When God's Children Suffer

Horatius Bonar wrote this brief treatise during his ministry in the Free Church of Scotland, addressing the perennial question that haunts believers facing trial: why does a loving God permit his children to suffer? Writing in the aftermath of personal losses and amid the broader sufferings he witnessed in his pastoral work, Bonar crafted this meditation not as a systematic theodicy but as pastoral comfort grounded in Reformed theology.

Bonar argues that suffering serves multiple divine purposes in the Christian life, chief among them the sanctification of believers and the manifestation of God's glory through human weakness. He contends that trials are neither accidents nor punishments for the regenerate, but rather instruments of grace that God employs to conform his people to the image of Christ. The work emphasizes that suffering deepens fellowship with the crucified Savior, strips away worldly attachments that compete with devotion to God, and produces a hope that fixes itself more firmly on eternal rather than temporal goods. Bonar grounds these assertions in extensive biblical exposition, drawing particularly from the Psalms, Job, and the Pauline epistles to demonstrate how Scripture itself teaches believers to understand their afflictions as evidences of sonship rather than divine displeasure.

This work has endured because it offers theological substance without losing pastoral tenderness, providing frameworks for understanding suffering that avoid both shallow optimism and despairing fatalism. Bonar's treatment became a model for later Reformed approaches to the problem of pain, influencing how evangelicals would address suffering through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Who should read this: Christians facing serious trials who want biblical grounding for their questions about divine purpose in suffering, and pastors seeking theologically informed approaches to counseling the afflicted. Those looking for philosophical arguments about the problem of evil or seeking to question Reformed assumptions about divine sovereignty should look elsewhere.