One of the most comforting promises Jesus ever made is also one of the hardest to understand when life becomes painful. Jesus told His followers, “I am with you always” (Matthew 28:20). Not some of the time, ALL of the time. Always.
We love that promise. We quote it when someone is afraid, lonely, uncertain, or walking into something difficult. But there is another side to that promise that we don't talk about nearly as often.
If Jesus is really with us always though, then where is He when something terrible is happening?
Where is He when the phone call comes? Where is He in the hospital room? Where is He when someone we trusted hurts us? Where is He when a child suffers, a marriage falls apart, someone is abused, or a person experiences something that will affect them for the rest of their life?
For someone who has lived through deep suffering, this isn't a theological exercise. It can become a very personal question: Jesus, if You were actually there, why didn't You stop it?
We should be very careful with that question. Hurting people do not need easy explanations for things Scripture itself does not explain. We should never casually tell someone that God caused their tragedy because “everything happens for a reason.” There are things that happen in this broken world that are genuinely evil. There are things people do to one another that God condemns. There is sickness, death, injustice and loss that Scripture itself describes as enemies and consequences of a fallen world.
The Bible doesn't ask us to call those things good. What it does tell us, repeatedly, is that Jesus does not abandon us in them.
Jesus never promised a life without suffering
Jesus was remarkably honest with His disciples about this. He told them, “In this world you will have trouble” (John 16:33). You WILL sounds pretty certain. And boy did they, even those closest.
That doesn't sound much like the version of Christianity that says following Jesus should protect us from everything painful. The first followers of Christ certainly didn't experience that kind of life. They experienced rejection, persecution, imprisonment, sickness, loss and death.
Yet these were the same people to whom Jesus promised His presence. That means we need to separate two ideas that we sometimes unintentionally put together: The presence of Jesus does not always mean the prevention of suffering.
Sometimes God does prevent it. Sometimes He heals. Sometimes He delivers. Sometimes redeems. Sometimes He changes circumstances in ways that can only be described as miraculous. Scripture gives us plenty of reason to pray boldly for all those things.
But there are also times when He does not stop the thing we desperately wanted Him to stop. That doesn't mean He wasn't there.
Look at Jesus at the tomb of Lazarus
John 11 may give us one of the clearest pictures of the heart of Jesus toward human suffering. Lazarus had died. His sisters, Mary and Martha, were grieving. When Jesus arrived, Mary fell at His feet and said something that sounds very much like what hurting people still say today:
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” (John 11:32)
In other words: Jesus, You could have prevented this!
And she was right. Jesus could have. But what happens next is important for us to understand.
Jesus doesn't rebuke Mary for asking the question. He doesn't give her a lecture about God's sovereignty. He doesn't tell her that she shouldn't be crying because Lazarus is about to be raised.
John tells us that when Jesus saw Mary and the others weeping, He was deeply moved and troubled. Then Jesus wept. (John 11:33–35)
Jesus already knew resurrection was coming, yet He still entered their grief. That tells us something beautiful about the character of Christ... knowing the end of the story does not make Jesus indifferent to the pain in the middle of it.
He knew what He was about to do for Lazarus, but He still stood beside a grieving woman and cried. So when we ask what Jesus is doing when we are suffering, one answer Scripture gives us is surprisingly simple: He cares.
He is “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain,” and Hebrews says that our High Priest is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.
Sometimes God meets us in what He has not prevented
There is a powerful picture of this in Daniel 3. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar's image, knowing it could cost them their lives. They trusted that God was able to rescue them, but they also said that even if He did not, they would remain faithful.
God could have kept them from being thrown into the furnace. He didn't. They went into the fire.
Yet when Nebuchadnezzar looked inside, he was astonished to see not three figures but four walking in the furnace. The men who had been thrown in bound were walking around unharmed.
God's faithfulness was not disproved because they entered the furnace, His presence was revealed inside it. That may be an important truth for someone looking backward at the worst season of their life.
Maybe you prayed and the situation didn't stop.
Maybe you begged Jesus to change something and nothing seemed to change.
Maybe you concluded afterward, He must not have been there.
But Scripture gives us another possibility... He may have been nearer than you realized.
What is Jesus actually doing?
The New Testament gives us an answer that we don't talk about enough, and that is that Jesus is interceding for us in those instances.
Romans 8:34 says that the risen Christ is at the right hand of God “and is also interceding for us.” Hebrews says He “always lives to intercede” for those who come to God through Him (Hebrews 7:25).
