I’m reading in Job. A friend and I were discussing it a few weeks ago and I couldn’t carry my end of the conversation well because I’d not read the book in a while. So I decided to go through it slowly.

I think that most of the trials we suffer in this life are not judgments at all. Not individual judgments, anyway. We are born in trial. Birth is traumatic. That curse is a result of judgment, but it’s not a judgment on the baby being born. He’s done nothing wrong. So for him the suffering is not punishment for personal sin. It’s training. The suffering we have here, which starts at birth, is designed to teach us who God is and who we are.

But I suspect that most of us are hounded when we suffer. I suspect that doubts come in to sit with us the way Job’s three friends came in to sit with him. “Repent and God will quit making you suffer.” Even one of my all-time favorite authors, Horatius Bonar, in his Night of Weeping, writes a whole book on how, if we’d only learn our lessons early, God could take away most of the suffering. But because we don’t listen when we have a sore throat, God had to give us a full-blown cold. And if we don’t listen to that we’ll get something worse.

I can see where this thought comes from. We know that God will not be mocked and each one reaps what he sows. And we see with our own eyes that this is how life works.

Don’t we?

If we eat Big Macs every day, we gain weight. Duh. It’s not too hard to figure out.

We have this cause and effect thing down. Spend foolishly, fall into poverty. Smoke, die of lung cancer or heart disease. Drink and drive, go to jail.

The problem with this, I think, is that its not true. Many people smoke and don’t die of lung cancer or heart disease. Many people don’t smoke or drink and they die anyway. Something kills them. Even though they drink carrot juice and work out three times a week they still die. What’s up with that?

Some people spend and spend and spend and they never fall into poverty. The wicked often prosper–that’s why we’re told not to envy them. If they never prospered Psalm 73 wouldn’t make any sense.

What about all the people who die in tsunamis? Are they more wasteful of water than I am? They are taking too many showers perhaps, so God sends a big wave–”Heh, you want water? I’ll give you water!” Kind of like when he rained the quail down on the Israelites.

We see in scripture that God does punish sin here and now, sometimes. What I don’t get is how, with all the mercy in the Bible, we tend to get stuck on the punishment part.

How many times is God merciful to his people as opposed to how many times he punishes them? He is sloooooowwwwwww to anger, abooooouuuuuunding in love.

Why then do we so often see suffering as punishment and health and wealth as blessing?

We tend to have a slave mentality instead of a beloved son mentality.

I think.