Life Is a Test: Suffering and the Meaning of Life

There’s a kind of honesty that sounds cruel at first but turns out to be exactly what people need to hear.In 1914, Ernest Shackleton reportedly placed an advertisement in a London newspaper for his Antarctic expedition. The ad read something like this: Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. Whether the ad is apocryphal or not, the story endures because it captures something true about human nature — the brutal honesty of it didn’t drive people away. It drew them in. Something in us responds to a call that tells the truth about the cost, because when the stakes are real, the reward is real too.I want to make a similar case here. What I’m about to say might sound harsh — but I think it’s exactly what people need to hear. Life contains real tests. Your choices have real, eternal consequences. The suffering you’re going through right now is the very place where that test is being administered. And the outcome of that test is not just about whether you become a better person or whether God uses your pain for some greater good down the road. The outcome could be about heaven or hell.I genuinely believe that hard truth is actually more encouraging and steadying for the person lying in a hospital bed than anything they’ll typically hear from a Christian trying to explain their suffering. Not because it’s easy — it isn’t. But because it’s real. And people who are suffering don’t need comfortable half-answers. They need to know that what they’re going through actually matters, that there is a real enemy trying to use their pain against them, and that there is a real and eternal reward waiting for those who endure faithfully even unto death.But we need to build the case carefully. So let’s start at the beginning.Everything Downstream of One ConvictionBefore we get to suffering, we have to talk about the theological premise that makes all of this necessary.If once saved, always saved (OSAS) is true, then nothing in this post matters much. Whatever you do, however you behave in your suffering, the end is secured. But if OSAS isn’t true — if free will really matters and your choices genuinely have eternal consequences — then everything changes. Free will, when you actually believe in it, is a serious thing. It’s much more comfortable to believe it’s all going to work out no matter what you do. But if your choices really matter, then the question of what your suffering means stops being merely pastoral or philosophical. It becomes urgent. It becomes a matter of life and death.What the Bible Actually Says About TestingThere are not one or two isolated verses about testing in the Bible. There is a consistent, pervasive, Old Testament-to-New Testament pattern of God explicitly testing people to see what they will do.The Old Testament PatternGenesis 22:11–12 — When Abraham raised the knife over his son and the angel of the Lord stopped him, God’s own explanation for what had just happened was this:“Do not stretch out your hand against the lad, and do nothing to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”Deuteronomy 8:2 — Moses, looking back on forty years in the wilderness, gives us the interpretive key for that entire season of Israel’s history:“You shall remember all the way which the LORD your God has led you in the wilderness these forty years, that He might humble you, testing you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not.”The wilderness, in its totality, was a test. The explicit goal was to find out what was in their hearts — whether they would obey or not. And it’s worth pausing here to remember that many people failed that test catastrophically. The earth swallowed some of them. Others were destroyed. This was not a test with automatic grace for failure. The consequences were real.Deuteronomy 13:3 — On false prophets who might arise and perform signs:“You shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”Judges 3:4 — On the pagan nations left in Canaan after the conquest:“They were for testing Israel, to find out if they would obey the commandments of the LORD, which He had commanded their fathers through Moses.”God left nations there — nations that would tempt Israel toward idolatry, toward compromise, toward sin — on purpose, as a test, to see what Israel would do. The surrounding culture is not an obstacle to the test. The surrounding culture <