What If the Greatest Blessing in Hardship Isn’t Relief, But Revelation?
When trials linger, could God be offering us something deeper than immediate relief?
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Most of us pray for hardships to end quickly. Pain, loss, uncertainty—none of these feel like places we want to dwell for long. Yet throughout Scripture, we see a pattern: God often allows His people to endure seasons of struggle before revealing His purposes. Think of Joseph in prison, Israel in the wilderness, or Job on the ash heap.
This tension raises a question we don’t always want to face: is it possible that the real blessing of hardship isn’t the moment we’re delivered from it, but the way God reveals Himself to us in the middle of it? What if the trial isn’t just an obstacle to escape, but the very setting where our eyes are opened to His power and presence in a way comfort could never provide?
That thought can feel unsettling. Our instinct is to equate blessing with ease, yet Job’s story shows otherwise. He lost everything, cried out in anguish, and challenged God with bold words. But when the dust settled, what changed him most wasn’t restoration of wealth or family—it was an encounter with the majesty of God Himself.
So here’s the question for us today: when we are walking through trials, do we only look for relief—or are we open to the possibility that God might be using the hardship to unveil Himself in ways we couldn’t have imagined?
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And, what if the revelation goes both ways?
Suppose that God purposely created this universe and this difficult world in order to give Himself the best possible context within which He can demonstrate His maximal greatness to all of His created persons, and within which His created persons can demonstrate what sort of person they will choose to be, even in extremely difficult situations.
In that case, God might make this world extremely difficult. He might create a world that tests the persons living on it to the extremity of their endurance, in order to honor those who, by faith, endure to the end, and are therefore rewarded with a place of greatness in heaven.
Suppose that God simply rewarded Job for His righteousness in his earthly life, and never allowed Satan to put him to the test. The universe would never have learned what a great man Job turned out to be.
