The comforting doctrine of the necessity of affliction — part two

This article is a "part two" to the piece of the same title (en online, 13 Sept. 2025) and has been written after comments on the initial article led its writer, Neil, to do some more thinking about Adam and Eve. Read that first article here.

"Misunderstand not sickness, as if it were a greater evil than it is; but observe how great a mercy it is…Our sickness and death are sent by the same love that sent us a Saviour, and sent us the powerful preachers of his word, and sent us his Spirit, and secretly and sweetly changed our hearts, and knit them to himself in love; which gave us a life of precious mercies for our souls and bodies, and has promised to give us life eternal; and shall we think, that he now intends us any harm? Cannot he turn this also to our good, as he has done many an affliction which we have complained about?"

So wrote Richard Baxter in his Directions for a Peaceful Death.

Baxter understood sickness and affliction, most especially as our death draws near, as one of God’s many gracious means of working for our good.

A majority of our Parliamentarians want to pass into law the permission for doctors to kill people who might only live another six months because, they argue, suffering is a waste. Richard Baxter saw the painful process of dying as a means of grace, as God works for our eternal good.

Affliction

I once experienced a painful season where my life felt like it was not worth living. In the darkest days, I longed to die and be with Christ, for the pain of ministry life to end. The gap between my living hope in Christ and the painful grind of life created misery. I felt I needed to work harder to make life better, to fix things and fix myself.

Richard Baxter has helped me live now in that tensioned space.

The gap between my life now and the glory to come is as great as ever, but I no longer—after years of wrestling—feel depressed about it. The pain and affliction are not good, but God is good; God is sovereign so God must deem all affliction necessary—but necessary for what?

Holiness

Baxter writes to those who are approaching death: "While you are here, you are yourselves defiled; sin is in your natures, and your graces are all imperfect; sin is in your lives, and your duties are all imperfect; you cannot be free from it one day or hour. And is it not a mercy to be delivered from it? Is it not desirable to you to sin no more? And to be perfect in holiness?"

I will now put forward a case for the necessity of affliction in relation to our perfection in holiness. That perfection is the true, eternal freedom of the human heart and will.

Our affliction grieves God. He is deeply reluctant to cause affliction. Jeremiah wrote to the suffering residents of Jerusalem in the days of Nebuchadnezzar's siege: "For the Lord does not willingly bring affliction or grief to anyone" (Lamentations 3v33).

And yet, the Psalmist sees God's goodness in causing affliction by which the human will is moved to obedience by God: "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word. You are good, and what you do is good; teach me your decrees" (Psalm 119v67-68). Also: "It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees" (Psalm 119v71).

In light of Psalm 119, God in His goodness and love causes all kinds of afflictions to teach and incline our wills to obey the word of the Lord—partially in this life but completely in the age to come.

God did not create pre-programmed, robotic human beings who have no choice but to love and obey Him. He will not resurrect pre-programmed, robotic humans. His plan is to resurrect human beings who can freely love Him, with affections freely satisfied in Him, and be free to relate perfectly to Him—without sin. Humans who, like Christ, learned obedience through suffering (Hebrews 5v8). Eternal freedom to love and obey is produced by satisfaction in Christ and the knowledge of good and evil.

Adam and Eve — and Paul

In the beginning, Adam and Eve had almost everything they needed for eternal freedom with God... Almost—they lacked desire for God (see my previous article here for notes on affliction and desire). And Adam and Eve lacked the knowledge of good and evil; they had not experienced all that is evil—all the shame, wickedness, unrighteousness, conflict, strife, murder, aches, pain, addiction, mourning, suffering, affliction and death of this world, in which we groan with the whole of creation.

The lack of desire for God and the lack of the knowledge of good and evil meant Eve and Adam lacked the will to obey God. They saw, they desired, they took and they ate because they were not satisfied in God alone and they lacked the deterrent of the knowledge of both good and evil.

The result of the Fall is that every human being is now separated from God and so learns or discovers the knowledge of good and evil. Every good moment of beauty, every joyful contentment, every taste of glory, praise and love of God, is matched—and sometimes exceeded—by every experience of evil, wickedness and injustice with every twinge, ache, pain, grief, sorrow, gut wrenching fear and death.

The Apostle Paul develops what Psalm 119 puts so succinctly. In Romans 8, he argues that our groaning under affliction precedes our eternal freedom where we will never, like Adam and Eve, be separated from the love of God again.

Paul begins by contrasting the suffering of this age with glory to come (v18). He acknowledges the awful experience of evil: "We groan with the whole of creation," (v19).

