Beyond "why": asking what suffering accomplishes
The question most people ask when they encounter serious suffering is "why?" — why me, why this, why now? That question is honest and human, and the Bible does not dismiss it. The Psalms are full of it. Job asks it with such force that his friends are silenced. Jesus himself cries from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). The question of why God permits suffering is a genuine and weighty one, and this site explores it at length. But there is a different and equally important question that is often not asked: what does suffering accomplish?
The difference matters. "Why?" is the question of a person in the middle of something painful, looking for a reason that might make it bearable. "What does it accomplish?" is the question of a person who wants to understand not just the permission but the purpose — not just God's tolerance of suffering but his active redemption of it. The Bible's answer to the second question is more developed and more surprising than most people expect. Suffering, in the scriptural account, is not merely permitted and endured. Again and again it is taken up into something larger: a sacrifice, a testimony, a condition of restoration, a participation in the very work God is doing in the world. This does not make suffering good in itself. It does mean that suffering, in God's hands, need not be merely waste.
The pattern of sacrifice in Scripture
One of the structural patterns running through the entire Bible is the pattern of sacrifice: something of value is given up, and that giving opens a way that would otherwise be closed. The pattern appears at the very beginning of the restoration story. When Cain and Abel bring offerings to God, Abel's offering is accepted (Genesis 4:4). When Abraham is tested with Isaac on Moriah, God provides a substitute sacrifice — but the willingness to give is what establishes the foundation (Genesis 22). When Israel is in Egypt and the angel of death passes over, it is the blood of the Passover lamb on the doorposts that makes the difference (Exodus 12). Sacrifice — the willing surrender of something precious — appears again and again as the condition that opens the way forward.
The pattern is not arbitrary. It reflects something deep about the nature of restoration. What was broken in the fall was a relationship of love and trust between God and human beings. Relationships are not restored by decree; they are restored by actions that demonstrate the reality of love. A willingness to give up what is most precious — to endure cost for the sake of love — is one of the most eloquent expressions of that love. The sacrificial system in Leviticus was not God's demand for blood; it was God providing a framework within which the people of Israel could express their commitment to the relationship, demonstrate the seriousness of sin, and point forward to the ultimate sacrifice that would finally restore what had been broken. The Epistle to the Hebrews makes this explicit: the sacrifices of the law were "only a shadow of the good things that are coming" (Hebrews 10:1).
The suffering embedded in sacrifice — the surrender of something costly — is not incidental. It is precisely what makes the gesture meaningful. A sacrifice that costs nothing signifies nothing. The willingness to endure the cost is the demonstration of the love. This is why the cross is not simply the death of Jesus but the willing death of Jesus — "he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death — even death on a cross" (Philippians 2:8). The obedience and the willingness are inseparable from the sacrifice's meaning.
Indemnity: what it is and where it comes from
The Divine Principle introduces a concept that names this pattern more precisely: indemnity. The word comes from the legal and financial domain — an indemnity payment restores a damaged relationship or position. In the Divine Principle's framework, indemnity refers to the conditions that must be established in order to restore a lost providential foundation. When a relationship, a position, or a foundation in God's providence is broken through sin or failure, something is required to restore it — not as a payment of divine wrath, but as a practical condition for returning to the original state.
The concept is rooted in Scripture's own vocabulary. When Jacob wanted to return to God's favor after his long sojourn with Laban, he had to cross the Jabbok and wrestle with God through the night (Genesis 32). When the Israelites worshipped the golden calf, Moses spent forty days interceding before the relationship was restored (Exodus 34). When Elijah fled in despair after Carmel, he was sent back on a journey of forty days to Horeb before he could resume his prophetic work (1 Kings 19). The forty-day period, the periods of separation, the sacrifices — these are all indemnity conditions in the Divine Principle's reading, not arbitrary tests but practical restorations of positions that had been lost.
What makes suffering relevant to indemnity is that indemnity often involves enduring difficulty as an expression of fidelity and love. It is not the pain itself that accomplishes anything — God is not appeased by pain. It is the love, trust, and commitment expressed through the willingness to bear difficulty for God's sake that establishes the condition. The suffering is the form that the love takes in a specific circumstance; the love is what does the work. This distinction is critical: indemnity is never self-punishment or masochism. It is love made costly by circumstance, and it is that love — expressed through faithfulness under pressure — that opens the way forward.
How Jesus' suffering opened the way
The supreme example of redemptive suffering in the biblical account is, of course, the cross. What Jesus underwent was not incidental to his mission — it was its climax and its culmination. Hebrews 2:10 says that God made Jesus "perfect through what he suffered." This is a striking statement. Jesus was not morally imperfect before the cross; the language of being "made perfect" here means brought to the full completion of the mission, the full expression of the life of love that God intended. The suffering of the cross was not an obstacle to that completion; it was the form the completion took in a fallen world.
Romans 5:10 describes what the cross accomplished: "we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son." The broken relationship between God and humanity — broken in the garden, worsened through millennia of sin and separation — was restored through the one act of perfect love and perfect obedience that humanity had never managed to produce. In Jesus, a human being finally gave everything — held nothing back, refused no cost — in the service of God's will. The cross is what the Passover lamb, the Mosaic sacrifices, and all the acts of indemnity throughout history were pointing toward: the sacrifice that would finally close the gap.
