From a literary perspective, I find the resolution of the book of Job perfectly satisfying. Sure, it’s a whole other world culturally, it’s translated from another language, and it’s incredibly ancient, which means the uncertainty of the Hebrew text for this word or that figure of speech is footnoted more often than in other scriptures. That said, it’s a tremendous piece of writing, and God’s four-chapter response to Job’s perplexity and distress is its epic and poetic climax.
From a theological perspective, however, modern Christian readers may walk away from the book’s conclusion feeling something significant about the problem of human suffering still needs addressing.
That’s because it does. More than 3,500 years ago, when an unknown individual or individuals began to preserve the story of Job in written form, there was simply no way to say it.
A Non-Responsive Answer
God’s answer to Job is what our legal system would call “non-responsive” in that it does not even attempt to provide Job with all the answers he is so desperately seeking. It takes the form of over sixty mostly-rhetorical questions about the marvels and mysteries of creation. These begin at the beginning:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” “Where were you when the morning sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Answer: Not born. Not even conceived. A great gaping nullity.
The quiz continue along the same lines, exploring the limits of human understanding about the natural world and the universe of which it is only the tiniest part:
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked the recesses of the deep?” Er, no.
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?” Not exactly.
“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?” Well, no. Not even if I try really, really hard.
On to the Animal Kingdom
Then the Lord moves on to the animal kingdom:
“Do you give the horse its might?” “Is it by your understanding that the hawk soars?” “Is the wild ox willing to serve you?” No, no and no.
At this point Job responds just long enough to promise to keep his mouth shut. Understandably.
The Lord moves on to describe two great beasts with which Job was evidently familiar but which are now almost surely extinct, giving them the best part of two chapters of description. The questions he asks Job are of the same sort:
“Can one take Behemoth by his eyes or pierce his nose with a snare?” “Will Leviathan make a covenant with you to take him for your servant forever?” No, and no, and here endeth the argument.
The reader must come to his own conclusion about what God is saying to Job. No neat philosophical answer ties it all up in a bow for us. The metamessage is something like “The answer is above your pay grade.” This message Job meekly accepted. “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” Right answer, absolutely, but it makes no concession whatsoever to human curiosity. Such a conclusion leaves us with a God of wonders, immense power and endless natural perfections, but a God whose moral perfections must, at least for the present, go entirely unexplored.
The Tiniest Fraction
Bear in mind the conclusion of Job was written by and for people in possession of only the tiniest fraction of the Divine revelation you and I now enjoy. Over successive generations, the Holy Spirit has provided many of the answers Job sought so earnestly:
- “How can a man be in the right before God?” (See Genesis 15:6, Psalm 32:1-2, Isaiah 53:11, Galatians 2:15-16 and Romans 3:21-24.)
- “If a man dies, shall he live again?” (See Psalm 16:9-10, Isaiah 26:19, Daniel 12:2, Matthew 22:30-31, Luke 14:14, John 5:29, 1 Corinthians 15, Revelation 20:5.)
- “Why are not times of judgment kept by the Almighty, and why do those who know him never see his days?” (See Psalm 1:5-6, Ecclesiastes 12:14, Daniel 7:9-10, Matthew 3:12; 12:36-37, John 12:47-48.)
These scriptures are only the tip of a very large iceberg. God has not been parsimonious with truth. We know many things Job could only speculate about and hope for.
The Ultimate Mouth-Stopper
The ultimate mouth-stopper concerning the suffering of the righteous was the life and death of the Lord Jesus. As Job and his friends discovered, a sort of human righteousness hierarchy does indeed exist. There is such a thing as relative righteousness, and Job’s conduct put him right around the upper limit in a fallen world. God himself says so: “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?”
Yet for all Job was called blameless and upright, it was only by comparison to his fellows. When we come to the Lord Jesus, he is the “beloved Son” in whom the Father is “well pleased”. To whom else did God ever say, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession”? When Job effectively asked the question “Which of you convicts me of sin?”, all his friends scrambled to answer it. When the Lord Jesus asked it, he was met with stony silence. But how could Job know his limited righteousness problem would be resolved by God himself taking on genuine humanity and living a life of such exquisite perfection as to make his own resurrection from the dead a moral necessity? Who would imagine that?
Then there is the suffering. No doubt Job’s suffering was immense. Satan took from him everything he was allowed to take. But did Job’s sweat become like great drops of blood falling to the ground? Was Job’s appearance marred beyond human semblance? Was Job “made sin who knew no sin”? Surely the later scriptures answer these questions in the negative. Just as all human righteousness was relative until the Lord Jesus Christ entered the world, so the greatest examples of human suffering pale into insignificance when set alongside his, and all the more so because of the magnitude of the injustice done to him. Even criminals confessed, “This man has done nothing wrong.” Again, how could Job imagine God would put his beloved Son through far worse than Job ever experienced?
New Song, Old Song
The eternal resolution of the human condition required the ultimate suffering of the foremost exemplar of moral perfection. To me, that’s a much more satisfying answer to Job’s objections than even the most profound and moving revelation of God’s creatorial splendor. But that’s not the answer Job got. The Old Testament is full of references to a better answer, but they come in hints, allusions, word pictures, symbolism and obscure predictions. Revelation is progressive, and the full story could not be told until in the fullness of time all had been accomplished.
That doesn’t make the answer Job received inadequate. It was the best answer God could possibly give at the time, and perhaps we are not its primary audience. The “new song” of Revelation 5 is really the second verse to a much older melody. The one completes the other. The natural perfections of God are evident from creation, but the revelation of his moral perfections is only complete in the person of Christ.
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