Where Is God When Life Is Hard?

Life can be so hard... because of sin the human experience is so broken. It can be so difficult to navigate through life when you’re feeling the painful ache deep in the soul when you’re in the middle of suffering or when you’re going through trials and affliction. 

There’s this lie that we can be tempted to believe and it’s that when we go through some real hard stuff that God doesn’t love us. Or if there is some heavy, difficult circumstances that you weren’t prepared for that just completely blindside you, the temptation is to believe the lie that says, God is not good. 

In 2nd Corinthians Paul uses a series of paradoxes based on different hardships he had been through to highlight the 

In 2 Corinthians 4 he states “But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. 8 We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; 9 persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed”

A little later in Chapter 6 using this same theme he goes on saying “We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; 9 as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold, we live; as punished, and yet not killed; 10 as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.”

And so my exhortation and prayer for us this morning is that even in the midst of crazy circumstances and difficult trials, and when there seems to be no hope that we may have the eyes of faith, not to have to try and interpret our suffering through some superficial positivity but to be a human in our weakness in a broken world just desperate to want God. That Psalm 34:8 would be real to us, that we would “taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in Him.”