Perfection through Suffering

For it became Him, for Whom are all things, and by Whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both He that sanctifieth and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause He is not ashamed to call them brethren (Hebrews 2:10-11).

The presence of evil in this earth, and of all the sorrow and suffering that flows from evil, naturally appears to be the one great imperfection that mars the economy of the world. When God looks on things as they now are, He can no longer regard them with unmixed complacency as He did at the beginning of creation, when we read, “And God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good …” (Genesis 1:31). What a different picture meets His vision now! It is a strange and tragic spectacle that He gazes on. A world of dying men, all alike being borne along by the stream of time towards the greedy tomb; and in this short and fateful journey exposed to all sorts of losses, and bereavements, and disappointments, and pains, and diseases, never knowing what a day may bring forth, and liable at any moment to the direst calamities. He sees it all, and He permits it, though it was not He who directly caused this melancholy state of things. Surely this is the mystery of mysteries, and to reconcile this with our belief in the Divine benevolence and love must needs appear the problem of problems—an insoluble problem indeed to those who do not look beyond this world for the key to its solution.

Suffering Serves a Divine Purpose

Here however the sacred Writer boldly faces the mystery, and dares to speak of this great and all-pervading imperfection as the necessary condition of a higher perfection—a perfection so high and glorious as to justify and vindicate all that has seemed mysterious and inexplicable in bringing it about. We cannot for a moment doubt that God, being omnipotent, could if He willed bring evil to a summary end, and crush into nothingness that evil one from whom we believe it emanates. To doubt this is to be Dualists and Manicheans