Joseph was falsely accused and imprisoned for years, yet God raised him to the second-highest position in Egypt. His imprisonment was the divinely ordained pathway to his exaltation and to the preservation of the people of God (Genesis 39–41).

Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern for preaching the truth. He sank into the filthy mire, and his own countrymen left him there to die (Jeremiah 38:6). He prophesied faithfully and was rewarded with rejection, persecution, and imprisonment. Like John Bunyan, he is the model of a minister who speaks the truth regardless of the consequences.

Daniel maintained his prayer life despite a royal decree forbidding it and was cast into a den of lions (Daniel 6). His faithfulness did not exempt him from suffering; it guaranteed it. But God vindicated him, and his accusers were destroyed.

The Apostle Paul wrote his most influential letters from prison—Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon. He was beaten, shipwrecked, stoned, and chained. He asked the churches to “remember my chains” (Colossians 4:18). During my own imprisonment, I came to understand that request in a way that no seminary course could have taught me. Paul was not merely asking for sympathy. He was asking the church to recognize that his suffering was part of his ministry—that the chains were not a detour from God’s plan but the vehicle through which God’s plan was being accomplished.

Peter was imprisoned and, like nearly all other apostles, ultimately martyred. He wrote his epistles—including the very passage that forms the foundation of this chapter—from a position of intimate acquaintance with unjust suffering.

John Bunyan, the Baptist pastor who wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress and Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, spent twelve years in Bedford jail for refusing to stop preaching without a license. His allegories of the characters Christian and Faithful at Vanity Fair, and later Christian and Hopeful in Doubting Castle, capture the dynamics of unjust suffering with a precision that resonates across the centuries. The pilgrims entered Vanity Fair wearing bright, shining clothes that immediately set them apart. When asked what they wished to buy from the world’s vices, they replied, “We buy the truth” (Proverbs 23:23)—and for that answer, they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by a demonic judge and blind jurors. In Doubting Castle, they eschewed suicidal thoughts after suffering tremendous abuse by the guard Giant Despair.

In more recent history, Baptist pastors Obadiah Holmes and John Clarke were whipped and imprisoned in Puritan New England for the crime of conducting Baptist worship. Adoniram Judson suffered two years in a Burmese prison in appalling conditions. Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand endured fourteen years of imprisonment and torture under Romanian communism. Centuries of Waldenses in the Southern Alps, now forming part of France and Italy, were slaughtered by Roman Catholic-backed states for holding to the primitive, simple, biblical faith.

And such has been human history ever since for serious, committed Christians. As I wrote in Suffering Unjustly, there can be little doubt that peace and prosperity are not the equilibrium position for the best of God’s people. They are the exception, not the rule. If you are suffering unjustly, you are in the mainstream of Christian experience, not on its margins.

The State as Persecutor

A common error among modern Christians—particularly in the West, where democratic institutions have provided centuries of relative liberty—is the assumption that the state is fundamentally benign. The biblical testimony says otherwise.

The Apostle Paul instructs us to be subject to governing authorities (Romans 13:1-4; Titus 3:1), and Peter echoes this command (1 Peter 2:13-17). But these instructions must be understood in context. Paul and Peter wrote under Nero, a man who used Christians as human torches to illuminate Rome’s streets and his garden parties. When Paul speaks of rulers punishing evildoers and rewarding good conduct, he is saying that the state and its public policies define good and evil, and state actors will reward or punish people by that standard, which usually does not coincide with God’s in the Scriptures. Hence, the words “good” and “evil” in Romans 13:3-4 are defined by the ruler, not by God. Paul even shifts his Greek vocabulary—using ponerós (high wickedness) in Romans 12 and kakón (broader misdeeds) in Romans 13—to signal that the state’s definition of “evil” often differs radically from God’s.

Substitute the word “Nero” for “authorities” in Romans 13, and the passage becomes absurd—unless you understand this distinction. The same applies if you substitute “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Mao Zedong,” or any number of modern democratic governments that have codified anti-Christian ideology into law.

The Christian’s four enemies, as I outlined in Suffering Unjustly, are:

His own sinful heart

Satan and his demons

The state

False religion

Of these four, the most common source of unjust suffering throughout history has been the state—and most predominantly its judicial arm. Modern democratic societies produce suffering through proactive public policies: anti-self-defense laws (under which I was convicted), unjust child custody standards, punitive taxation, restrictions on religious liberty, and a judicial culture that prioritizes political outcomes over truth. The penalties for running afoul of these policies include fines, loss of property, loss of children, and imprisonment.

Nothing in history has been more lethal to people than the state. Only those cleaving to some antiquated, romantic, yet quixotically fictitious notion that state actors primarily serve the public interest could ever think otherwise. During my years in the Valparaíso and Rancagua penitentiaries and the Casablanca jailhouse, the evidence overwhelmingly confirmed what I had studied theoretically in graduate school: the state is man’s chief enemy in all ages.

Sovereignty, Providence, and the Purposes of God

If God is sovereign—and He is—then your imprisonment is not an accident. It is not a mistake. It is not evidence that God has lost control or forgotten about you.