Was it unfair for God to allow Job to suffer over what was basically an argument between God and Satan?

Therefore God gave Satan permission to do as he pleased in afflicting Job's body, while sparing his life (v.6). It may seem heartless on God's part to give Satan such permission, but God's pure love was in this in a way that unbelief cannot understand, for this eventually worked for greater blessing, But Satan did show himself heartless, for he wanted only to accomplish Job's downfall.

The controversy then is not between Satan and Job, but between Jehovah and Satan. Job is not so much on trial as the Lord Himself. Is God able to keep His servants loyal when the greatest afflictions pass over them? Has the Lord the power to sustain them? To manifest this power, to show forth His own glory, He permits the suffering of the saint. There are many blessed and comforting truths connected with all this. The best is that we learn that the Lord lovingly watches His people, as He watched Job and spoke well of him and that it is an honor not chastisement when He permits afflictions and sorrow to come.

In Job we have man put to the test; we might say, with our present knowledge, man renewed by grace, an upright man and righteous in his ways, in order to shew whether he can stand before God in presence of the power of evil, whether he can be righteous in his own person before God. On the other hand we find the dealings of God, by which He searches the heart and gives it the consciousness of its true state before Him.

All this is so much the more instructive, from its being set before us independent of all dispensations, of all especial revelation on God's part. It is the godly man, such as one of Noah's descendants would be, who had not lost the knowledge of the true God, when sin was again spreading in the world and idolatry was setting in; but the Judge was there to punish it. Job was encompassed with blessings and possessed real piety. Satan, the accuser of the servants of God, goes to and fro in the earth seeking occasion for evil, and presents himself before Jehovah among His mighty angels, the "Bene-Elohim": and God states the case of Job, the subject of His government in blessing, faithful in his walk.

It is carefully to be remarked here, that the spring and source of all these dealings is not Satan's accusations, but God Himself. God knew what His servant Job needed, and Himself brings forward his case and sets all in movement. If He demands of Satan if he had considered His servant Job, it is because He Himself had. Satan is but an instrument, and an ignorant though subtle instrument, to bring about God's purposes of grace. His accusations result really in nothing as against Job, save to disprove their truth by what he is allowed to do; but, for Job's good, he is left to his will up to a certain point, for the purpose of bringing Job to a knowledge of his own heart, and thus to a deeper ground of practical relationship with God. How blessed and perfect are God's ways! How vain in result the efforts of Satan against those that are His!

Our answer then as to the nature of all miraculous powers of Satan is that they are divine power put forth with divine permission with a divine object, in answer to a Satanic demand for that power. Satan desired to tempt our Lord, and God put all His power at the enemy's disposal to effect his object if possible. The result was the exhibition of the perfections of the sinless Man. The "messenger of Satan" (2 Cor. 12) given to Paul was permitted of God with a purpose of grace, in spite of the malignity of the one who would destroy the usefulness of a servant of the Lord. In regard to every outward form of Satanic activity we can use the words of our Lord, "Thou couldest have no power at all against Me, except it were given thee from above" (John 19:11). In other words, it was not Satan's lightning, but God's that smote Job's property; God's, not Satan's, whirlwind that destroyed his family. Satan had demanded this — "Put forth Thy hand now, and touch all that he hath" (Job 1:11). Job sees only God's hand in his affliction — "The Lord hath taken away" (ver. 21); and God Himself says to Satan, "Thou movedst Me against him, to destroy him without cause" (Job 2:3).

Another day came when the sons of God presented themselves once more in heaven, and Satan not only came in their midst, but, here it is added, to present himself before Jehovah (Job 2). One might have thought that surely he will now be ashamed. He had had all his way, and God was only the more magnified. But no; the unjust — and one need not say that Satan is the leader and spring of such — knows no shame; at any rate, there he is. And Jehovah again questions, and brings out too that His servant Job, although Satan had tried to set him against Him, "holds fast his integrity." He could add, "although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause." Satan asks for one more trial, "Skin for skin, yea, all that a man has will he give for his life." "Skin for skin," like for like, as many take it; or it may be that he lowers all that had passed to a superficial trial, that it had merely touched the surface of things — "Skin for skin." But he says, let there be something deeper now, and we shall see. Let it not be "skin for skin," or a skin-deep trial; "but put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face. And Jehovah said to Satan, Behold, he is in thy hand; but save [literally abstain from] his life." The reserve of his life was not with the view of mitigating the trial, but in order to the triumph of God for the good of the afflicted, the moral of the book. The trial, in fact, would have been less in every way, and its purport lost, if God had been pleased to let His servant Job be removed like his children; and, when Job broke down, death was exactly what he impatiently desired. It would have been the readiest relief to have died. He had no fear whatever as to God's loving, him, if he were only with Him; and the most calamitous plight into which he was reduced by the enemy after this would have found an instantaneous close in quitting the scene of such suffering. But God reserved his life when allowing Satan to do his worst, not, in my judgment, to spare Job anything, which was far indeed from the point, but because it would have interfered with His own gracious purpose of blessing in the face of evil and the enemy. And this is what we find in the book, that God had such a purpose, and that, even great as He is and infinite in His resources, each saint is an object of care to Him, and His purpose alone prevails. Whatever of sorrow may come in, they are but the circumstances of the way, and this not merely now, but then, even in the days before redemption. The great principle is always true, because God is always God, if there be not the manifestation of Christ as yet.

