Another Possible Reason - XP

Another reason God gives hard trials to His most righteous followers may be reflected in how high-level role-playing characters earn XP.

In many role-playing games, characters become stronger by earning experience points, or XP, for overcoming challenges. The tougher the challenge, the more XP you gain. However, as characters gain experience and level up, they become increasingly more capable of handling challenges, so they have to face tougher challenges in order for their challenges to be "tough" or "challenging" at all. Some game systems reflect this by having higher-level characters gain less XP for the same challenges, and some do it by having higher-level characters need more XP to level up further. Some do both. In any case, the result is that the characters need to face tougher challenges in order to keep progressing at the same rate.

It's like exercising. If you lack physical strength, lifting even relatively light weights can help you become stronger, but if you're already strong, you'll need to lift heavier and heavier weights in order to grow stronger. If you're strong enough, lifting light weights won't increase your strength at all.

Maybe that's part of the reason God gives His toughest challenges to His strongest followers -- Because that's what it takes to help them become even stronger. I suppose that's basically the same as what I said yesterday, that if something is already fairly pure, it needs an especially effective purifying process to make it any purer. I thought of mentioning spiritual inertia again, drawing an analogy from the fact that if something is moving quickly, it takes more energy to get it moving even faster. It's all the same idea.

So when God gives hard challenges to good people, that may be because that's what it takes to help them become stronger. Or maybe there are other reasons, like giving them the opportunity to prove how good and faithful they are, or giving them an opportunity to earn the blessings God wants to give them. Whatever God's reasons are, it's a fact of life that bad things happen to good people, but when they do happen, it can be comforting to know what some of the possible reasons are, and it can be encouraging to know that God may intend to use these challenges to help us become stronger and to prove to us just how strong we really are.