Last night, I led a small group on (essentially) the last 6 chapters of Job. Inevitably, the discussion took a hard turn toward discussing evil and suffering.

Job is quite a paradoxical book. It is a simple book, with a simple narrative. It certainly is easy to read, and one can follow the story-line without much trouble. At the same time, there is hardly a book that is harder to comprehend than Job. The opening scene, where it is God who brings Job to Satan’s attention, knowing what would happens, is particularly hard for us to grasp, as is God’s answer to Job in chapters 38 through 41. If the narrative is simple, the details are extremely difficult.

So what do we do with the book of Job? I can’t offer answers that will satisfy everyone, but I do want to offer a few things for consideration when reading Job.

1. If you come to the book of Job looking for an answer to the question “why?” you will be dissatisfied. This is because the purpose of the book isn’t to answer that particular question. The only place in the Biblical narrative that really addresses the question of “why” is Genesis 3, and even that text is unsatisfying to some degree. If you read Job as if it was intended to answer the question “why” you will misinterpret it every tme, because that was not the intent of the book. Instead it presupposes the existence of evil. Job’s place is in the Biblical narrative of Genesis 4 to Revelation 22, where evil and suffering are known facts that must be dealt with and the question becomes instead, “What is God doing about it?” The answer to that is the cross and all that it entails in the new creation.

2. Job chapters 1 and 2 do not just set the stage for the story, or add spurious detail, but inform the entire narrative. I have particularly in mind here the sections where we get a “behind-the-scenes” look at the unfolding of the cosmic drama between Satan and God. These sections, marked with the introductory phrase “One day the angels came to present themselves before YHWH, and Satan also came with them,” are Job 1:6-12 and Job 2:1-7. It’s easy to assume, because of the dialogue between Satan and God, that these two scenes are informative of Job 1:1 to Job 2:10, which catalogues the suffering of Job. Obviously, the throne room scene informs those issues because it is the direct playing out of Satan’s actions and God’s allowances. When we get to the middle section of Job, chapters 2:11 to 37, it is easy for us to forget the two scenes. I think, instead, that we should see those two scenes as informing not just the first two chapters, but the entire narrative after that. Do we really think that Satan, after destroying all of Jobs life thus far, would not somehow try to use Job’s friends and their speeches to get to Job? Of course he would—and still does. The two scenes also inform chapters 38 to 42. The flip side of the coin to Satan’s role is God’s sovereignty, power and wisdom. These themes are the very themes that run through God’s speech (chapters 38 to 41) and is the cause of Job’s humility in his reaction (chapters 42).

3. The Book of Job is the Gospel. In the end, the question of “why” is never satisfying. It may gives us intellectual insight into what is going on, but intellectual insight is rarely a healing balm for our emotions during suffering. So in stead of the answer to “why,” God gives Job something infinitely more helpful and soothing—Himself. God gives Job the gift of himself, and this is nothing less than the Gospel. In the gospel, God presents an answer to the question of what he is doing about suffering. He has conquered it through the cross, in the giving of himself to bear the weight of God’s wrath for our sins. As Job, a blameless man, suffered, Jesus the Innocent man, suffered in our place. It’s interesting, that for all of our frustrations with God’s “answer” in chapters 38 to 41, Job (the guy who actually suffered) is deeply satisfied with the answer.

4. Job is an exercise in the ‘renewing of our minds’ (Romans 12.2). Job makes us uncomfortable. One of the themes we kept returning to last night is that the book of Job destroys our categories of thought as Americans (I’m sure that this is true for my non-american readers as well). Here in the United States, there is an assumed right to prosperity and individual autonomy. Both of these are quite against the Bible’s teachings that 1)we deserve death, life and prosperity is grace, and 2) we are created in need of and for community. We are offended when these presuppositions are prodded. The primary way we Americans tend to think about God does not have a category for either of the two cosmic scenes, nor the apparent “non-answer” answer at the end of the book. And God help us try and wrap our mind around the fact that Jobs response is worship instead of being upset at God’s response. We simply must have our thinking about God enlarged to begin to take in the book of Job.