Bible Challenge Day 180: God’s Justice? (Job 4-6)

Job has always been one of my favorite books in the Old Testament. And today we get into the central question of the entire book: is suffering always fair or just?

Job has just cursed the day of his birth (3:1-3). His friend Eliphaz feels obligated to challenge Job. Job has often counselled others who were suffering, says Eliphaz, but now he seems unable to benefit from the very lessons he has previously taught (4:3-5). And the most basic lesson of all is that God is not unjust. “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same” (4:7-8).

Eliphaz does not make the obvious conclusion explicit. He leaves that for the other friends later in the book. But the implication is clear enough. Job is suffering. God is too just to impose suffering on innocent people. Therefore, Job deserves what he is getting; Job must have sinned somehow.

For now, Eliphaz accentuates the positive. He says “How happy is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up” (5:17-18). That is, Job should learn his lesson, do right, and experience God’s forgiveness and blessing.

Job will have none of it! He reminds his friends that he did not ask for their help (6:22-23). He accuses them of withholding kindness and becoming treacherous (6:14-15, 21). And he ends with bitter sarcasm: “Teach me, and I will be silent; make me understand how I have gone wrong. How forceful are honest words!” (Wait for it . . . . ) “But your reproof, what does it reprove? . . .  You would even cast lots over the orphan, and bargain over your friend” (6:24-25, 27). With his very last words, at least in this chapter, Job again asserts his innocence (6:29-30).

So the positions are taken, and will only harden for the rest of the book. Job’s friends claim that God is just, so Job must deserve his suffering. Job responds that they are jerks and that he is guiltless. At stake are competing theologies and competing visions of our world. Is God just and our world ultimately fair? Or is the world sometimes unfair and—one must say this with caution—therefore God not always just? The seemingly pious answer is the first. And yet we know from chapters one and two that Job is in fact innocent and that his suffering comes from a kind of bet between Satan and God. That certainly challenges easy and conventional pieties!

Fr. Harvey