Catechism: The Bible And SufferingSample

It can feel like we’re losing the battle.

You watch as someone you love struggles to keep their head above water as waves of shame, anxiety, depression, and even self-harm threaten to overwhelm them.

Maybe for you, the struggle rages within your own mind, and you begin to doubt that you will make it through.

Just as a funhouse mirror or Insta filter can so distort your features that you struggle to recognize yourself or your best friend, the effects of sin can warp your thoughts and emotions until a sound mind seems impossible.

Trace back every evidence of brokenness, every thought or action that reeks of death, and you’ll arrive at the same spot.

Evil, suffering, and death were unleashed when Satan convinced Adam and Eve to turn away from God, to choose the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil instead of the Tree of Life. The results of this choice are all around us: in the brokenness of our relationships, bodies, minds, societies, politics. Sin has infected everything.

But because of Jesus, because of God’s unrelenting plan to redeem and restore us both now and for eternity, there is a reason to hope.

Not hope in the sense that we use it to signify a wish like I hope it rains or I hope I win, but the heart-bursting expectation that God’s promises are true, and His Kingdom has and will come.

There will be a day when all is turned right side up.

There will be a day when the shackles of suffering and shame are broken once and for all.

There will be a day when you are no longer marred by the effects of sin—yours or anyone else’s.

• Can you recognize any of the effects of sin in your own life?
• What is one thing that you pray that God will make right? What role do you think you have in His plan to redeem and restore?