By Morgan Cates
Humans have a natural instinct to try and comfort others. We do not want to see other people suffering, and we have an innate desire to help others when we see them in these situations. We often do that by offering encouragement during trials, which is a God glorifying thing to do. For example, we call our friends to remind them that they are loved, we buy meals for friends that are grieving, or, most importantly, we point them to Scripture and to the gospel. These are excellent, practical ways to support our brothers and sisters who are experiencing afflictions on any level. However, there are also ways that we can poorly encourage them as well. You have almost certainly seen those corny reposts floating around social media that say, “the teacher is always silent during the test,” “He won’t give you more than you can handle,” or “God gives His toughest battles to His strongest soldiers.” While these statements often have innocent purposes behind them, they give a false idea to those who are truly suffering. Not only does this give a misrepresentation of the purpose of suffering, but it also falls short of Biblical teachings about actual stressful circumstances.
There are multiple passages in Scripture that directly address this issue. For starters, in Acts 6 and 7 the apostle Luke records the suffering of Stephen. In the beginning of chapter 6, the apostles gathered to appoint the first deacons of the Church. They appointed seven men, but Stephen in particular stood out. Luke described him as a man full of faith, grace, and the Holy Spirit (Acts 6:5,8). His face was like an angel (Acts 10:15). Stephen was a man’s man, Biblically literate with a passion for the gospel. He had a knack for intellectual ability. When people would try to debate him they would be stuck without arguments (Acts 6:10). Stephen perfectly exemplified what it meant to be a strong man of God, and it was precisely because of his spiritual strength that unbelievers conspired together to arrange his unjustified murder. At the end of Acts 6 we see those who could not refute Stephen and hated him, instigating his arrest and trial for blasphemy. The next 53 verses of the Bible are devoted to Stephen’s speech during his trial where he delivered the gospel to them and rebuked them because they were denying the truth and resisting the Holy Spirit (Acts 7:51). Then Luke says that they were furious with him and carried him out of the city before stoning him to death in front of Saul of Tarsus, who would later become the apostle Paul. While he was being beaten in the head with rocks, Stephen prayed for his offenders’ forgiveness and asked the Father to receive his spirit. Imagine that… praying for the forgiveness of a man as he is in the act of murdering you.
As Luke clearly outlines for us in the text, Stephen was a warrior for the gospel, and a strong one at that. Stephen perfectly exemplified for us what it means to be a, “strong soldier,” yet he still died. Stephen had proven himself to be a formidable opponent by winning a number of debates, but this was a battle that he could not win. We would be naive to believe that the Lord had no hand in Stephen facing this trial, so how do we reconcile this story with the idea that God will not give you more than you can handle? We do it by coming to the logical conclusion that God, in fact, does give you battles that you cannot win. If God was to only give struggles to strong soldiers, He would never give us any struggles at all. Our triune and sovereign God does not give His toughest battles to His strongest soldiers because apart from Him, we are not strong. In fact, apart from Him we are not able to be strong, “for apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). God doesn’t give you battles that only you can handle, He gives you battles that only He can handle, and He does that in order to show us our dependence and His sufficiency. When we find ourselves in the midst of a trial that we recognize we cannot sustain ourselves through, it forces us to come face to face with the realization that we are not adequate enough to bolster through even our temporal troubles. Which in turn causes us to look outside of ourselves to find something that is ample to handle our sufferings. Stephen left us a great example of this during his death. Right before they began stoning him, Stephen looked up into the sky and, “saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). Seeing the majesty of our Lord is what enabled Stephen to respond with grace while he was being beaten. This is why we, “run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus… who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:1-2). We look to the cross in all things because it is there that we can see the all-amazing, all-glorifying power of our Lord, and we rest in knowing that the One who accomplished that great work is the one who sustains us in our toughest battles, especially the battles that we are not strong enough to win.