Why Did My Life Have to Be Hard?

Why Did My Life Have to Be Hard?

No matter what is happening to us, we can recognize that it will ultimately count as little more than a “light momentary affliction” that is “preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17–18Romans 8:18). Our suffering, in other words, can and should prompt us to look up and long for what God has prepared for us.

If you were to ask me what I take to be among Scripture’s most comforting passages, my answer may surprise you: Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes.

Psalm 90 is Israel’s poignant lament that, even though they are God’s chosen people, they are also Adam’s children, subject as he was to God’s righteous anger at their sin. Moses’s poetry in Psalm 90 leads us, step by step, deep into the cellar of their life’s brevity, pain, and toil. The third verse begins that descent by echoing God’s words to Adam in Genesis 3:19:

You return man to dust
and say, “Return, O children of Adam!” . . .
You sweep them away as with a flood; they are like a dream,
like grass that is renewed in the morning:
in the morning it flourishes and is renewed;
in the evening it fades and withers.
For we are brought to an end by your anger;
by your wrath we are dismayed.
You have set our iniquities before you,
our secret sins in the light of your presence.
For all our days pass away under your wrath;
we bring our years to an end like a sigh. (Psalm 90:35–9)

We aren’t exactly sure of the details — perhaps, as Allen Ross argues, Moses penned this psalm at the end of Israel’s forty years of wandering in the wilderness (A Commentary on the Psalms, 3:26–27). Whatever the specific backdrop, the Israelites had gone through a period of intense suffering and had thus learned the hard way that God’s anger against their sin meant that, even if they lived unusually long lives, their best years would be but toil and trouble that would soon be gone, and then they would fly away (verse 10).

Good But Unfathomable Providence

Ecclesiastes is best understood “as an arresting but thoroughly orthodox exposition of Genesis 1–3,” as David Clemens observes. In particular, it makes “the painful consequences of the fall . . . central,” clarifying how disconcerting life after the fall can be. The Preacher knows that God generally administers his providence through the world’s regular causal processes (Ecclesiastes 1:4–79). Fools and sluggards generally get what they deserve because they refuse to conform to creation’s ordered patterns (Ecclesiastes 4:5; see also Proverbs 6:6–1120:424:30–34). Wisdom is better than folly because the wise understand and honor those patterns and thus can see where they are going, while fools stumble around in the dark (Ecclesiastes 2:13–14).

But still, “time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11). In other words, what God, in the course of his ordinary providence, ordains creation’s structures and processes to bring us, is not only outside our control but also beyond our finding out. Yet nothing can be added to what God does, nor anything taken away from it. “God has done it, so that people fear before him” (Ecclesiastes 3:14).

A healthy, holy fear of God’s providence thus keeps us humble and dependent as we acknowledge that he has so ordered life “under the sun” that, however hard we may strive to understand what was or is or will be, we won’t fathom much. “No one can comprehend what goes on under the sun. Despite all their efforts to search it out, no one can discover its meaning.

Read More

Scroll to top