Does God give you more than you can handle?
I was recently asked this question by a friend:
God only gives us what we can handle right?
I think when people ask this, they are generally looking for comfort. And they generally are condensing 1 Corinthians 10:13, which reads:
No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.
And the problem I find is with the word “testing.” What is St. Paul talking about here? As the old adage goes: “If you take a text out of its context it becomes a pretext for anything you want it to say.”
The word “testing” here is the Greek word πειρασμός, (peirasmos), which means “an attempt to learn the nature or character of something” or “an attempt to make one do something wrong.” This isn’t just talking about difficult things happening to us, but difficult things that are designed to test us to see whether or not we will be faithful. In other words, this verse is about temptation, not just hard times.
So God will not allow us to be tempted beyond our ability to endure, because when we face temptation he will also give us the way out so that we will be able to endure it.
That doesn’t mean that we can handle every bad thing that happens to us with our own strength. In fact, as Christians we find ourselves regularly in situations that are more than we can handle on our own. That’s why God gives us a community - the Church - to help us. That’s also why we have God’s Word to instruct and guide us, so that we can discern what is the right thing to do.
In the preceding verses, St. Paul is warning the Corinthians not to fall away from Christ through temptation. We are to temper our desires with God’s Word and prayer, “so that we might not desire evil as [the Israelites in the wilderness] did” (v. 6).
The lesson to take away from 1 Corinthians 10:13 is this: When you face hardship, suffering, or other temptations to drift away from faith in Christ, there is no excuse: God has given you all you need to persevere in faith despite the hardship and suffering. He has not abandoned you to suffering, but he comes alongside you, suffers with you, and guides and keeps you in the middle of it. Our God is not a god who is far off and distant, but one who, in Jesus Christ, has taken on our flesh and lived closely among us, enduring suffering and shame for our sake, so that we can be confident that we are kept in the hands of a loving God.
