My preference would be to just come out and say "God doesn't test us." I considered that as the title for this piece because it's more incendiary, but it's not entirely accurate. Institutional education has given us a definition of "test" that is hard to shake, one whereby we are measured to a standard and we either fail or pass the test based on our performance against said standard. In some cases the standard is not predetermined, but is that of our highest performing peer, and it is against them that we are directly measured and our status of pass/fail is judged. As children, we heard that God was a just and righteous Judge, and we became familiar with his standards. I think bad theology, ill-equipped parents[1], and over-simplified children's Bibles[2] all combined to give us a view of a testing God that we were never meant to have. Because when God tests us, and test us he will, he is not measuring us against his righteous standards. That is not and never has been, the definition of his testing, and it's time that we all got past this.

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