It is important to see that Job was walking on the earth well pleasing to God, and owned by Him as such, when Satan first called in question his fidelity and imputed to him the unworthy motive which was couched in the question "Doth Job serve God for nought?" It affords us the clue to a true apprehension of the nature of the discipline to which he was subjected, when we see that it was not primarily on account of personal failure; but the rather for the purpose of exemplifying to Satan the truth of God's estimate of His servant. It will be seen that much personal failure was betrayed by Job, while under the divine discipline; for though the trials which he suffered were inflicted by Satan, and with the intent to verify his calumny on him, yet they were used of God to accomplish in Job that self renunciation and faith in God, which did eventually enable him to establish in full blessedness, the truth of the estimate which God had in His goodness given of him. It is wonderful and most interesting to trace the way and manner in which the blessed God at once confounds Satan, vindicates His own judgment, and educates His servant up to the standing He had ascribed to him, and having brought him to it, rebukes Satan by bestowing on Job twice as much as he had before.

Here then is communicated to us what could not else be known, that it was God, and not Satan, who began the whole transaction. It was God who took notice of His servant Job, and it was His delight in His servant (for He does delight in His saints) which roused the malice of Satan.

162 It began, note, with God. He says to Satan, "Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in all the earth, a perfect and an upright man?" God had considered him. Satan says, Well, You have made a hedge about him, so why should he- not fear You? Then God lets Satan loose at him. He lets him take all that he has, his servants are killed, his children too afterwards, his fortune gone; and Job says, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." Then Satan says, Skin for skin, a man will give anything he has for his life! Then God says, You can have his body, but not his life. So Satan smites him with sore boils, so that he becomes both wretched, and the derision of his neighbours. His wife wants him to curse God and die, but in all this Job sins not; he has "received good at the hands of the Lord and shall not he receive evil?" So that I get this fact: all that Satan did against Job entirely failed, save that it entirely cleared him from Satan's accusation and the charge of hypocrisy. All that Satan could do he did, but could do no more than he was allowed to do.

But now we see how God was watching over Job. Job was full of himself. He was doing blessedly, but he was thinking of it too. Supposing God had stopped short here, what would have been the effect of it? Why Job would have said: Well, I was gracious in prosperity, and now I have been patient in adversity; and he would have been worse than ever. God had justified him from Satan's accusations, and his suffering had only prepared the way for closer dealings of God.

But God has pronounced: is not that enough? Alas, with sin has come in distrust of God Himself: He also is upon trial; and Satan's reasoning in Job's case almost openly takes that ground. God pronounces as to Job, and he takes exception to it. "Hast Thou not made a hedge about him, and about his house?" he says; and that means to say, "This sentence is not given upon proper trial." And God in His very mercy to man, who to his undoing has accepted Satan's malignity as truth, does not retreat behind His privilege. If He is, and must be, sovereign in His doing, so that "none can stay His hand, or say unto Him, What doest Thou?" yet will He suffer question, and let all be brought into the fullest light. Job's hedge is taken away, and Satan is allowed large limits within which to deal with him, ― the end being, of course, blessing to the sufferer and full vindication of God's perfect ways.

God, whose purpose is only disclosed at the end in the profit done to Job's soul (though His being the source of all is revealed), leaves Job, in a measured way, in the hand of the adversary for temptation and trial. Such is the scene and spring of action from within. But all comes on Job from without by apparently ordinary causes. The predatory hordes of Sabaeans, Chaldeans, and the like, make razzias on his flocks and herds; a violent wind from the desert throws down his house when his children are feasting; and at last a disease of the country attacks his own body: rapidly accumulated no doubt, but all ordinary events, however trying. What was Job's own character? He was, in his general character, a godly, upright, gracious man, fearing God, eschewing evil, and gracious with those around him. Why should evils, if there be a divine government, fall on such a one? If this world be simply the present manifestation of divine government as such, then indeed it would be incredible. But though Providence overrules all, and God delights to bless even temporarily; and though in result, when He takes to Him His own great power and rules, the blessing of the righteous will fully arrive; yet now, in a world of sin, He is carrying on another purpose, the perfecting of saints for the full enjoyment of Himself. This, since sin and will are come in, is wrought in two ways — judgment of self, and submission to God.