The Divine Principle notes something that most theologies acknowledge only partially: the cross achieved spiritual salvation, but the fall had both a spiritual and a physical dimension. The lineage of sin — the misalignment passed from generation to generation through fallen human nature — was not erased by the cross alone. This is why Jesus spoke of a further work to be completed, why Paul speaks of a creation still "groaning" for liberation (Romans 8:22), and why the New Testament consistently points forward to a completion of restoration that goes beyond what the first advent accomplished. The cross opened the way. What it opened the way to is the fullness of what God originally intended — a world aligned with God's heart, from the inside out. To understand how that further completion relates to what Jesus accomplished, see our post on what the second coming will accomplish.
What it means to "take up your cross"
Jesus' invitation to his followers is unambiguous: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23). This has sometimes been misread as an invitation to seek out suffering — as if pain were itself a form of holiness. The confusion is understandable, but the text does not support it. The cross was not something Jesus sought for its own sake; it was the cost his faithfulness to God imposed on him in a world that was not aligned with God's will. To take up your cross is to accept that the same dynamic will operate in your own life — that following God's way will sometimes conflict with the world's way, and to choose faithfulness anyway.
Paul describes his own experience in 2 Corinthians 4:8–10: "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body." The suffering Paul bears is not meaningless; it is the form that faithfulness takes under pressure, and Paul insists that it becomes the vehicle through which the life of Christ is made visible. The suffering is real. But it is not the point; faithfulness is the point, and faithfulness sometimes costs.
For the person going through genuine difficulty — illness, loss, injustice, grief — none of this is meant to minimize the pain or to offer a tidy explanation that makes it stop hurting. The invitation to take up the cross is not a demand for stoicism. It is the offer of a frame: that what you are enduring, if borne with love and trust, is not outside God's redemptive reach, that your faithfulness under pressure may be accomplishing something your eyes cannot yet see, and that the God who endured the cross alongside Jesus is present in whatever you are carrying now.
Can suffering bring us closer to God's heart?
There is a dimension of suffering that the Divine Principle emphasizes that other theological frameworks sometimes understate: the dimension of participation in God's own grief. The Principle teaches that God has suffered throughout the long history of the fall and restoration — not as a passive observer, but as a parent watching his children destroy themselves and each other, desperate to help but committed to honoring the freedom he gave them. God's grief over the fall, in the Divine Principle's account, is real and profound. To understand how God suffers with us is to understand something about the relationship suffering can create.
When a person endures suffering with love and trust — when they hold on to God's promises in the dark, when they refuse bitterness, when they choose to serve others from within their own pain — they are doing something that resonates with the very heart of God. They are not escaping suffering; they are transforming it from the inside. They are participating, in their own small way, in the same pattern that Jesus embodied on the cross: love that refuses to let pain become the last word, faithfulness that does not depend on favorable circumstances, a relationship with God that nothing can sever.
Paul's language in Colossians 1:24 is startling: "Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ's afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church." He is not claiming to add to the atonement, which Christ accomplished fully. He is claiming that his own suffering for the sake of the community is a continuation of the same pattern of love — that his endurance of hardship for others is itself a participation in Christ's redemptive work. This is not a special privilege for apostles. It is the vocation of every disciple who chooses love under pressure.
The redemptive purpose of suffering, then, is not simply that God can "use" our pain after the fact. It is that bearing difficulty with love and faithfulness is itself one of the primary ways human beings participate in God's work of restoration. We are not just patients waiting to be healed. We are, in our suffering, invited to become co-workers with a God who knows grief and who has been redeeming it since the beginning of history. That invitation does not make pain desirable. It does make it meaningful — and meaning, in the end, is what makes suffering bearable.
Frequently asked questions
Does suffering have a redemptive purpose?
The Bible consistently suggests it can. Romans 5:3–4 says suffering produces perseverance, character, and hope. Hebrews 12:10–11 describes God's discipline as painful but ultimately producing "a harvest of righteousness and peace." The cross is the supreme example of suffering transformed into the source of salvation. Not every instance of suffering has an obvious arc, but the Bible invites trust that none of it falls outside God's redemptive reach.
What is indemnity in the Divine Principle?
Indemnity refers to the conditions required to restore a lost foundation in God's providence. When a relationship or position is broken through sin or failure, something practical is needed to return to the original state — not as a payment of divine wrath, but as an expression of the love and fidelity that restoration requires. Throughout Scripture, these conditions take the form of sacrifices, periods of separation, and acts of faithful endurance. The pain is not what accomplishes the restoration; the love expressed through willingness to endure is what does the work.
What does "take up your cross" mean?
Jesus' words in Matthew 16:24 ("deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me") are not an invitation to seek out pain. They describe the willingness to accept the cost that faithfulness imposes in a fallen world — to choose God's way even when it conflicts with the path of least resistance. The cross was not something Jesus desired for its own sake; it was the form his faithfulness took in a world that rejected him. For his followers, the same principle applies: love and obedience are the point; the suffering is the cost they sometimes carry.
Did Jesus' suffering accomplish something specific?
Yes. His death accomplished reconciliation between God and humanity (Romans 5:10), was the ultimate act of obedience (Philippians 2:8), and was the sacrifice that fulfilled and surpassed all the anticipatory sacrifices of the Old Testament (Hebrews 10). The Divine Principle adds that the cross established the spiritual foundation of salvation — the restoration of the spiritual relationship between God and humanity — while pointing forward to the further completion of physical and lineage restoration that the Second Coming will accomplish.
Does God cause suffering in order to purify us?
God is not the author of suffering — suffering entered the world through the fall, not through God's intention. But Scripture affirms that God can work through suffering, drawing good from what was meant for harm (Romans 8:28). Hebrews 12:10 describes God's engagement with human difficulty as aimed at our good, producing holiness. This is less like an infliction and more like a parent willing to allow a difficult but necessary experience because they know it will produce growth that could not have come any other way.