Our personal groaning might or might not be due to personal circumstances. We groan corporately and vicariously. Our knowledge of the afflictions of family, friends, neighbours, even whole nations on the other side of the world, causes us to groan.

Paul then states that the whole of creation has been subjected to this groaning by the one who subjected us (v20). This repetition of subjection emphasises God's deliberate act of subjecting the world to affliction. As the Psalmist sings: "Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us, for as many years as we have seen trouble," (Psalm 90v15, italics added).

If affliction is a deliberate act of our good God, then affliction must be necessary.

Paul then states that subjection to suffering precedes our liberation into a threefold freedom of the glory of the children of God (v21).

God's beloved children are first liberated from decay; once freed from mortality, from aches, pains, sickness and death, we will never die. God also liberates us into the freedom of glory of the children of God. This is the glorious freedom of children to experience constant and maximum love from God and for God—like a child delighting with her family on a sunny day on the beach... Freedom. As Baxter puts it: "When our perfected bodies shall have the perfect glorious body of Christ to see, and our perfected souls shall have the God of truth, the most perfect uncreated light to know, what more is a created understanding capable of? And yet this is not the top of our felicity…"

This delight of knowing and being known, of loving and being loved is not yet the pinnacle of peace.

A resurrected will

The third liberation is a resurrected will, unbound by the sinful desires of a sinful nature. The resurrected will is not pre-programmed or robotic, but with the help of the knowledge of good and evil and with complete satisfaction in Christ, we will always, eternally, freely, relate perfectly to God.

Unlike Adam and Eve, we will have the memory of affliction, the knowledge of good and evil, as the perfect deterrent to sin. We will say, "I am never going back to a world of pain". And we will be fully satisfied in God.

Baxter goes on: "…For the understanding is but the passage to the heart or will, and truth is but subservient to goodness: and therefore though the understanding be capable of no more than the beatific vision, yet the man is capable of more; even of receiving the fullest communications of God's love, and feeling it poured out upon the heart, and living in the returns of perfect love; and in this intercourse of love will be our highest joys, and this is the top of our heavenly felicity."

To live in the returns of perfect love requires freedom to live and love in return. That freedom to love, to choose wisely and obediently, in eternity, requires the knowledge of good and evil.

Paul is comforted by the hope of liberation in glory and from trying to fix everything, including ourselves. For Paul, it is enough to know, with confidence, that in all things God is working for the good of those who love Him.

Those God predestined, He called, justified and glorified, and those are the children He loves.

For Paul, this confidence gives him—and us—permission to groan as we wait, watch and pray (v22-25). The Spirit helps us to groan well. We are not Christian failures if we groan in our affliction or grief, even for the whole of our lives. Our spiritual success is not measured by personal happiness. We need not feel like failures if we cannot shake off grief, or find total healing after trauma. We don’t need to fix the cause of our groaning if it is serving our eternal good.

Concluding thoughts

I have suffered permanent nerve damage and my family says I have been changed—in some bad ways. The cause was a long season of conflict and stress in ministry. I have felt the human propensity to work hard to fix things. There is a tension between working to stop the cause of affliction and waiting patiently. I can't seem to heal completely from trauma and so I groan.

More than that, I groan deeply with Iranian friends over Iran, Nigerian friends over Nigeria and with church members enduring cancer treatment or dementia.

We groan over grooming gangs, political failures, the global climate... the litany goes on... as we wait.

I no longer try to fix circumstances beyond my control or even to fix myself. I try to look for the good God is doing in this life. I can see some, limited good, but I struggle to see how affliction always, fully leads to good in this life.

Joseph had to wait decades to see how God had worked for good through unspeakable agony, affliction or grief. Joseph’s knowledge of God’s goodness was partial, not complete. It is good not to try too hard to see any good. It can increase our wounds if we try to speculate on what good might arise from any specific affliction in this life. Sometimes there is no earthly good to be seen, perhaps especially as death draws near.

Paul points us to the eternal liberation of the heart and will as the good God is working for. God is subjecting His beloved children to all manner of affliction, first and second hand, so we might be truly free to choose the good, forever, in the glorious presence of our risen Christ.

We will not be robots in the new creation but new humanity—Adam and Eve 2.0. We will receive the answer to the prayer in Psalm 119v65–67: "Do good to your servant according to your word, Lord. Teach me knowledge and good judgment, for I trust your commands. Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word."

As Paul says elsewhere, these present sufferings—these light and momentary afflictions—are achieving for us a glory and freedom which far outweighs them all.