Job and the Question of Suffering

For an entire week, three friends joined Job in mourning his tragic losses. Nobody spoke; they wept with him and wondered at how a righteous man like Job could suffer so many tragedies … the loss of all his wealth, all his children, and now his own body was riddled with disease. All of them grappled with the same questions. What was going on? Why did this happen?

As Job mourned, his friends slowly began to offer up answers to explain his unfathomable suffering. One suggested Job had sinned and was being punished by God. Another advised him to repent over sins that brought on these tragedies. Even his wife, herself hurting and confused by the tragedy, advised Job to just curse God and die.

While his well-meaning friends continued to propose that God blesses the obedient and punishes the wicked, Job groaned in misery pleading with God for understanding. He struggled to make sense of his wretched situation, yet he refused to blame God and give up. He believed that God is just, even if he couldn’t fathom why he was suffering.

In the end, God came to Job to clear everything up. The Lord asked him, “Do you know all things and would you assume to take the place of God?” Job confessed, “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know” (Job 42:3). Job admitted he could not fully grasp the ways of God.

God then condemned Job’s friends for not speaking “what is right.” Finally the story concludes: “Now the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (v. 12).

Suffering, Job learns, does not come from the hand of God. There is an enemy, Satan, who is the cause of the pain people experience in our world.