What about Job’s suffering?

Question 6016.

The suffering of Job is the passage everyone reaches for when life collapses, and it is also the book most often misused. People quote the patience of Job at those who are anything but patient, and they quote the ending at people who are nowhere near it.

Let me try to read it as it stands, because the book is far stranger and far kinder than the summary version most of us carry around.

The reader knows what the sufferer does not

The book opens with two scenes in heaven that Job never learns about. The accuser suggests that Job serves God only because God has paid him well, and permission is given for that suggestion to be tested. Everything that follows in the suffering of Job happens under a limit that Job cannot see.

This is the structural key to the whole book. We are told the cause; he is not. He spends thirty eight chapters demanding an explanation which the reader has already been given and which is never offered to him.

That arrangement is deliberate, and it says something to us. The suffering of Job has a reason. The reason is not disclosed to the one suffering. Both halves of that sentence matter, and most misuse of the book comes from dropping one of them.

What was actually at stake

The question raised is whether God is worth having for His own sake. Does Job fear God for no reason (Job 1:9)? Strip away the herds, the health and the family, and see whether anything remains.

That is a bigger question than one man’s comfort, and it is why the book will not settle for a tidy answer. If worship can be bought, then worship is a transaction and God is a vending machine. The suffering of Job puts that accusation to the test in public.

Job does not pass perfectly. He says a great many things he later withdraws. But he does not let go, and at the lowest point he says that though God slay him, yet will he hope in Him. That is the answer to the accusation, delivered from the ash heap.

The comforters were orthodox and wrong

Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar are not fools. Much of what they say would pass without comment in an average sermon. Their doctrine is that God is just, that He blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked, and that therefore Job’s catastrophe implies Job’s sin.

The premise is broadly true and the application is disastrous. They reason backwards from circumstance to guilt, and God says at the end that they have not spoken of Him what is right, as His servant Job has (Job 42:7). Sound theology deployed without love or knowledge becomes an instrument of harm.

I take that as a warning aimed squarely at people like me. The three friends got seven days of silent presence exactly right, and then ruined it by opening their mouths. There is more on this in the article on whether all suffering results from personal sin.

God answers with creation, not with an explanation

When the Lord finally speaks from the whirlwind, He does not mention the accuser, the wager or the reason. He takes Job on a tour of the wild world: the sea, the storehouses of snow, the wild donkey, the ostrich, the warhorse, Behemoth and Leviathan.

It reads at first like evasion. It is not. God is establishing that the world is vast, ordered and largely unconcerned with human management, and that the One who runs it is not obliged to file a report. The suffering of Job is placed inside a universe far bigger than the accounting Job wanted.

Job’s response is not resentment but rest. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you (Job 42:5). He wanted answers and received a Person, and found that the Person was enough. That is not a trick. Anyone who has been through it knows the difference.

The restoration is not the moral

The final chapter gives Job twice what he had, and this is where careless preaching does its damage. If you teach that faithfulness under trial produces a doubled bank balance, you have written a promissory note that God has not signed and that many believers will watch bounce.

The restoration is real and it is generous, but it is an epilogue, not a formula. Note too that the children are replaced in number, not in identity. Anyone who has buried a child knows that ten more do not cancel the seven. The book does not pretend otherwise.

What the ending does establish is direction. This is the God who gives, and the pattern of the whole Bible bends towards restoration. But the timetable is His, and for many the doubling waits for the resurrection.

What the suffering of Job teaches us now

The suffering of Job dismantles the equation that pain equals punishment. That equation is intuitive, ancient, and comprehensively rejected by this book and by Jesus in John 9 when He denies that the man born blind was being paid out for anyone’s sin.

It also shows that unseen realities are in play. Not every hardship is spiritual attack, and I am wary of Christians who see a demon behind every flat tyre. But the curtain is pulled back here just far enough for us to know that our small lives are not as private as they feel.

And it sets a limit. The accuser can go this far and no further. That boundary is never removed. Whatever is happening to you has a fence around it, drawn by a God who loves you, even when you cannot see either the fence or the love. See also the study on whether God causes or allows suffering.

Job speaks better than he knows

Scattered through the complaints are flashes that reach beyond anything Job could have understood. He longs for an arbiter who might lay his hand on both parties. He asks whether a man shall live again. He declares that his Redeemer lives and that in his flesh he shall see God.

Those are the deepest notes in the book, and they are struck at the lowest point. The suffering of Job produced a longing for a mediator, and the New Testament announces that the mediator has come. There is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5).

That is why I never read this book on its own. It asks a question it cannot answer and points to a hand it cannot see. The arbiter Job wanted has a name, and He has scars.

A word about the patience we credit him with

James commends the steadfastness of Job (James 5:11), and the older rendering of that as patience has done a certain amount of damage. Job is not calm. He accuses God of hunting him like a lion, of watching him without blinking and of refusing him the courtesy of an answer.

The word hupomone is closer to endurance than to serenity. It means staying under the load rather than smiling while it is applied. Job endures because he will not let go of God even while shouting at Him, which is a far more useful model than the composure we tend to imagine.

That matters pastorally. Believers who feel they have failed because they are angry in grief have usually been handed a picture of the suffering of Job that the book itself does not support. Endurance is not the absence of protest. It is the refusal to walk away.

So, now what?

If you are in it, you are allowed to speak plainly to God. Job does, at length and with heat, and he is commended rather than rebuked for it. The polite silence many Christians think is required is not required. Bring the complaint.

Resist the urge to explain. The friends were not condemned for their silence but for their speeches, and the suffering of Job was made heavier, not lighter, by three men determined to make sense of it. If you cannot bear the mystery, at least do not hand your discomfort to the person who is bearing the loss.

And hold on to the one thing Job did not have, which is a cross. The suffering of Job asks whether God is worth having when everything else has gone, and the cross answers it, because there we see what God was prepared to lose in order to have us. When did you last take a grief to Him without first tidying it up?

And hold on to the one thing Job did not have, which is a cross. We know what God is willing to suffer alongside us, because He has already done it. When did you last take a grief to Him without first tidying it up?

I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God.

Job 19:25-26 (ESV)