Marriage can be a beautiful picture of selfless love, godly self-sacrifice, and mutual encouragement across decades of faithfulness. It can also be cut short due to tragedy or interrupted by circumstances outside one’s control. While marriage can be a source of great joy, suffering intrudes on our lives in various ways, leading to crushed expectations and devastating outcomes that no one could predict. Disability, financial setbacks, and mental illness can strike, without any failure or sin on the part of the couple. Spouses or children can die unexpectedly, employment can end abruptly, and sickness can strip away our sense of security. This is why couples need to discuss the problem of evil before they enter marriage, preferably in pre-marital counseling with their pastor.
When we don’t engage the problem of evil, we can fall into a transactional approach to God. This way of seeing God frames good outcomes as the result of faithfulness, while bad outcomes or suffering result from sin. Transactional thinking approaches suffering through false retributionist theology and can even lead to a form of prosperity gospel. For instance, “good” parenting will lead to “good” children who walk in faith or conversely, lax parenting will lead to children walking away from faith.
When we don’t engage the problem of evil, we can fall into a transactional approach to God.
However, life is not that simple. Good and faithful parents have children who walk away from the faith, while inattentive parents can have faithful Christian children. This applies to many areas of life. Healthy people who steward their body as the temple of the Holy Spirit can be struck with heart disease or cancer. Faithful Christians endure depression and can be struck with mental illness, apart from any sin. When couples misunderstand the impact of the Fall and its corrupting influence, they can inadvertently trap themselves into thinking like the disciples in John 9 or like Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar in the book of Job.
Preparing Your Marriage for Hardship
Young Christian couples sometimes fall into a simplistic theology that sees God through this transactional lens. In counseling couples as a pastor and U.S. Army chaplain, I’ve seen this thinking make tragic situations much more difficult. Christian couples often assume that if they just do things the right way, if they just love Jesus and follow His Word, things will work out perfectly. They will have the perfect, social media picture-ready family. Yet life is not so simple. I once knew a faithful woman who was struck with a severe mental illness that led to paranoid delusions, causing serious distress to her and her family. Another church member’s husband suffered early onset Alzheimer’s in his 40s, resulting in the functional loss of their relationship. Another godly couple watched their 7-year-old daughter endure years of chemotherapy with an uncertain future. While some would take the path of Job’s friends and assign some sin to explain their suffering, Scripture paints quite a different picture, contradicting transactional and retributionist theology.
The Warning of Job’s Friends
The book of Job helps correct this type of thinking. Job is wisdom literature, acting almost as a counterbalance to the general truisms in Proverbs. It portrays a righteous, wise man enduring suffering. In Job 1:1, the narrator declares Job was called “blameless.” The word has the sense of perfection, like an unblemished sacrifice. Later, in Job 2:3, God Himself echoes this assertion when speaking to Satan. Interestingly, Satan does not contradict God’s observation, but instead claims Job’s righteousness is because God has blessed Job and protected him. He suggests that if Job faces real hardship, he will sin. Though they disagree on the cause of it, both God and Satan agree that Job is blameless. God allows Satan to afflict Job, and he endures the loss of his family, his fortune, and his health, then enters a period of mourning and depression. But Scripture is clear, in all this he did not sin. The point made by the author is that there was no sin or human reason why Job should suffer such horrible circumstances.
When Job’s friends arrive, they see his suffering state and assume sin must be behind it. They goad him into bitterness towards God with assumptions of guilt and misapplications of theological principles. The book resolves with Job’s encounter with God, in which Job sees God’s immensity and omnipotence. Lament turns to worship as Job acknowledges his finiteness and God’s power (Job 42:1-6). Not to be overlooked, God’s response to Job’s friends should be the fatal blow to transactional, retributionist thinking. God’s anger burns against the friends for not speaking what was right (Job 42:7). They went looking for sin in a blameless man to explain away his misfortune, and in the process turned Job’s depression into bitterness.
Looking for Comfort in the Wrong Places
There’s a famous line from my favorite TV show, in which a leader declares, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” Like Job, couples can do everything “right” and still face tragedy. They can remain faithful to God, pray over their families, and disciple each other. They can serve, give, and fellowship, but still suffer. Think of the “Hall of Faith” in Hebrews 11. The account lists not only those who were faithful and received great rewards in this life, but also those who were mocked, flogged, imprisoned, and murdered (Hebrews 11:36-38). Tragedy and suffering afflict the faithful, just as they afflict the unfaithful. This is why couples must engage the problem of evil and talk about it prior to marriage.
Tragedy and suffering afflict the faithful, just as they afflict the unfaithful. This is why couples must engage the problem of evil and talk about it prior to marriage.
I tend to think we look for sins and mistakes in tragic situations out of our own fears and insecurities. Seeing others suffer reminds us of the precariousness of life. We’re reminded of life’s fragility and how quickly all we have can be lost. So, we look for some explanation why this suffering has been inflicted. We assume they must have made some mistake or committed some wrong that led to this outcome, and we, being upright and moral people, can avoid their fate. Yet the book of Job breaks us of this thinking.
Jesus echoes this sentiment in John 9 responding to the question of a man born blind. He says, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:2). In this instance along with many others, the purpose of suffering was not retribution, but revelation of God’s grace and glory. The relationship between sin and suffering is complex in Scripture, but it is never assumed.
Look to the Good Work God is Doing
There’s no easy answer to the tragedies we face in this life. Even the book of Job, which explores deeply the implications of the problem of evil, does not leave us with simple answers. We must learn to live in the beautiful tension of a good and gracious God who pursues us and redeems us through the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, but also allows suffering to fall on the just and the unjust.
The introduction of sin in the world through Adam’s rebellion led to a corrupted world where tragedy strikes in seemingly random ways. However, we know there is no random chance in God’s economy. God repurposes tragedy and suffering to redeem a people for Himself and restore us to right relationship with Him. Christian couples must understand that whatever befalls them in their marriage, God can use it for His glory and the good of those that love Him.
