True or false: God will never put you in a situation that is more than you can handle? While once a typical Christian response to challenging circumstances, it is now being blown off as “not true” (as one person suffering from terminal cancer told me). Well, is it true, or is it not? Scripture seems to settle the matter with verses like this:

No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it. (1 Cor. 10:13)

But is it a black-and-white issue? Emotions run high on this issue, depending on how close one is to excruciating suffering. We must guard against spiritual-political correctness guised in Christian lingo—almost as if how you answer the question determines whether you are a superficial Christian tied to pithy platitudes or a “realist” Christian freed from such pretensions.

Armchair theologians are not at liberty to pontificate with faux courage and prophetic pretensions from the comfort of their cloistered internet chat rooms. What is needed is an adequate and profound theology of suffering, which is so often missing in contemporary Christian conversation. This can only be understood and embraced by direct and personal involvement in this fallen world, where real people live with agonizing or disheartening pain and struggle, where there are genuine frustrations with God’s apparent silence, like Job experienced.

Pithy platitudes can easily insult the human experience of suffering, pain, and the doubt it brings about a loving, relational God. They serve more to assuage our selfishness in not wanting our desire for comfortable living to be disturbed by someone else’s ongoing suffering. It’s much easier to throw out a platitude and then return to our self-centered life. James addresses this kind of attitude:

If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and be filled,” and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself. (James 2:15–17)

Yes, dead faith plies in pithy platitudes that sound profound but prove to be empty words lacking empathy.

Stories like Job’s showcase suffering that is so great, and God is so silent that it leaves us wrestling with what kind of God we serve. His friends approach it based on the logic that seems unassailable to them. One plus one equals two, they tell Job, in so many words. God is just and God is sovereign – that is what we know about God for sure. Therefore, the only thing that makes sense in Job’s suffering is that he must have done something wrong to deserve what was happening to him, some sin that God is punishing him for. The irony of their viewpoint is that Job had done nothing wrong to deserve the misfortune that had befallen him; in reality, he was off base in concluding that God was unfair in causing his sufferings without cause! Job’s friends assert it was a moral issue; Job saw it as a fairness issue. Who was right? Either way, the suffering of this godly man was humanly unbearable. Although he never descended into the abyss of cursing God for his suffering, he did curse the day he was born (see Job 3:1)—that’s how bad it was.

It seems a matter of reasonable certainty that God does, in fact, give us things that are too great for us to handle. Human experience gives abundant evidence of this – I am not sure why anyone would question that unless they have compromised their integrity and present a self-inflated outward appearance of bravery that disintegrates upon personal reflection in the honesty of their soul. That seems as axiomatic as 1+1=2. Open your eyes and smell the coffee.

If God only gave us things we could handle, then we wouldn’t need Him. But as the apostle discovered, “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13). And it is in the depth of our suffering that we come to know God in profound ways of which we would otherwise be oblivious. This thinking by the apostle did not come easily but with a significant cost. It was engendered not by the desire for comfort or avoidance of all suffering but by the greater and higher life purpose. He writes that his overriding passion was “that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death” (Phil. 3:10). This desire eclipsed even the natural instinct of self-preservation, for he also wrote, “according to my earnest expectation and hope, that I will not be put to shame in anything, but that with all boldness, Christ will even now, as always, be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death” (Phil. 1:20).

May we be like the apostle Paul, who taught us to “Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ” (1 Cor. 11:1). Our Lord Jesus Christ suffered with a purpose, and the apostle did as well. May we have a similar mindset when faced with our own suffering.