NFORTUNATELY, SUFFERING IS A PART OF LIFE AS WE know it. The possible reasons for human suffering have been debated across history and cultures. However, philosophical and theological urgency is found in the context of the Judeo-Christian belief in an all-powerful, wise, and good God. The difficulty is to balance and maintain this belief in the face of the actual experience of intense human suffering. This is the impulse driving the book of Job.

The majority of Job consists of debate between Job, his three friends, and Elihu as to the cause of Job's sufferings. They also consider, in a broader sense, the apparent anomaly of the righteous suffering and the wicked prospering: "The great question is raised more by the distribution of suffering than by its existence."¹ However, to simply read Job as an attempt to answer these pressing questions is to miss the point of the book. The prologue of chapters 1 and 2 provides an insight to the story that is not known at any stage by the human voices in the remainder of the book. The readers' extra knowledge provides a partial answer to some of the questions raised by Job and his friends.

The Suffering of Job
The problem of suffering in the book of Job is set out succinctly in the narrative prologue of chapters 1 and 2. Job is introduced as a man "blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil" (Job 1:1).* He had seven sons and three daughters and great wealth. However, Job 1:13-19 narrates a day in which all Job's wealth and his children are taken from him in a succession of disasters.

In the midst of his grief, Job's response is to worship God and, with an air of resignation, admit that "the Lord gave and the Lord has taken away" (verse 21). However, worse was to come for Job. He is soon afflicted with a painful skin disease and is reduced to sitting on a rubbish heap, scraping his skin with a broken piece of pottery. This is the position his three friends find him in and forms the backdrop for the debate that follows. Job is reduced to such anguish that the opening of the debate is seven days of silence in which "no one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was" (Job 2:13).

This period of silence is the friends' most sympathetic act. Job's sufferings are compounded by the reactions of those around him. Indeed, the despair of his wife, the accusations of his friends, and the apparent silence of God contribute more to Job's suffering than his physical predicament does. He laments that his friends are estranged and his family has forgotten him (Job 19:13, 14). He is misunderstood, unanswered, and--as his friends' frustration grows--even abused.

After his period of silence, Job launches into his bitter complaint: "a cry of anguish from a soul quivering with agony." ² Job questions both the justice of his sufferings and, more broadly, the apparent undeserved sufferings of the righteous in the world, while the wicked often appear to prosper. These two questions are interwoven throughout his arguments. The previously theoretical problems are given urgency by Job's present agony.

Ironically, the answer assumed by Job's friends and Job himself adds mental anguish to his physical distress.

The Assumed Answer
The assumed answer to the questions raised by Job underlies the tension in the narrative and debate of the book of Job. "The theory dominant at the time this immortal poem was written was that suffering is the infallible index of personal culpability."³ Considering the rest of the Old Testament, the currency of such a belief was hardly surprising. God repeatedly promised the emerging Hebrew nation that if they followed His ways, they would prosper and would defeat their enemies. Alternatively, if they did not follow God, He would not protect them, and disaster would come upon them. This reasoning is emphasized even amid the wisdom of the book of Proverbs.

Accordingly, it would be expected that if Job was righteous, he would be blessed, and if he was wicked, he would be punished. The analogy drawn from this assumed equation by Job's friends was that the suffering that had befallen Job must be indicative of Job's sin: "Such is the fate God allots the wicked" (Job 20:29). Eliphaz chides Job, as someone who has often encouraged others, for being dismayed when "it strikes you" (Job 4:5). The friends repeatedly enjoin Job to confess his sin to God and seek God's forgiveness and reinstatement to favor.

They become increasingly frustrated with Job's assertion of his innocence. Eliphaz sounds their exasperation: "Is not your wickedness great? Are not your sins endless?" (Job 22:5). He affirms that the righteous are upheld by God and they see the destruction of the wicked "and rejoice" (verse 19). So strong is Job's friends' belief in this answer to Job's questions, they charge him with blasphemy in rejecting God's justice: "Your own mouth condemns you" (Job 15:6). This is Elihu's charge against Job--that, even if he has not sinned, he is sinning against God by his vehement denial of sin and his affirmation of his own self-righteousness.

Job's Answer
Despite the pressure from his friends, Job refuses to accept their formula. While he admits the apparent truth of their theory (Job 9:2; 26:3; see also 6:25 and 12:3)--and it seems he would have employed such reasoning before his suffering--he cannot reconcile this with the reality of his situation.

