Reading Job for God’s Mission

Why does it hurt so much to be a human being?

Last week I was having coffee with a friend who teaches at a Christian university. He told me that in research he’s done with American missionaries coming off the field the two most critical things they need are self-care and a theology of suffering. When he said this, I thought: This is why we need the book of Job, because it gives us a laboratory for learning where God is present in suffering.

Reading the Old Testament book of Job is challenging, to say the least. It’s a book that resists most of our habits, techniques, and strategies for “getting something out of” reading the Bible. It’s a book that refuses our modern question of “How does this apply to my life?” It’s a book where you have to see the whole to make sense of the pieces. Not every statement can be taken at face value. We need an uncommon amount of diligence and patience when we come to Job.

The naturalist John Muir writes, “We look at life from the backside of the tapestry. What we normally see is loose ends, tangled threads, frayed chords. But occasionally light shines through the tapestry and we get a glimpse of the larger design.” These words capture the big ideas in Job. We are a complex mess of raw and exposed emotions, but somehow these are the building blocks of God making something beautiful.

Here are some helpful ideas to keep in mind as we read Job.

Job is an ancient work of Middle Eastern art

Herein lies one of our greatest obstacles as modern Western people. Our default is to read Job as literal history. And yet, Job begins with the line, “There once was a man named Job,” and then the bulk of the book is highly stylized poetry. The artist who brings us Job is more interested in persuading us with emotions and making us feel rather than constructing a systematic theology or doctrine. Job is art. Job is poetry—elaborate metaphors, crafted rhetoric. Watch for how it makes you feel.

We see movies all the time that are “based on a true story.” And this might be a helpful way of considering the book of Job. There may very well have been a historical man named Job who lost everything and then got it back. This book represents an artistic interpretation of those events.

There’s a purposeful structure to Job. It has a narrative prologue (chapters 1 and 2), a series of dialogue speeches between Job and his friends (3–26), some concluding remarks of Job (27 and maybe 28), and then three monologues, one by Job (29–31), one by a fourth friend (32–37), and then finally one by Yahweh (38–41). This is all wrapped up with an epilogue (42).

It’s critical to keep track of where we are in story and pay attention to which of the characters is speaking at any given point. The speeches of Job and each of his friends can often sound like good theology, but when we hear the speech of Yahweh we discover that each is missing something critical. Job’s friends may sound pious. They might even mean well. But, only Yahweh has the total picture in view and knows what really is going on.

Think of Job as you would a play

I like to imagine this as a play. A narrator stands in front of the curtain and dramatically gives the setup. Then the curtain rises and we see Job, lamenting as he does in chapter 3. Eliphaz tries to comfort Job. Job responds. Bildad gives his theological two-cents. Job fires back. Zophar rebukes Job. Job says it’s not so simple.

This cycle repeats three times and then Job has the final word. The curtain closes and we have an intermission. The narrator comes out again with the words of chapter 28, a beautiful poem about the source of wisdom (and this, I really think is key to understanding the book). The curtain rises again with chapter 29 with Job alone, followed by Elihu, and finally Yahweh. The curtain closes and narrator delivers the resolution.

Reading Job as a play shakes out of some of our default reading habits and helps us see the big picture that’s happening.

Job exists within the Wisdom Literature

The Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament includes the books of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. These are books that aren’t concerned with the story of God and Israel and salvation. Rather, their interest lies in nitty, gritty ordinariness of being human.

What does suffering mean? How do we pray? How does one live the good life? Where is there meaning in life? How do we love? These are the questions driving this section of the Bible. Here Bible says to us that everyday life in this world matters.

Particularly in Job, we sense questions like, Why does it hurt so much to be a human being? Where is God when we grieve? How does God deal with lament? And the age old “Problem of Evil” question: If God is sovereign and God is good, why do bad things happen to good people? Is God not sovereign? Is God not good? We also see that life isn’t as predictable as the book of Proverbs sounds. That both Proverbs and Job exist in the Wisdom Literature show us the level of complexity with which the compilers of the Bible were comfortable.

