Suffering doesn’t make sense on earth. If it’s punishment, it seems disproportionate to the crime. If it’s so we learn something, how come people die from their affliction without being able to share what they learned? It could be developing our character, but if we’re 10% or 20% more righteous when we get to heaven, what will that matter? Surely none of these things are worth the perpetual agony in my daughter’s life.

Let’s zoom way out to the view from heaven. God needed to determine who to let in. He created the universe (space and time) to give us a chance to decide whether we trust him. If everything is perfect down here, then it’s like we’re already in heaven. God created a place without him so we seek him. He created a world that isn’t heaven so we could long for a better place. We often become hopeless when we don’t know when our suffering will end. In the big picture, it will end when we die or Jesus comes back.

The view from heaven is that all of life is a test. Ultimately, life on this planet exists to determine our eternal destination. If we are going to choose to trust him, we need to have the opportunity not to trust him. Suffering is what makes it hard to believe the amazing news about our King and his coming kingdom.

Suffering is the ultimate test. Will we submit to the way God rules us and enter his kingdom? Or will we take matters into our hands and run our own lives? This is the story of the Bible. We declare allegiance to our King, and our desire to join his kingdom, by persevering through suffering.

Without suffering, there is no way to pass the test. In the west we are fond of ‘skipping the test’, but the tests just keep coming. You can postpone them, but they will come nonetheless. Every single person on this planet, Christian or not, is being tested. Whoever still wants Jesus as Lord after all of this, is welcomed into heaven.

The gospel is an invitation into suffering. Not in some theoretical sense. The essence of the evangelism is delayed gratification: we sacrifice sin, pleasure and selfishness in this life, and we receive a reward in heaven. Christians who are opposed to making people suffer won’t evangelize. Or, they’ll only witness to people who are in such bad shape it probably can’t get worse.