We get a glimpse of this before Peter's greatest failure. Jesus told Peter that Satan desired to sift him like wheat. But then He said, “I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:31–32).
Interestingly, Jesus did not prevent Peter from going through the trial. Peter still failed. He still denied Jesus. He still wept bitterly afterward. But Peter was not walking through any of it unnoticed. Jesus had already been praying for him.
There may have been times in your own life when you couldn't pray. You may have been too shocked, too angry, too exhausted or too broken to find the words. That doesn't mean nothing was happening, Jesus was interceding for you.
When Jesus feels absent
This may be the hardest part to get our heads around. There are seasons when Christians genuinely cannot sense the presence of God. Prayer feels empty. Scripture feels distant. Heaven seems silent.
The Bible doesn't shame people for experiencing this. In fact, some of the most faithful people in Scripture cried out from exactly that place.
David asked, “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?” (Psalm 13:1).
Psalm 22 begins, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me...”, words Jesus Himself would later speak from the cross.
The Bible is remarkably honest about the difference between what we know about God and what we sometimes feel in suffering. There will be moments when Jesus feels absent, but feeling abandoned is not the same thing as being abandoned.
Jesus' promise does not depend upon our ability to perceive His presence.
That matters tremendously when looking back at trauma or loss. You may not remember sensing Jesus there. You may have felt completely alone.
But we should not conclude that because we could not perceive Him, He had left us. The fact that He was there may have prevented things from being much worse even.
Jesus understands suffering from inside suffering
This is where Christianity offers something extraordinary; we do not worship a God who remained safely removed from human pain. God entered it.
Jesus knew grief. He knew rejection. He knew betrayal by someone close to Him. He knew false accusation, humiliation and physical suffering. He knew what it was like for friends to disappear when He needed them. In Gethsemane, He knew anguish so great that He pleaded with the Father concerning what was ahead.
Isaiah had described the coming Messiah as “a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.” Hebrews later tells us that Jesus is able to sympathize with our weaknesses.
So when you bring Jesus the worst thing that has ever happened to you, you are not explaining suffering to someone who has never experienced it. You are bringing your wounds to Someone who has wounds of His own. And remarkably, after the resurrection, Jesus still showed His disciples the scars.
This does not mean everything that happened was God's will
This distinction is especially important for people who have experienced terrible things at the hands of another person. Someone else's sin against you should not automatically be described as “God's plan.” Scripture never requires us to call evil good in order to believe that God is sovereign. Romans 8:28 says that God works in all things for the good of those who love Him. It does not say that all things are good. Those are very different statements.
God is able to take something He hates and redeem what it tried to destroy. That is what Joseph eventually recognized after his brothers sold him into slavery. He told them: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good.” (Genesis 50:20)
Joseph did not deny their evil intention, He discovered that their evil intention was not powerful enough to determine the ending of his story. That is redemption.
And this is one of the great hopes we have in Christ: what happened to you does not get to have the final word over you. Jesus does.
So where was Jesus?
There are some “why” questions we may have carried for a very long time.
Why didn't He stop it? Why wasn't the prayer answered differently? Why did that person die? Why did He allow someone to make that choice? Why did healing not come?
I don't think we honor Jesus by inventing answers He hasn't given us. Sometimes the most biblical answer is simply: I don't know.
But not knowing why does not mean we know nothing. We know that God gave up some of His ability to intervene by giving us free will. And not all of us use that free will respectfully. That's the result of living in a fallen world. But Scripture tells us enough about Jesus during these times to know at least this:
He sees.
He cares.
He grieves.
He understands suffering.
He draws near to the brokenhearted.
He intercedes.
He strengthens.
He redeems.
And He does not abandon His people.
Perhaps, then, the beginning of healing for some of us isn't finally discovering why something happened. Perhaps it is allowing Jesus to meet us in the memory of where it happened.
You don't have to pretend it didn't hurt. You don't have to minimize what someone did to you. You don't have to call something good that was evil. And you don't have to force yourself to understand something you simply don't understand.
You can bring the unanswered question directly to Him: “Jesus, I don't understand why this happened. I don't understand why You didn't stop it. But if You really were with me, help me understand Your presence there. Show me where You were. And meet me in the places that still hurt.”
That is not weak faith. That is bringing the wound into relationship with Jesus.
The great promise of Christianity has never been that those who follow Christ will never walk through the valley. Psalm 23 says something much more realistic, and, in the end, much more comforting: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”
The comfort isn't that there is no valley, the comfort is that we do not walk through it alone.
~Devin
Devin Osborne
The Early Church