Job is initially downcast. He curses the day of his birth and longs for death to spare him this agony. He recognizes that justifying himself is self-defeating--"Even if I were innocent, my mouth would condemn me" (Job 9:20)--but passionately maintains his innocence of any sin deserving such trials as have come upon him.

For Job, the answer to his suffering calls into question the nature of God. Job faces a difficult dilemma: "If God is almighty, then he is not just; if God is just, then he is not almighty."⁴ Job does not question God's omnipotence. Both his friends and Job himself affirm the greatness and power of God. Rather, Job suggests that God is not just and that He has for some unknown reason targeted Job particularly, like a lion hunting (Job 10:16).

Job's reaction to this conclusion makes unsteady progress throughout the dialogue. Initially he wishes he were dead, and then he asks God to leave him alone to allow him to live his short life in peace. He slowly becomes bolder and expresses his desire to reason with God, even if it kills him. Job believes that if he could be given a fair hearing he would be able to justify himself before God. The imagery switches between Job appealing to God, Job accusing God, and Job defending himself before God.

Job's conclusions are a hope that he will indeed see God one day--whether in this life or after death (Job 19:25, 26)--and the assurance he has a witness in heaven and an advocate on high (Job 16:19). Job is certain that he will be justified when he gets a chance to present his case. In this way he affirms his faith in a just ordering of the universe and ultimately a just God, despite external appearances.

God's "Answer"
Much to the surprise of Job and his friends, God appears to make an answer to these arguments. However, the most startling feature of God's answer to Job's complaint is that He does not provide an answer to any of Job's questions or complaints, except for that as to whether God would answer him. Yet this nonanswer is unimportant. Yancey suggests that "God could have read a page from the phone book and Job would have meekly consented."⁵ Indeed, God's speech, though a grand discourse, adds little to that already considered in the preceding chapters: Job, Zophar, and Elihu have acknowledged God's control of the natural world and the universe. The most important aspect of God's answer is simply that He did answer.

Job is awed into silence by God's appearance and declarations. He admits that he spoke of things "I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know" (Job 42:3), and Job repents of his charges against God. God rebukes Job's friends and instructs Job to pray for their forgiveness. However, God accepts Job and affirms what the reader of the book of Job has known from the beginning--that Job is blameless, that he has spoken "what is right" (verse 7).

There is no direct answer given to the problem of suffering. However, the assurance that God is in charge of the universe and the affirmation of Job's faith are deemed to be sufficient answers. "The problem of human suffering grows small when . . . man understands that he is not the center of the universe around whom everything revolves. . . . He does not know and does not need to know why he suffers, for he has been accorded a vision of God."⁶

The Big Picture
The reader has witnessed the dialogue and debate of the preceding 40 chapters of the book of Job with background knowledge of the meetings in heaven between God and Satan in chapters 1 and 2. Even at the conclusion of Job's struggle, he has no knowledge of the bigger picture behind the suffering he has endured. His suffering and his anguished questions remain gloriously unanswered.

Job and his friends, however, have come close to the real answer. On a number of occasions, the question has been asked as to whether Job's righteousness, wickedness, or questions can ever matter to God (Job 22:3; 23:6; 35:7). The insight of chapters 1 and 2 suggests that an individual's faith and actions can and do matter to God. In a kind of bet, "God was letting his own reputation ride on the response of a single human being."⁷

Amid the anguished and frustrated discourse on suffering found in the book of Job, the overriding theme is that a person's response to suffering, and, ultimately, to God, is more important than the reason behind whatever the present circumstance might be. God's glorious unanswer is so much bigger than our questions. As C. S. Lewis has Screwtape write--using the reverse demon logic--"Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."⁸

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*Bible texts in this article are from the Holy Bible, New International Version. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Bible Publishers.

¹ Theodore H. Robinson, The Poetry of the Old Testament (London: Duckworth, 1947),
p. 83.
² E.S.P. Heavenor, "Job," in D. Guthrie and J. A. Motyer, eds., New Bible Commentary, 3rd ed. (Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1970), p. 424.
³ H. R. Minn, The Book of Job (Auckland: University of Auckland, 1965), p. i.
⁴ James S. Ackerman, Alan Wilkin Jenks, Edward B. Jenkinson, and Jan Blough, Teaching the Old Testament in English Classes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), p. 410.
⁵ Philip Yancey, The Bible Jesus Read (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1999), p. 62.
⁶ Julius A. Bewer, The Literature of the Old Testament, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), p. 342.
⁷ Yancy, p. 63.
⁸ C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, 1998 ed. (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1942), p. 31.

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Nathan Brown is editor for the South Pacific edition of Signs of the Times and the South Pacific Division Record.