Why does God allow Job suffering?

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.

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.

Meanwhile Job was singled out, not because there was something evil hidden beneath apparent blamelessness, but because he was the most upright man then living on earth. The Lord plainly indicates this as the true groundwork of his unexampled trial. Before angels, holy and evil, before God and man, it was proved that instead of serving God for gain or ease, he clung to God when all was lost, and no gain save the intensest suffering for soul and body, because he took it all from God, without in the least knowing why the blessed and blessing God should so give up to torture the one He loved. In the full conclave of heaven Satan sneered at the notion of such absolutely disinterested God-service. But Satan, as we saw, was utterly baffled; and God was proved dearer to him incomparably when he was suddenly thrown down to nothingness and suffering from all the prosperity which God had hitherto poured on him. God then drew out of Job's heart what neither he nor other men nor Satan had suspected; and this by the presence and sympathy of three friends. Who could have looked for it? The patient man broke down in impatience, and, provoked by the misjudgment of his friends, gave way to the bitterness of his soul as if God were become his enemy, for he could not draw near to Him. There was just his sorrow — that thick cloud between his soul and God. And there was the reason why he was from time to time all but despairing. It was not as to death, which he knew would close his grievous calamities; but why was it that such a God should so deal with His servant Job?

This was not God dealing in law, nor promise, nor full grace, as shewn out in Christ; but here is a man taken up, Satan accusing him, and God dealing with him. A master hand was guiding all in Job's case, though Satan was permitted to sift him. The accuser goes up, and God says, "Hast thou considered my servant Job?" Satan accuses. Now he must go through another process to learn how a man, a sinner, could be blessed with God Himself - could know Him, could understand His thoughts and feelings. Satan might touch his goods, but not himself. This seems but an every-day occurrence: loss of children, property, etc. God carries it on, shewing how He orders everything. Job stands these losses; he blesses the name of the Lord; but his heart was not reached. Satan says, "Skin for skin," etc. Well, says God, You may go and do it. His wife too comes and says, "Curse God and die." His piety is proof against this also, his heart was not reached; but God has to do His work thoroughly. Job sits in the gate, his friends around him; he was a mark for every one; it is too much for him. Now he curses the day he was born. He was feeling human complacency before, and had not been exercised in the presence of God. Many can say good things of God who have never tasted what they are themselves in the presence of God. What we want is a righteousness that cannot be shaken in the presence of God. We must be brought to this - not only be conscious of grace, but have truth in the conscience.

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!

We are anxious that the reader should distinctly seize this point. It is, to a very great extent, the key to the entire book of Job. The Divine object was to expose to Job's view the depths of his own heart, in order that he might learn to delight in the grace and mercy of God and not in his own goodness, which was as a morning cloud and the early dew, that passes away. Job was a true saint of God; and all Satan's accusations were flung back in his face; but, all the while, Job was unbroken material, and therefore unprepared for "the end of the Lord" — that blessed end for every contrite heart — that end which is marked by "pity and tender mercy." God, blessed and praised be His name! will not suffer Satan to accuse us; but He will expose us to ourselves, so that we may judge ourselves, and thus learn to mistrust our own hearts, and rest in the eternal stability of his grace.

And how did it affect Job? Very few converted men now would act as Job did then. "Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground and worshipped." Now he was a most affectionate man, and he was a man full of graciousness even to strangers. What was it for him to lose all, not merely his property, but every soul of the family, outside his own house? And he said "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: Jehovah gave, and Jehovah has taken away, blessed be the name of Jehovah." You cannot conceive a more happy and decided expression of entire godliness from a deeply tried soul. "In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly," that is, in a way that was contrary to all propriety.

But I do not call these spiritual sufferings; they are what are common to man. It might be so with an unconverted man; only there was this peculiarity about Job, which he did not know at first — that God was allowing Satan to bring all these things. Satan's pleasure and hope was to entangle Job's feet and cast him down, and that he would curse God. That was what Satan dearly longed to bring about. God allowed him to have his way, but not to kill Job. That would have been agreeable to Job; but it would not have brought out the great moral of the tale, which is, blessing brought into his soul by the very things that seemed to be against him, and not merely by the things that he experienced. When he began to find fault, he had to learn that that very God was One who never could swerve from what was excellent, and that in all this He had a purpose of blessing for Job. Not merely in his having outward blessings, i.e., of a temporal kind, but blessing for his soul.

