The Passion of Job: Why Job suffered and what we can learn from it

Part 1: The Meaning of Job's Suffering

Chapter One: The Story of Job

The story of Job is perhaps one of the most widely known stories in the Bible. Even non believers are familiar with it. It is a story of great suffering. It tells of a righteous man who became the target of a dispute between God and Satan.

The Book of Job is full of surprises, not the least of which is the opening chapter in which Satan visits God. Somehow I had never pictured God and Satan ever talking directly after the fall. Yet, not only does Satan visit God, there is no indication that this is an unusual event. They strike up a conversation in which God tells Satan that Job is the most righteous man on earth. It is important to note, for reasons that will be made clear later, that God brings up the subject of Job, not Satan. Satan claims that Job is righteous only because God protects Him. God counters that Job is righteous by nature and to prove it, He allows Satan to have (almost) free reign against Job. The rest of the story is about the resulting suffering and eventual redemption of Job.

To be honest with you, I have always had my misgivings about this story. It seemed to portray God as a kind of heartless Supreme Being who was willing to subject one of the most righteous men on earth to unheard of tortures just to win an argument with Satan. This was far from my conception of God and did not seem to match the descriptions of God in the other books of the Bible. After all, the God I knew was a God of mercy, love and grace. What happened to Job did not seem to reflect the love of God. There was no mercy in the suffering of Job. The God I knew was a God of justice. Yet, Job's suffering did not seem to be just. Job appeared to be caught up in some dispute between God and Satan and did not deserve the pain and loss that was inflected upon him. As a result, I tended to stay away from this book because it bothered me, when what I should have done all along was to sit down and read it over and over again until I could understand its message. What I would have discovered is that the book of Job is hard to accept precisely because it displays the mysterious nature of God.

It took me years to reach that point. It wasn't until I was looking for a topic to teach in my adult Sunday school class one summer that I decided that if I was ever to tackle Job, I could learn more by being forced to teach it to someone else. So I decided to teach Job, the one book of the Bible that had always bothered me the most in the hope that I could finally understand what God was doing to poor Job. Preparing for the class wasn't easy but as I struggled through Job, praying for God's help with each lesson, I began to see that my initial conception of the subject of this book was wrong. Job is not a book about a wager between God and Satan in which Job is just a pawn. Rather, Job is a story about a man who had lost his sense of wonder about God and the lengths that God went to in order to restore Job's awe. I came out of the study with a whole new perspective on God and the Book of Job. It went from being the book that I avoided the most to one of my favorite texts in the Bible. I guess there is a lesson to be learned here. Do not run from or avoid difficult passages in the Bible. Instead, with prayer and study, let the difficult passages draw you into a deeper understanding of God. In my case, this book is the result of my turning to Job and trying to understand it rather than running from it.

I know that old conceptions of the meaning of the Word of God are hard to give up, as they should be. It is not wise to be willing to change your view of a passage in the Word as easily as you change your mind about what you want to order at a restaurant. You need to test what you are being told against the Word. A new view or interpretation of a passage must always be consistent with the rest of the Word of God. So, don't just accept my word that the Book of Job is more than the story of a bet between God and Satan. Examine it, pray about it, and carefully consider the issues raised in this chapter. After all, it took a lot of work for me to come around to a new understanding of Job. Yet the effort I put into understanding this difficult text paid off with a fresh view of God and a conviction that I need to change how I interacted with God.