Why Are Some Christians Blessed While Others Suffer?
Q: How do I reconcile that I am blessed, and all is good for me, but other Christians elsewhere are struggling and asking God for help? This is the question of my unsaved husband, and I can’t answer it.
A: When you talk about some people being blessed and other people struggling, it seems like you primarily mean that in a material sense. In the Western world, we have unbelievable abundance in our culture and society. Most of us lack for nothing, or lack for very little.
How do we compare that to people who live in other parts of the world, where they suffer hunger or bad housing or poor clothing or other forms of deprivation? I think this is a misunderstanding of what is truly important in life. Modern Western people are materially rich but spiritually empty. I think it’s no accident that some of the nations which enjoy such remarkable prosperity and have had the longest existing welfare states are some of the most secular and God-rejecting cultures in the world. They have no need for God, because they have everything they could ever materially want. That can mean they have material prosperity, but spiritual poverty – and not spiritual poverty in a good way, like Jesus talked about in the Beatitudes. The people who seem so well-off are not as blessed as you think they are, even though they may be materially prosperous. The people you think are deprived may not be as deprived as you think they are.
If the purpose of Christianity was just to make us prosperous and comfortable, then you could say we have largely achieved that in the Western world. But that is not its purpose, and many Westerners are not comfortable in their souls. Maybe they’re comfortable in their homes, cars, or clothes, but they’re not comfortable in their souls, and that matters a lot.