If God is in control, why do I have a headache?

The question “Why?” is the one we long to answer. If God is in control, why do I have a headache? Why do I have cancer? Why are my teenagers causing so much trouble? Why am I still single? Why hasn’t he given us a child?

After all, if we put all the Bible’s teaching together, we find that God controls each and every event, from the tiniest to the greatest, from the most predictable to the apparently random, visible and invisible, in every place, at all times, from the least complex to the most intricate, right up to human beings with all our wonderful capacity to think, to reason and to make decisions. This is the scope of God’s control.

But then we look at our present circumstances and are left asking… WHY?

Sometimes we can’t fully answer it. But we can say some things. Here are some of the main answers the Bible gives.

1. If you are a Christian, it is NOT God’s punishment for your sin. This is very important. The great mistake of Job’s so-called “comforters” was to assume that Job’s sufferings must be a punishment for his sin. But if you are trusting in Jesus (as Job was, in anticipation), the punishment for all your sin has been paid by Jesus. So don’t beat yourself up and blame yourself. You and I have plenty of sins, for which we deserve far worse than we get; but our sufferings are not the punishment for these sins. Jesus paid it all.

2. It is not punishment, but it may be God’s fatherly discipline, given in order to fashion and shape you to become like Jesus. As Hebrews chapter 12 puts it, “God disciplines us for our good, in order that we may share in his holiness” (Hebrews 12 v 10, see v 4-13). It is good to search your conscience afresh and ask yourself if there is any matter of which you ought to repent. Perhaps this suffering is God’s way of prompting you to a fresh repentance from some sin. Maybe, maybe not; only you can say. Read this chapter of Hebrews and take comfort from the assurance that you have a heavenly Father who is determined to make you like Jesus. We wish it didn’t hurt so much; but it will be worth it in the end.

Take comfort from the assurance that you have a heavenly Father who is determined to make you like Jesus.

3. It may also be a trial that is necessary in order to demonstrate your genuineness as a follower of Jesus. When you go on trusting God even when it’s really hard, glory will come to God (1 Peter 1 v 7). This may be hard to accept, but it is actually a wonderful truth, that God will be glorified precisely through your struggles in a way in which he might not be glorified if we had things easier.

4. Finally, many of our difficulties are simply because we are living life “under the sun”, as the book of Ecclesiastes puts it. And life “under the sun” in this age is life under God’s righteous judgment on a sinful world. While we are not punished for our individual sins—Jesus paid for those—we are still sinners in a world under judgement. We must expect things to be messy and difficult.

Probably most, if not all, of our problems can be described as in numbers 2, 3, and 4, all at the same time. Beyond this, we cannot say and it is not profitable to speculate or to pretend that we know.

This article is adapted from Christopher Ash’s book Where was God when that happened? And other questions about God’s goodness, power and the way he works in the world, which is available to buy now.