Is God good, even when everything goes bad?
Is God worth trusting when you lose everything you have?
That is the question at stake in the book of Job.
At the beginning of the book, God calls together a heavenly counsel.
Among those present with God and the angels is the accuser, Satan, known as the devil.
And God asks the accuser if he had considered bringing an accusation
against a man who was blameless, a man named Job.
For there was no one else on earth like him.
A man above reproach who feared God and turned away from sin.
And so, immediately, the accuser begins to accuse.
“Job only worships you because you’ve blessed him and kept him from abuse."
"But take everything away from him, make him lose, and he will undoubtedly curse you.”
So, in order to show that he is still good when everything goes bad, that God is still
worth trusting when you lose everything you have, God allowed
Job’s fields to be ransacked, his livestock to be killed.
God allowed Job’s children to die and his body to fall ill.
Even his own wife seemed to be a test of his will.
For she told him to curse God and die for all the pain he had instilled.
And as Job suffered, heaven listened to see if Job’s suffering would result in faith or denial.
It’s almost as if there was a heavenly trial, and
Job was brought as a witness after losing everything he had.
And the charges were brought by the accuser,
is God good when everything goes bad?
Is God worth trusting when you lose everything you have?
Surely God can’t be good if he removed his protective covering.
Surely God can’t be trusted if he allows so much pain and suffering.
What would Job say?
How would he respond after he lost everything to disaster, death, and the sword?
Job says, “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Well the heavenly debate was laid to rest, for Job lost everything and still called God blessed.
And yet Job’s suffering wasn’t solved.
Unlike the accuser’s accusations, his pain and questions were not laid to rest.
So, to help answer these questions and to ease Job’s pain, we are introduced
to three guests, Job’s friends who come to aid when they hear he is bereft.
And after seven days of sitting with their friend silently, Job finally speaks.
And it sounds to his friends like blasphemy.
He wishes God would have simply never let him been born
than for him to have to go through all this suffering.
Why would God allow him to live if he knew his life would come with such agony?
The friends then respond to what they believe is Job’s heretical theology.
And it is these conversations that make up the majority of Job’s story.
As it was with the trial in the heavenly counsel, this theological debate between Job
and his friends also sounds like a court case where Job accuses, and his friends defend.
I mean, you can picture it.
Job holds a trial where he is the plaintiff and his pain is the evidence.
His friends join the court as God’s attorneys to take up the defensive.
The only problem is there is no defendant.
God is not present in the courtroom.
Nevertheless, throughout the trial there are three cycles of statements
and rebuttals between Job and his friends.
Each of which repeat the same basic argument but get more pointed and belligerent.
The friends maintain that Job must have sinned to have fallen under such pain.
They believed God uses suffering to punish evil.
In fact, they thought he always makes the universe function that way.
The friends believed that Job is suffering because he sinned and needs to repent.
The only way to explain God, suffering, and their relationship
is to say that Job did evil and his pain was God’s punishment.
But Job’s rebuttal remains consistent.
Job says the friends are looking at the argument from the wrong side of it.
The problem is not that God punishes the wicked,
but that Job is suffering even though he knows that he is innocent.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
Job wants God to answer this question.
He wants God to take the stand, to be cross-examined, to tell Job why this happened.
But the position of the defense remains abandoned.
And so, as Job realizes that his friends don’t understand and that God won’t take the stand,
he starts to beg for a mediator, a representative.
Someone who could represent him not in this earthly court, but in the heavens.
But that is not what happens. Instead, God puts Job on the bench.
God asks Job to give a defense and begins asking him the questions.
“Answer me, where were you when I taught space and time to blend?
Tell me, how did I stitch together the wind?”
“Answer me, if you can, where were you when I populated every inch of the astronomic?
Tell me, how did I construct molecules down to the subatomic?
Answer me, reveal to me, your knowledge.”
Unlike Job and his friends, God’s questions
were not moral or philosophic, they were huge and cosmic.
They were not meant to answer Job’s questions but to show by comparison that
Job did not even possess the logic necessary to understand the answer he sought even if he got it.
The point of all of this is not to answer Job’s questions but to show that, in suffering,
God is doing something greater than anyone can comprehend or even begin to know.
And so, the only way for Job to respond was to repent, to take back his argument and accept
that trusting God through suffering was enough for him.
And yet God is gracious, so he not only restored what was taken from Job, but even doubled it.
While Job’s story has helped many, the relationship between God and suffering
is still difficult and many find it troubling.
How can God be good when things are so bad?
How can he be trusted when we lose everything we have?
For everyone since Job has wrestled with pain
and many find themselves bringing their claim before God’s court.
And while we would be wise to take Job’s advice and realize that the answers we seek
are far beyond the reach of our minds, God is gracious.
So, Job was not the last story about suffering he would write.
Instead, God would take the relationship between
himself and suffering to the most unexpected heights.
He would come to us in the person of Jesus, and God the Son would suffer. He would die.
You see, God understands why so many accuse him for their pain.
He has compassion on those who hurt and say he is to blame.
And we know this because of the cross of Jesus.
For he did take the blame for the wrongs that were not his.
He did suffer the penalty that was reserved for our sins.
He was made guilty, though he was truly innocent.
He took our griefs and with our sorrows became a participant.
He is the representative for which Job pleaded.
He is the answer to suffering that we all have needed.
For in the cross of Jesus we see God’s goodness
at the very place where everything seems to be going bad.
In the cross of Jesus, we learn that we can trust God when we lose everything
because, for us, he lost everything that he had.
Hey, I’m David with Spoken Gospel.
Thank you so much for watching our video introduction to the book of Job.
This is the first video in our Wisdom Series, and we can’t wait
to walk you through the rest of the books in the Wisdom genre.
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