Job was a saint who must have lived somewhere in the patriarchal times, because of the length of his life perhaps towards the end of the patriarchal times. In the first chapter of the book we find that he was a man “perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil” (Job 1:1). We may say that none of us is perfect but it isn't just that kind of perfection that the Holy Scripture means when it talks about a man being perfect, even in the Old Testament. It means a man of integrity. When a believer's path is set in the way of obedience to God, that is an integrity. When a man of godly integrity sins it doesn't destroy his integrity because he goes to God in confession and self judgment as David did, who in spite of his sins was a man after God's heart. Job was a man of integrity in that sense of the word. There are other indications that Job was a saint in another sense, because he was a man of faith. When his trial began to be bitterly felt and expressed by him he said “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (Job 13:15). He was a man who in spite of his suffering was entirely in subjection to the will of God. He complained that he didn't understand, he complained that he wanted to know the reason, he even thought that God was unjust to him, but he didn't give up his integrity, his devotion to God. Perhaps the clearest pointer to his being a saint is his confession in chapter nineteen when he says with the words driven out of him by his sufferings “Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were printed in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen and lead in the rock for ever! For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though, after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me” (Job 19:23-27). The only way to knowledge in a matter like this is faith in the testimony of God. We have no idea how the testimony of these truths came to Job, but they did come to him and he believed them. When he said “I know that my Redeemer liveth” it was a rudimentary statement about his knowledge of the Saviour who was then to come, but it is a very wonderful one. He might have said “the Redeemer liveth” but in this difficult passage there is nothing more certain than the personal pronoun “my”. We can see that there was not the slightest question of a doubt regarding his future. It was the present that was Job's trouble and it might be like that with us. We are quite certain of our future but O how sufferings can distress us at the present time. Job knew of his own link with his Redeemer by the use of the pronoun “my”. Job knew that he himself was going to see Him. There has been a great deal of learned argument and discussion about the very difficult question of the text and translation at this point. I sometimes think that perhaps the translators always make out a sentence to be a perfectly grammatical whole and wonder why we cannot see here a succession of sobs. “My Redeemer liveth … He shall stand at last upon the earth … after my skin … destroy this body … in my flesh I shall see God”. Though you miss out the intervening words the certainty is as clear as ever. Job is going to see God in resurrection and this has been the hope of the righteous from the dawn of history. We may rejoice that although our knowledge of the Saviour is so much fuller than Job's was and there has been brought to us the fulness of the truth that surrounds Him where He is at the right hand of God in heavenly glory, yet in the end Job's faith was such that he was brought through to a true prosperity.

In coming back to read the book of Job there are two things that have struck me very strongly. The first is that right to the very end of the book Job never knew about that interview between God and Satan that began it all. Job wanted to understand and in the end he was given the understanding that was necessary, “ … now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5-6). The real origin of the calamities that came upon him he never knew. Neither is there any promise that we shall know the origins of the distresses that come upon us. The purpose of them we might know but when you read the story it is a staggering fact that Job never knew that it was all started by God when Satan came into His presence among the sons of God. The other very striking thing is when, in the end, all the cloud of words had died away and Jehovah answers Job out of the whirlwind. What will He say? How will He explain the things that Job's friends have failed to explain? How will He complete the explanations that were begun by Elihu? He didn't do it! Not one word of explanation of Himself did God utter. Not one word to answer the questions that Job had asked. His words were entirely concerned with the things of this earth and nature. The Lord spoke of the inanimate things, the sea and the earth and the storm, and then the animate things, the beasts and the birds. Then, right at the end, He speaks about Leviathan. There was not one word of a spiritual kind but the presence of God was in the word and it brought Job to know himself. That was the end of the Lord, to bring Job through to true prosperity by realising the presence of the Lord. The real problem for Job had been that although he was a saint, although he could say “I know that my Redeemer liveth” he was not really habituated to the effect of the presence of God. Think of statements made in Old Testament days by those who realised the presence of God. Isaiah: “ … Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (Isa. 6:5). Think of Elijah and the still small voice and the voice that said to him “What doest thou here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:13). In the presence of God he realised that he had to condemn himself and get back to the work that God had given him to do. We have so many examples and Job is one of the clearest.

The Lord begins to speak in Job 38 and we read that He spoke out of the whirlwind. I have already referred to the fact that there is nothing in what the Lord says there that is outside of the life of men and of animals and of the creation as we know it. Some see something typical in them but I do not believe there is the slightest justification for this. The Lord was taking up something that Elihu referred to. He was displaying the immense greatness of God. If Job could not ask one tenth of the ten thousand questions that arise about nature how could he possibly understand God? God speaks first about the inanimate things, the earth, sea, clouds, hail and rain. He shows three things about them. Firstly that He designed them; secondly that He created them; and thirdly that He controls them. Consider the whole range of inanimate things that make up the world and the whole range of living creatures, and God commands them all. It says “Doth the eagle mount up at Thy command, and make her nest on high?” (Job 39:27). All the eagles on the earth, all moving to execute the demands of God. We cannot understand those movements and we cannot conceive in our minds the Being that could embrace the whole of them. The lesson for Job was that it was altogether too great for him to try to get to the bottom of things and seek for explanations. God in His counsels and actions is altogether too big for us. Then when the Lord comes to the end He speaks about Leviathan. We may feel like asking “what has all this explanation got to do with Job?”, but the presence of God was in the Word. If one of God's creatures terrifies the man who sets his eyes upon him how wrong it was of Job to persist and persist in questioning God. Job did maintain his righteousness and we are told that Job was an upright man, but Job also charged God with injustice in what He had done. God didn't exactly reprove Job for this. Elihu did, but God did not. God was altogether in His Words out of the whirlwind, showing that it was quite impossible for Job to cope with questions that arise about God. God gives no account of Himself in these things, His counsels and His designs, that lie behind the things that are done. We cannot expect God to give account, and this is only in earthly things! The presence of God was mediated in the things that Job heard and saw. Job's patience was manifested when he didn't curse God when his wife said “curse God, and die” (Job 2:9). His patience was manifested when he said “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord ” (Job 1:21). That was Job's patience, but the end of the Lord was reached when Job said “Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6). After this he sailed into prosperity, though what is spoken about at the end was prosperity of an earthly kind.