You Have Not Told The Truth About Me

The friends of Job explained his ordeal by saying that he was suffering because he wasn’t a good person. It was a reasonable conclusion. After all, doesn’t God promise, in numerous passages (e.g., Deut. 28.15), to curse the disobedient? If so, it would seem a simple matter of reasoning from effect to cause—which means that Job’s hideous suffering Job had been triggered by his heinous sins. It was logical, it was Scriptural, it might have been the conclusion we would have drawn had we been Job’s friends.

The problem with this conclusion is that it’s wrong. So wrong, in fact, that at the end of the book the Lord is angry with those who concluded such and tells them to bring a costly sin offering to Job and ask him to make sacrifice for them lest they bear the brunt of God’s anger. This they do.

Based on this, I wish to say two things.      First, if Job teaches anything, it teaches that there are mysteries in this life that we do not understand. Suffering doesn’t necessarily imply the guilt of the victim or failures in his or her faith. Job’s innocence, not his guilt, is what occasioned his suffering. He didn’t suffer because he was the worst of men, but because he was the best of men. He didn’t suffer because he was abandoned by God, but because he was honored by God.

Second, the mysteries of life—the unanswered cries of “Why?”—should make us humble, causing us to remember that the Lord may have reasons far beyond our ability to reason (Isa. 55.8). Ought we not, therefore, be cautious, lest we think of God (or our fellows) what isn’t true.

Kenny Chumbley