same conclusion: “There is no such thing as wasted suffering for the believer. Suffering is real, and it is sanctifying.” In Christ, suffering “has been irreversibly transformed into an instrument for sanctification and glory,” so that, read together with 2 Corinthians 4:17, “the greater the suffering, the greater the promise of glory.”⁸

Historical Development

Reformation: the cross as branch of self-denial

Calvin’s Institutes (1559) devotes an entire chapter to bearing the cross as a discipline belonging to the Christian life, a case self-denial treats at greater length in its own right. One argument from that chapter belongs here: suffering itself produces the very confidence it seems to threaten. “Tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience,” Calvin writes, so that a believer who has already found God’s promised aid “firm and constant” in past affliction has every reason to expect it again; the cross, by “overturning the overweening opinion we form of our own virtue,” strips away “pernicious carnal confidence” and teaches the sufferer “to recline on God alone.”⁹

Puritan practical divinity

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan writers turned this doctrine into sustained pastoral counsel for afflicted believers specifically. Watson’s A Body of Practical Divinity (1692) and Boston’s Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (composed around 1720) both work through affliction at length as its own topic, not merely an illustration inside a larger argument, developing the “furnace of affliction” and “sanctified use of affliction” as their own genre within Reformed practical theology.⁶⁵

Modern Reformed dogmatics

Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics makes explicit what the earlier pastoral tradition assumed: suffering that remains even after justification is not punitive. “Even the suffering they often still… have to bear on earth is not a punishment, a penalty, a required late payment of the demands of the law, but a fatherly chastisement that serves their maturation.”¹⁰ Recent Reformed writing on the beatific vision carries the same doctrine forward, reading suffering’s relationship to future glory through 2 Corinthians 4:17 rather than through providence’s vocabulary alone.⁸

Opposing Views

Open theism and process theology relocate suffering outside God’s own determination. Where the confession holds that “whatsoever befalls any of his elect is by his appointment, for his glory, and their good,”¹ open theism holds that “the future is open to God; he does not know what will happen” until it occurs, so that suffering is a risk God takes in creating genuinely free creatures rather than a trial he decrees in advance.¹¹ On this account, suffering carries no settled, foreordained purpose a sufferer can trust before the fact; God responds to it rather than assigning it a purpose beforehand. The confession’s own comfort depends on the opposite: it is God’s prior appointment, not a hoped-for response after the fact, that Romans 8:28 offers as ground for confidence in suffering.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t insisting that suffering has a purpose minimize how painful it actually is? Reformed writers who state the doctrine most strongly are also careful to deny this. Parkison’s own account of 2 Corinthians insists that Paul “lets our suffering weigh as heavy as it is, and he refuses to ever let us label it as pointless. There is no such thing as wasted suffering for the believer. Suffering is real, and it is sanctifying.”¹² Affliction’s purpose does not require, or permit, treating the pain itself as unreal or small.

Is suffering God’s punishment for the believer’s own sin? No: the penalty for a believer’s sin was borne by Christ, and a suffering that remained genuinely punitive after justification would leave that substitution incomplete. Bavinck’s own answer: the suffering believers “often still… have to bear on earth is not a punishment, a penalty, a required late payment of the demands of the law, but a fatherly chastisement that serves their maturation.”¹⁰ The distinction matters: a punishment satisfies a debt still owed; a fatherly chastisement trains a child whose debt is already paid.

Related Doctrines

References

A Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 5, para. 5; identically in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 5, para. 5; the Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 5, para. 5; and the Philadelphia Confession of Faith (1742), chap. 5, para. 5. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1932), 239: “he knows that even his sufferings, sorrows, persecutions, defeats, etc., are not the results of chance or accident, but that they have been foreseen and foreappointed, and that they are chastisements or disciplines designed for his own good.” ↩
A Confession of Faith (London, 1677), chap. 5, para. 4. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 12, “Eternity.” ↩
Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State (Printed for the booksellers, 1787), 205-206. ↩ ↩²
Thomas Watson, A Body of Practical Divinity: Consisting of Above One Hundred and Seventy-Six Sermons on the Lesser Catechism (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1692), 262-263. ↩ ↩²
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, “Discourse IX: On the Wisdom of God,” 551. ↩
Samuel G. Parkison, To Gaze upon God: The Beatific Vision in Doctrine, Tradition, and Practice (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2024), chap. 6, “The Beatific Vision and the Christian Life,” 200. ↩ ↩²
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 8, sec. 3, 17-18. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩ ↩²
John Bolt, editorial note, in Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, chap. 17, “The Order of Salvation,” citing John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1998). ↩
Parkison, To Gaze upon God, chap. 6, 199. ↩