Wisdom literature should inspire us to wonder, both the kind that leads us to inquisitive questions but also the kind that sits with the fact that we’re a part of a great big world for which we don’t have all the answers.

What do we make of “the Satan” in Job?

Western medieval Christian art has given us the image the devil in the Bible is a red demon with horns a pitchfork. But that image doesn’t exist in the Old Testament. In the book of Job, we see a picture of a character we don’t see anywhere else in the Old Testament.

This antagonist to God and Job appears only in the prologue, which is notable. The Hebrew word used is “the satan.” It’s always preceded by the definite article “the.” This isn’t a proper name but literally means “the accuser.” “The Satan” is never acknowledged by the human characters in the story, which is also interesting. This scene in chapters 1 and 2 portrays something like a government cabinet and “the accuser” acts like the minority opinion or a prosecuting attorney.

The idea it gives is that good and evil are not equal and opposite forces in the universe.Rather, evil is, for a time, allowed to exist within the sovereignty of good. Why this is so isn’t a concern of the artist. It’s simply taken for granted. It’s just the way the world is. There is evil in the world, but it never has the final word.

Think of Job as the scene of the cross

In multiple places, the New Testament portrays Jesus as a similar but better version of a numerous Old Testament characters—Moses, David, Melchizedek. Jesus is like Job, but Jesus is so much more.

Jesus was innocent, as was Job. Jesus suffered, as did Job. Jesus cries out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” While it’s a quote from Psalms, it’s much like Job’s laments. In the end, Jesus because of his faithfulness is vindicated by God, even more so than Job was.

Imagine the scene of the cross but with the words of the book of Job. Jesus speaks the lines of Job. The religious leaders stand in for Job’s friends. What does that exercise show you about Job’s story? What does it illumine about the story of Jesus?

When we stop to consider the problem of evil and suffering in the world, we can’t do that without the cross in full view. The suffering and ultimate vindication of Job point us to the suffering and ultimate vindication of Jesus.

But what about God’s mission?

The world is in pain. What is God doing about it? What are we doing about it? How we do cultivate a healthy theology of suffering?

I serve as a chaplain at a poverty outreach ministry. I hear stories of pain everyday. A grandmother whose grown grandson stole her rent money for drugs. A father whose drugged out son physically and verbally abuses him. A 22-year-old, bi-polar, unemployed mom of three who was fired because she had a baby and now can’t find work because she can’t find childcare. A grieving mother who carries paranoid resentment because her son was murdered a decade ago but the case was never solved. A married couple that passionately loves God but can’t seem to get untangled from their drug addictions. Young parents who are trying to get their kids back from DHS.

I hear these stories in view of a stained-glass Jesus under the words “Come unto me.” I don’t know what the do with these stories. But I sit before Jesus and I tell them that their story isn’t over yet. It’s going to be okay in the end. It’s just not the end yet.

The book of Job provides us clues for entering into the pain and misery and conflict present in our neighborhoods. It’s hard to be a human being. The presence of suffering is universal. The meaning that Christian communities infuse into their own deepest wounds provides a witness of hope to a watching world that’s desperate to escape, ignore, and numb pain.

When the rug is swept out from under us, when the world is turned upside down, when tragedy robs us blind, even there, “Look, the fear of Yahweh is wisdom, turning from evil is understanding” (Job 28:28).

The book of Job invites us to ask the most difficult questions. It welcomes us to articulate our angriest, most emotional questions and to throw them at God. God can take it. God can not only take, God can bear it. Jesus has experienced it himself. If God vindicated Job, if God vindicated Jesus, can we trust God to vindicate us in our deepest suffering?

If you want to go deeper in Job, be sure to check out:

Job for Everyone by John Goldingay

Job by Francis Andersen

On the problem of evil, there’s Evil and the Justice of God by N.T. Wright, and on the deep mysteriousness of God, there’s the contemplative classic The Cloud of Unknowing.