"…questions that many
people run away from"

What comfort Job?

Job's harrowing experiences are related in a unique book, which is one of the stranger inclusions in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. Job was a good man who suffered everything that cruel fate could throw at him and came through his time of trial with honour. His book addresses questions that any people run away from, but which honest believers are forced to face. Most people who have lived as for as adulthood come to recognise that life is not fair. Some people prosper and enjoy good health, while others face grief and poverty; but it is not necessarily the good who prosper or the bad who suffer. Meanwhile, all of us are constantly being made aware through personal knowledge, news reports, and gossip of all kinds of undeserved suffering caused by tyranny, crime, negligence, accident and natural disaster. If God is good, does his failure to banish injustice and suffering prove that he lacks real power? Could such a weak divinity really be "God" at all? On the other hand, if God is omnipotent, does the continued existence of evil prove him to be unjust? The book of Job faces these issues and comes to some unexpected conclusions.
This book has an unusual profile for an Old Testament story, because it does not talk about Israel, its religious form is not distinctly Jewish, and it consists almost entirely of dialogue. Furthermore, we have no idea who wrote the book and it provides few clues to its place and time in relation to history or archaeology. In brief, Job's story is that he was singled out for trials as the result of an extraordinary argument in the heavens. We see God and Satan trading bets to determine Job's fate! He then loses his cattle to rustlers, his sheep to a mysterious fireball and his children and their families to a tornado. We cannot tell from the context whether this tale is based on actual events or whether the parable is entirely fictional. However, we can see that the writer had thought long about the question of how suffering and evil fit in with belief in an omnipotent but righteous God.

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