Job Session Six

God restores Job, and everybody comes back.

How did you cope when family returned after a time of suffering to comfort you?

What surprising thing did you learn from your suffering?

Take a few minutes to think these over on your own or discuss with others, and then write down your answers.

Although he doesn't entirely understand why innocent suffering exists, Job does understand more about the nature of evil and that it's in the Creation. He awaits till the last day for the full answer. In the meantime, he's proven to Satan -- God already knew -- and his friends and to us that faith does not depend on reward and punishment, but on a person wanting, seeking, and accepting nothing less than a relationship with God.

At this point, we find out for sure how close God and Job are when God tells the three errant friends that they "have not spoken of me what is right" through all those cycles of speeches but that Job did. He tells them that they must humble themselves before Job, offering a burnt offering as an atonement for their evil thoughts towards him. Job, in response, prayed for them, something they never did for him.

God, being a forgiving deity and equally faithful to Job, accepts Job's prayer and doesn't barbecue the friends to a crisp as they deserve. Some note that Elihu is never mentioned here. Did he slink off? Was he too young to be fully responsible and thus God did not speak harshly to him as he deserved, instead expecting that He would learn from the consequences the friends' faced? Was he served up to Leviathan? Or did God fulfill Elihu's last pronouncement? Is this proof Elihu is an add-on to the Book of Job? As I've said before, I believe that whether or not it's an add-on, it still has validity. And I do think his youth is what saved Elihu from God's discipline.

Only after Job has prayed for his friends, does God restore his fortunes and then twicefold.

Job's family returns. Suddenly he has brothers and sisters we'd never heard of before. They sit with him and share his food, which means he's welcomed them back even though they obviously took off when all this suffering descended upon him, perhaps didn't even have much to do with him before, being annoyed with his faithfulness. All speculation!

But the end of his sufferings have brought them round, and they know and say that the Lord did bring all that evil on him. This is further confirmation that Job's suffering was unjust and that he was innocent and that he had spoken right of God. But how did they know this? Did Job tell them of God's words to him? Or did they know this beforehand? And how does Job manage to accept them back when they were nowhere to be found when he needed their comfort and sympathy the most? The book doesn't answer that question. One assumes that the restoration was so profound and the vindication so healing of his soul that it allowed him to forgive them before they offered up their regrets. It probably helped that each of his siblings gave him a piece of money and a gold ring, symbolic and practical beginnings to restoring his fortune and a testament to their regret.

God once again gives Job seven sons and three daughters. (Seven again, like the seven days of Creation.) But unlike before, when none were named, the narrator names his daughters and only his daughters. Furthermore, Job gives them an inheritance, something he didn't do for his first daughters and something that is quite unusual in his patriarchal times.

For a long time I wondered what had happened during his suffering or what Job had heard in all these speeches that would cause such a radical shift in him. And then I realised that when God spoke out of the whirlwind to Job, against all human expectation except his, and after great suffering when he was considered so vile he deserved worse suffering than he'd already experienced, Job saw God treating him like an equal, with respect, worthy of his inheritance through the Creation. And so having felt that, he would see his daughters in the same light, humans worth the least on the planet no matter how beautiful, and realise that just as God had treated him so should he treat them. Yet his wife is never mentioned again. Patriarchy is hard to kill off.

The names are also not just happenstance. The narrator is telling us something about Job's restoration.

Jemimah means little dove, like the bird that brought back to Noah signs of the end of the flood that God brought upon humankind. Keziah means cassia or the name of the spice tree, which is listed in Psalm 45:8 with other anointing oils for healing. And Keren-happuch means horn of antimony or horn of eyeshadow or child of beauty {antimony was used as a cosmetic in the old days.})

So Job felt peace, was anointed and healed, and put the best face on.

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This is not the end of the problem of evil, else people would not be arguing about it still. There is a great need out there from the ones who suffer greatly to understand this problem. I don't know if this will satisfy that need or merely raise more argument, but for me this journey through the book, of wrestling with the passages, seeking God and faith through understanding, was necessary for me to recover from the past almost-decade of my life. I'm not sure it fully satisfies, but like Job it's enough for now. Plus the fact that through my own personal need I can perhaps help others is a testament to the power of God to transform into good the evil that has been done to me.

In the end, Job (and Satan) learnt that his faith is not dependent on reward from God, learnt that the innocent suffer because of the design of Creation, and bonus saw the least in society in a new light and blessed them more.