Brent Pollard
Solomon buries a strange phrase inside a warning about strong drink, and most readers hurry past it.
“Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has redness of eyes? Those who linger long over wine…” (Proverbs 23.29–30 NASB95)
Wounds without cause. The phrase arrests me.
Recently, I found myself thinking about those words after developing a painful hematoma. There had been no fall, no bump into a table, no memorable injury. It simply appeared. As someone taking blood thinners, I know there is a medical explanation, even if I cannot point to a particular moment and say, “That is when it happened.” Even so, Solomon’s phrase echoed in my mind for days. Somewhere in my body, a small vessel failed. I never felt it. I only saw the aftermath.
That experience sent me back to the proverb, and the proverb sent me somewhere I did not expect to go.
What Proverbs 23.29–30 Actually Describes
Solomon was not writing about medication or fragile capillaries. He was sketching a portrait of the drunkard who wakes bruised, battered, and unable to account for his injuries. The wounds are not genuinely causeless. The man cannot trace them, because the wine that battered him also stole his judgment, his awareness, and his memory.
Read the end of the chapter, and you hear him speak for himself: “They struck me, but I did not become ill; They beat me, but I did not know it. When shall I awake? I will seek another drink” (Proverbs 23.35). There is the horror of it. Sin anesthetizes the very faculty that would identify sin as the culprit. It leaves scars and then erases the fingerprints.
Every generation invents new anesthetics. The substance changes; the mechanism does not. Whatever dulls conscience will eventually dull the ability to name what has gone wrong. That is why the wise man begs us to stay awake.
When Suffering Has No Explanation: Job and the Man Born Blind
But the phrase carries a second freight, and Scripture will not let us set it down.
Sometimes life wounds us in ways we cannot explain, and no moral arithmetic will balance the ledger.
Job’s friends tried the arithmetic. They reasoned that extraordinary suffering must indicate extraordinary sin, and they pressed that logic on a shattered man for chapter after chapter. God’s verdict on their theology was withering: “My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has” (Job 42.7). They defended God with arguments God rejected. Zeal did not excuse them.
Centuries later, the disciples made the same mistake with a beggar’s face before them. “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he would be born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9.2–3). He refused the question as framed. He did not assign blame; He gave sight.
Jesus dismantled the same reasoning again when men brought Him news of Galileans slaughtered at their sacrifices and eighteen crushed beneath a falling tower. Were they worse offenders than everyone else in Jerusalem? “I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13.5). Tragedy is not a scoreboard. Tragedy is a summons.
Why Christians Must Not Invent Reasons for Pain
Here is the practical discipline this demands of us.
Christians should be careful not to invent explanations where God has revealed none. A diagnosis is not necessarily divine punishment. An accident is not always the consequence of poor decisions. A chronic illness is not proof of weak faith. We live in a fallen creation where bodies weaken, diseases develop, blood vessels rupture, bones break, and hearts fail. These realities are not always traceable to a specific personal failing.
When we manufacture a reason for another believer’s affliction, we are not comforting them. We are prosecuting them. And we do it, usually, because their unexplained pain unsettles our tidy assumptions about how God runs the world. Silence feels like weakness, so we fill it with explanation.
Note what Job’s friends did right before they did everything wrong. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, “and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his pain was very great” (Job 2.13). That week was ministry. The speeches were not.
Sit down. Bring food. Say less. Weep with those who weep (Romans 12.15). You are not required to explain the wound to bind it.
A Groaning Creation and the Redemption of the Body
That does not mean God is absent.
Paul teaches that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now, and that we ourselves groan within, “waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8.22–23). Every unexplained ache, every mysterious diagnosis, every wound that seems to appear from nowhere testifies that this world is not the one God originally intended and not the one He will finally leave us in. Groaning is not faithlessness. Groaning is the sound of hope straining forward.
So Paul can look straight at a wasting body and call the affliction momentary and light, because he weighs it against an eternal weight of glory and fixes his eyes on what cannot be seen (2 Corinthians 4.16–18). That is not denial. That is accurate accounting. He also carried a thorn he never had explained to him, only answered: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12.9). God gave him Himself instead of information, and Paul counted it the better bargain.
We are pilgrims desiring a better country (Hebrews 11.16). Pilgrims do not demand that the road make sense. They keep walking because they trust the One who mapped it.
Trusting the Great Physician Until Every Wound Is Healed
One day the Great Physician will complete His work. There will be no unexplained bruises, mysterious illnesses, failing lungs, aching joints, or wounded hearts. “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain” (Revelation 21.4). Every effect of sin and death will finally be undone, and the undoing will be thorough.
Until then, entrust your soul to a faithful Creator in doing what is right (1 Peter 4.19). Not in understanding what is right. In doing it. Worship on Sunday with a body that hurts. Serve someone whose suffering makes less sense than yours. Refuse bitterness the way you would refuse a drink that promised to make you forget.
Some wounds will still seem to come without a cause. They may puzzle us, inconvenience us, or frighten us. They are never outside the knowledge of our heavenly Father.
We may not always understand our wounds, but we can always trust the One who does.
