What is the purpose of trials and tribulations?
Trials are not arbitrary tests, but rather the arena where character matures, faith becomes real, and we take on our portion of responsibility. Overcoming hardship while still doing good adds something to a person that comfort alone can never produce.
Every serious life includes seasons that cannot be avoided, only passed through. Scripture treats these seasons not as interruptions of the spiritual life, but as its central classroom. Understanding why gives hardship direction and keeps it from becoming merely destructive.
Growth Requires Something to Push Against
Human beings were created to mature. That maturity was never meant to be automatic; it comes through a portion of responsibility that each person must fulfill personally. God provides everything else, but the final step of growth belongs to us, because a love and character we did not choose would not be ours at all.
In a fallen world, this growth happens under resistance. When we overcome hardship and still do good, something real is added to us. We feel elevated, energized, more ourselves. Comfort cannot generate that. Only the exercise of choosing rightly under pressure can, which is why James can write, "Count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations; knowing this, that the trying of your faith worketh patience" (James 1:2-3).
Trials Reveal What Is Actually There
Ease conceals. Pressure exposes what we truly believe, what we love most, and where our loyalties lie. Peter compares faith to gold tried in the fire (1 Peter 1:7), and the image is precise: heat does not create the gold; it separates it from everything else. Many people discover their real convictions only when holding them costs something.
This is also why trials are recurrent rather than one-time. Each level of responsibility asks for a corresponding maturity, and the testing that accompanies it is proportional to what is being entrusted.
Trials Build Capacity to Serve
Paul describes God as the one "who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble" (2 Corinthians 1:4). Suffering that has been worked through becomes usable. It creates a person who can enter another's pain without flinching, and there is no substitute for that in the work of healing a broken world.
Providential history reflects the same pattern. Every central figure who advanced God's work did so through a course of hardship: Noah building for years without visible reason; Abraham asked for his son; Joseph sold and imprisoned; Moses in the wilderness; and Jesus walking a path of rejection. Their trials were not punishments; they were the price of opening a road that others could then travel. The Bible reminds us, "For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake" (Philippians 1:29).
Trials Are Not Meaningless and Not Endless
Two errors distort this teaching. The first treats every hardship as directly assigned by God, which turns Him into the author of cruelty. Much suffering is simply the fallout of a fallen world. The second treats hardship as pointless, which leaves people with nothing but bitterness. The truth sits between: God does not send most of what we endure, but He can incorporate all of it into our growth if we let Him.
Nor is the testing permanent. "God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape" (1 Corinthians 10:13). There is a limit and there is an exit, even when neither is visible from inside the trial. Indeed, as it is written, "Many are the afflictions of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth him out of them all" (Psalm 34:19).
Living the Principle
Decide in advance how you will behave under pressure. Character formed beforehand holds; character improvised during a crisis usually does not.
Look for your responsibility rather than only for relief. In every difficulty, there is some portion that belongs to you: a response to make, an attitude to hold, a person to care for. Fulfilling that portion is what converts endurance into growth.
Do good while it costs. The value of an action rises exactly when it is hardest to perform, and those are the actions that change who you are.
Do not go through it alone or in silence. Bring the struggle to God honestly and to trusted people plainly. Isolation turns a trial into a wound.
Finally, take the long view. Paul weighed his own considerable sufferings as "not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us" (Romans 8:18). The person you become through a hardship endured well is permanent, and it is that person, not the circumstance, that God is working to bring into existence.
These answers explain the Bible in the light of the Divine Principle, the teachings of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. Read about the author, Sun Myung Moon.
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Sources and further reading
- The Holy Bible, King James Version — Scripture quoted and referenced throughout the answers.
- The Divine Principle (full text) — The complete text of the Divine Principle, the teaching of Reverend Sun Myung Moon that these answers explain.
- Unification texts library (tparents.org) — Large online library of Unification texts, sermons and collected speeches, including the Cheon Seong Gyeong.
- Short video lectures in English — Playlist of short English video lectures presenting these same principles.