It’s important to remember how the Bible talks about darkness and suffering — not because it denies their reality, but because it gives us a new lens through which to view them. And that lens offers the hope and meaning necessary to persevere.

The Psalms are a great place to turn when we’re wrestling with the complexities of life. David, in particular, makes little effort to sugarcoat his emotions. Meditating on the riches of God, he wrote in Psalm 139:11-12, “If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.”

Those words are deeply encouraging, aren’t they? Even darkness itself is not dark to our Lord — the source of radiant glory. Yet this is the same man who, on many occasions, cried out in agony: “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away” (Psalm 31:9–10).

Suffering is real. Pain can feel unbearable. Confusion abounds. Doubt overwhelms us, and anxiety takes control. We are human beings — finite, flawed, and feverishly filled with a variety of emotions. Life is often hard. More than that, life is often miserable. There’s no sense in denying it. Rather, what we ought to do is face the reality head-on: this fallen world means we will face illnesses, rejections, losses, confusion, and a series of other soul-crushing realities.

We will live through various seasons, and many of those seasons will be very difficult.

And yet, there’s another truth infinitely more worthy of our attention: we serve an ever-faithful God who has promised us many wonderful promises, one of which is that He will never leave us nor forsake us.

When we face trials and tribulations, the common instinct is to question: Lord, why? Why is this happening to me? There’s nothing wrong with asking such questions. I’ll be the first to admit those words frequently escape my lips. But when you look at the Bible, it approaches the conversation in a completely different way.

The Bible doesn’t encourage us to look at suffering and immediately question how a loving God could allow it to happen. Rather, it instructs us to recognize that God is loving us through the suffering.

Think about it: Outside of the Christian, who else in the entire world can say they have hope in life and death? Who can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there’s meaning behind their pain? Who can say with confidence that fires and floods will not overwhelm them? Who else can say that “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us” (Romans 8:18)?

It is only the Christian who can declare these things to be true. Yet when we would be most helped by remembering them, we often forget. That’s why it’s so crucial to know the promises of God and to write them on our hearts. We can’t wait for the storm to hit us before we prepare for its damage. We must start now.

So what are some of those promises? From the very word of God, for those in Christ, we know that we are:

• Loved with an everlasting love that we will never be separated from (Jeremiah 31:3; Romans 8:38-39).
• Forgiven, completely and permanently, through the blood of Jesus (Ephesians 1:7; Hebrews 10:14).
• Kept by the very hands of Jesus, who holds His followers and will let none be snatched away (John 10:28-29; 1 Peter 1:5).
• Protected by God, who is our refuge and shield, guarding our souls forever (Psalm 121:7-8; 2 Thessalonians 3:3).
• Valued by God, who cares for us deeply as His own treasured possession (Psalm 139:13-14; 1 John 3:1).
• Adopted as members of God’s family (Ephesians 1:5).
• Righteous, because God sees us so through Christ’s perfect record (2 Corinthians 5:21).
• Secure in the permanent, free gift of salvation from God (John 6:37; Philippians 1:6).
• Victorious, sharing in the ultimate victory over death and sin through Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:57; Romans 8:37).
• United with Christ, even now — and one day, face-to-face (1 Thessalonians 4:17; John 14:3).

Believe it or not, these only scratch the surface of the abundant, life-giving promises God has made to those who call upon His name! As the Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson once said, “The prospects” — for us, I might add — “are as bright as the promises of God.”

When the darkness presses in and the questions begin, we don’t have to manufacture hope or grit our teeth and pretend the pain isn’t real. We simply return to the One who has already spoken over our lives. The same God who walked with David through both the valley and the night is the God who walks with us. His promises are not fragile or conditional on our circumstances. They’re as sure as His own character, which is “the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).

Don’t lose hope, my friend, for “losses and disgraces are the wheels of Christ’s triumphant chariot” (Samuel Rutherford). If the current moment feels like more than you can bear, never forget that you are never alone. He goes before you and has already invited you to lay your cares at the foot of the cross.

Remember, not even darkness is dark to Him, so give Him your current moment: your financial strain, relationship troubles, job losses, failures, anxieties, depression, fatigue, stress, lost time, grief, loneliness, confusion, and everything else that’s weighing you down. “Name any affliction that is upon thee,” said one 17th century pastor, and “there is a sea of mercy to swallow it up.”

And in one final thought, John Bunyan, the English writer known for “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” once said: “I know that sufferings are not excellent in themselves, nor are they to be desired for any profit that they can yield, but God uses them as a teacher to make known the riches of His goodness that are seldom known by other means.”