Has anyone ever hurt you more deeply while claiming to comfort you? For example, someone “comforted” a friend of mine who had lost his daughter by suggesting, “Well, just think how bad it would have been had you lost all your family.”
When Job is suffering, some friends come to comfort him yet end up debating him. They insist that because God is just, Job must be suffering for a good reason. He must have done something wrong, so if he makes it right God will bless him again.
Job’s innocence
In spite of themselves, Job’s friends sometimes speak wisdom, the sort of wisdom found in the Book of Proverbs. Proverbs includes general principles, such as God blessing the righteous and punishing the wicked. But what happens when the righteous suffer? Job’s friends badly misapply their inherited wisdom; they assume that if Job is suffering, God must be punishing him. “Like a thornbush in the hand of someone drunk,” Proverbs warns, “is a wise saying in a fool’s mouth” (Prov 26:9).
Job defends himself insistently, and sometimes Job complains that God has struck him even though he is innocent. He wants to plead his case before God (Job 13:15-23; 23:3-4; 31:35), knowing that God will agree with Job’s innocence (23:5-7). Sometimes Job cannot seem to get God’s attention (23:8), protesting that God has taken away his access to a hearing (19:6; 27:2). Nevertheless, at times he seems to recognize that God will ultimately vindicate him (16:19-21; 23:10).
Job is sure that he has not done anything wrong to cause this suffering, and he is right. Nevertheless, some of Job’s protests could be understood as reflecting the same misconception held by his friends: the righteous should not suffer. God must be just, yet Job is righteous, and this poses something of a conundrum to everyone.
Mysteries of suffering
Job does not know what the book’s audience knows: God himself had praised Job’s righteousness, and Satan had been the one who wanted to strike him (Job 1:8-12). Although Job is right in a sense that God has done it (12:9; 17:6; 23:16), he does not know the entire story. Yet at the end of the book, when God challenges humans’ questions, he does not bother to inform Job or his friends about Satan’s role in accusing Job in the heavenly court.
This observation suggests at least two principles. First, Satan cannot touch God’s servant without God’s permission. In fact, God earlier protected Job’s health (1:12), and afterward his life (2:6), from Satan. If we are God’s servants, we can trust that God knows every hair on our heads; he may not directly initiate our suffering, but he still cares and has a purpose even when we suffer. Suffering may test us (cf. 23:10); it is not always a punishment.
Second, Job did not really need to know what went on in heaven. We do not need to understand the cosmic mechanics behind suffering; we just need to know that God is trustworthy. It is God and not Satan with whom we ultimately must deal in times of trouble, and Job was right to appeal to God.
In the book’s closing chapters, God asks Job whether he understands the mysteries of nature or has wisdom to rule the world (Job 38—41). “Were you around when I founded the earth? Tell me who arranged its boundaries?” (cf. 38:4-6). “Are you the one who watches over animals until they bear?” (cf. 39:1-4). “Is it by your wisdom that hawks fly and eagles build their nests?” (cf. 39:26-30). In God’s presence, Job recognizes that the larger scheme into which he fits is beyond his ability to understand (40:3-5). God asks Job if he must make God seem unjust to protest his own innocence (40:8). Job confesses that God’s wisdom is right though beyond Job’s understanding (42:2-6).
We don’t have all the answers; neither can we, but neither do we have to. We just need to remember that the one who watches over us does have the answers. Job was afterward vindicated in this life; that often happens after our testing, too, although our mortality means that we do not always live to see vindication. Although Job’s faith may have glimpsed the possibility of life beyond his death (cf. 13:15; 19:25-27), today we have a fuller and clearer hope than he because of what Jesus has done for us. In the cross we understand that God embraced our deepest suffering, and by Jesus’s resurrection we learn of certain hope beyond that suffering.
Wrong answers
At the end of the book, God reproves Job’s friends. “You have not been speaking what is true about me, as Job my servant has” (42:7). Job’s understanding of God, like that of any of us, was imperfect. Nevertheless, he rightly understood that God has the right and wisdom to do as he recognizes best—he is not obligated to always honor the righteous by others’ standards. Thus Job, in contrast to his friends, was also right that his suffering was not because of his sin. (Against some who suggest that Job invited judgments by fearing them, 3:25, which they cite, might refer to his fear after suffering; more clearly, Job elsewhere [30:26] says that he expected good things. The right object of faith is God, not speculations about the future, good or bad.)
Further, laments are ways to express pain; they are not always intended literally. Job’s friends pick apart his words for theological accuracy, but his are words of pain. (This might be the point of 6:26, although that is debatable.) Remember that Job has not simply had a bad day. He has lost all his wealth, all his honor, and worst of all, all his children; his friends have become his accusers. Yet God says that Job spoke rightly. Here God accepts the bitter (though not cursing) words of a man in pain rather than the theological arguments of those who think they are defending God’s honor. Job’s friends should have come to listen to his lament rather than to critique his speech.
Then again, Job’s friends may have been defending something besides God’s honor. Their theological system was at stake. “You see me and are afraid,” Job accused (6:21). If the righteous can suffer, then the sort of disaster that struck Job can also strike them. Their theology protects them against that dreadful thought.
My wife’s country was fairly stable when she was growing up, and she did not know what to think of Ethiopian refugees when she saw them there. She never imagined that, years later, she herself would become displaced in a war in her own country. When we learn of heartbreaking news around the world, do we have ways to explain why such sufferings could never happen to us? Perhaps, like Job’s friends, we need to rethink our theology at that deep level. Those who feel secure can despise others’ suffering (12:5), but the roles could have been reversed (16:4).
Job’s example
During the exile Israel remembered Job’s righteousness (Ezek 14:14, 20). This book was undoubtedly also a comfort to Israel returning from exile. Israel had faced the ridicule of Edomites (Ps 137:7; Obad 10-11), just as Eliphaz the Temanite (Teman was Edom’s capital) ridiculed Job. (For wise sages of Edom, cf. Jer 49:7; Obad 8.) Israel faced grave shame during their exile, yet God restored them from captivity—wording used for God restoring Job’s fortunes at the end (42:10, Hebrew). Later, James uses Job as an example of endurance (James 5:11).
Job undoubtedly did not feel like an example as he expressed his anguish. In our deepest darkness, however, when all we can do is cling to God for dear life, sometimes God counts that enough. He knows the depth of the suffering. He has not forgotten. In the end, he will vindicate those who look to him.