Job Session One

We prefer to answer the tough questions with platitudes as in Proverbs or Psalms. But Job is the reality check to our tendency to evade the hard truths of life, and as such brings comfort to those truly afflicted. It's wisdom literature that doesn't flinch from facing the fullness of human life, with all its paradoxes, incomprehensibilties, and bad behaviours dressed up in good intentions.

Job asks what if from your religion you got nothing; what if instead of rich reward you received suffering.

Would you still believe?

Do you so love God that no matter who you are and what your age and what you've suffered or are suffering, you cling to him?

These are the questions Job looks at hard and answers.

Describe a time of personal suffering.

How did you cope?

What was the most helpful thing your friends did?

Take a few minutes to think this over, and write down your answers.

Job had everything he could want: wealth beyond imagining, seven sons, three daughters, a wife, servants. And they all got along. Yet humility suffused his every cell. He even offered sacrifices for his children after each of their feasts so that they could be perfectly forgiven.

God sees all, including his servant Job who centres his life around him.

When Satan comes before God, it isn't he who begins the conversation but God. And it's also God who brings Job to Satan's attention. I find it fascinating and troubling that it's God who takes the initiative in what will become a bet with Satan.

God boasts of Job to Satan, and being omniscient, he must've known what the effect would have been on Satan, how Satan would not have been able to resist finding fault with Job's faithfulness of which God boasted. Besides which, it's natural that when one boasts of another to you, you will challenge that boast.

God says of Job:

Job is his servant.
Job is a blameless and upright man.
Job fears God.
Job turns away from evil.

God repeats these words twice in the first two chapters. These phrases are also repeated later in the Book. These words tell us that God considers Job faithful, innocent, wise, and full of understanding. But not perfect; simply a man with faith seeping into his every fibre of being.

It is easy to forget what God says in these first two chapters as we read on, for the many, many words of Job's friends will overwhelm these few, simple words and wipe them out of your mind or cause you to doubt that what God said is true.

God inexplicably (to us) takes Satan up on his bet. And God points out to Satan (and us) that Satan did incite God to go against Job for no reason. How does that make you feel? In what way does it change your view of God, if at all?

God repeats his assessment of Job, but the second time he adds a comment about Job's integrity. Again, what God says is true, and God says that Job is persistent in his integrity.

Is God's assessment of Job correct? Can God win his bet with Satan?

God winning his bet hinges on Job alone: God needs Job to win against Satan; God trusts Job with his reputation.

Were you expecting that? I wasn't!

After reading about how God and Satan play with Job's life, we're angry. We expect Job to be angry too. But he does the unexpected.

He falls down and worships.

How is it possible for Job to worship God after all that piling on of bad news? It is a challenge to much superficiality when it comes to worship and life's downsides. Job's wife says what we are thinking: why don't you curse God and die!

The author points out that Job does not sin (with his lips). Note: Job is still in the mindset of the healthy, not yet out of the numbness of shock. Satan understood in Chapter Two that making Job suffer bad health would cause a cascading effect of suffering, for suffering like this for months or years on end is worse than death. Death is a relief. His wife's blunt statement was in a sense compassionate as she knew death would bring relief, that remaining faithful to God would bring prolonged suffering.

Satan and God knew what they were opening Job up to, even if Job does not at this point. The ill health will slowly suck his reserves down to nothing until he becomes prey to all the well­-meaning people in the world.

We end this first session with Job's lament in Chapter 3. Read it now.

After his friends came to comfort him, and they sit in empathetic silence, too stunned to comprehend, Job begins to speak. But to whom is he speaking?

He is not praying, which is the standard way to talk to God. Yet lamenting is also a way to talk to God.

He says at least two phrases that God later picks up on:

In the beginning, Job wishes he'd never been born, that the night in which he, the "man­-child, first began life should perish.

He wishes that those who cursed that night be the ones skilled enough to rouse Leviathan. What does he mean?

We will not see reference to this again until God speaks.