The book of Job is both about and for people who know suffering.
There is no instant working through grief, no quick fix to pain
Wisdom is to fear God and turn away from evil
The problem of suffering essentially by saying that God is doing his best and it is not his fault if he does not manage to eliminate suffering.
Without question, God is in control. Satan has to ask permission but cannot go one millimeter beyond the permission he has been given. And the scandal is that the supreme God does give permission to Satan to cause God’s blameless servant to suffer. And suffer he does.
Between Job 2 and Job 42 is an age of agony, perplexity, and suffering. If we are to understand that agony we cannot skip those chapters in between.
The four markers of Job are:
Job really is blameless.
Satan has real influence.
The Lord is absolutely supreme.
The Lord gives terrible permissions.
The living God, the Lord, is the only supreme God. Nothing happens in the universe without his permission.
We ourselves, if we walk closely with Christ, may go through very deep darkness, deeper even perhaps than if we had not walked faithfully in his footsteps. And that as we grasp this sobering truth we may learn to weep with those who weep.
We need to recognize that those who suffer, suffer alone.
God is absolutely in control.
God is absolutely just and fair.
God is absolutely in control and God is absolutely just and fair.
Suffering is the fire that refines and reveals the heart of worship.
No, we are called, as was Job, to begin our lives of discipleship with the fear of God and repentance from evil, and to continue our walk with God in exactly the way we started it
He speaks to us, whether or not we will listen (verse 14b). Sometimes he does so in a dream or some other means of getting through with deep conviction of sin to our minds and hearts (15–16). Why does he make us feel so bad about ourselves in this way? In order that we may repent, not become proud and so be rescued from death (17–18). God does speak, and when he does, it greatly disturbs us (verse 16, terrifies), but it is meant for our good. But sometimes he speaks to us through pain
Job 37 is a magnificent description of an awesome God revealed in a fearsome storm, with whirlwind included (37:9).
‘Look around and you will understand that I the Lord am the Creator and sustainer of life, I am in control of all the world, and therefore you may trust me with your life and your unanswered questions.’
In biblical imagery, the sea, the raging water, is the place of threat and chaos and hostility to the security of the people of God
Satan, Leviathan, is a horrible monster. But he cannot go one millimeter beyond the leash on which the Lord keeps him.
That means that as we suffer, and as we sit with others who suffer, we may with absolute confidence bow down to this sovereign God, knowing that the evil that comes may be terrible, but it cannot and will not ever go one tiny fraction beyond the leash on which God has put it. And it will not go on forever. For the One to whom we belong is God.
The One who is God even over Leviathan suffered on the cross. He is the God who deals in scars, for he bears them in the person of his Son.
Job is not about human suffering in general; it is about the suffering endured by a believer because he or she is a believer. Job is being persecuted, not by human enemies but by Satan. He endures disaster, tragedy, and sickness because he fears God.
Every morning we ought to wake up and say to ourselves, ‘There is a vicious dark spiritual battle being waged in me today.’ Satan is very busy; wherever on earth there is a believer walking with God in loving fear
So here is one inescapable element of the normal Christian life: warfare. That expectation relates to our circumstances. The second relates to our attitude of the heart.
So we learn from the perseverance of Job that we ought to expect warfare and waiting, struggle and prayer.
The most deeply compassionate and merciful thing God can do is to humble us and bring us low so that we may bow before him and lean on him and trust him. That is the first mark of the compassion of God: that he loves enough to humble.
The technical term is ‘justification’. God vindicates Job; he declares him to be in the right. God acknowledges Job as one of his people.
The normal Christian life is warfare and waiting and being loved and humbled by God, and being justified by God, all in the here and now.
Let us remember what we ought to expect of the normal Christian life. Warfare. For each believer is a battlefield and the battle is sometimes dark. Let us be honest about that and not be surprised. Waiting. We are to be full of prayer, longing, yearning, passionate, even desperate prayer, as we wait for God to act. Humbling. When we are brought low, it is a mark of God’s mercy that we may learn to lean on him alone. Acceptance or justification. Here and now we may know God has accepted us, and we belong to him forever. Blessing in the end. For when the Lord returns he will shower such blessing on us that we will not be able to contain it.
The book of Job is not fundamentally about suffering. Job suffers because he is a believer and he suffers as a believer. And because he is a suffering believer the central character and subject of the book of Job is not Job who suffers but the God with whom he has to deal. The book of Job is about God.
The book of Job is not about Job, but about God – his character, sovereignty, justice, goodness and, yes, even his love. Above all, it is about God the Creator of everything, the God who is God, who made everything, even the wildest corners of the created order, even evil and death.
Job points us to the mystery at the heart of the universe that a blameless believer who walks in fellowship with his Creator, may suffer terrible and undeserved pain, may go through deep darkness and then at the end be vindicated.
The drama, the pain and the perplexity of Job reach their climax at the cross of Jesus Christ. In the darkness and God-forsakenness of those terrible hours of lonely agony, the sufferings of Job are transcended and fulfilled.
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