God's Problem (23 page)

The narrator assures us that in all this “Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing” (Job 1:22). One might wonder what “wrongdoing” God could possibly do, if robbery, destruction of property, and murder are not wrong. But in this story, at least, for Job to preserve his piety means for him to continue trusting God, whatever God does to him.

The narrative then reverts to a heavenly scene of God and his divine council. The Satan appears before the Lord, who once again brags about his servant Job. The Satan replies that of course Job has not cursed God—he has not himself been afflicted with physical pain. But, the Satan tells God, “Stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh and he will curse you to your face” (Job 2:5). God allows the Satan to do so, with the proviso that he not take away Job’s life (in part, one might suppose, because it would be hard to evaluate Job’s reaction were he not alive to have one). The Satan then afflicts Job with “loathsome sores…from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (Job 2:7). Job sits on a pile of ashes and scrapes his wounds with a potsherd. His wife urges on him the natural course, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.” But Job refuses, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not receive the bad?” (Job 2:10). In all this, Job does not sin against God.

Job’s three friends then come to him—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. And they do the only thing true friends can do in this kind of situation: they weep with him, mourn with him, and sit with him, not saying a word. What sufferers need is not advice but a comforting human presence.

It is at this point that the poetic dialogues begin, in which the friends do not behave like friends, much less like comforters, but insist that Job has simply gotten what he deserves. I will talk about these dialogues later, as they come from a different author. The folktale is not resumed until the conclusion of the book, at the end of chapter 42. It is obvious that a bit of the folktale was lost in the process of combining it with the poetic dialogues, for when it resumes, God indicates that he is angry with the three friends for what they have said, in contrast to what Job has said. This cannot very well be a reference to what the friends and Job said in the poetic dialogues, because there it is the friends who defend God and Job who accuses him. And so a portion of the folktale must have been cut off when the poetic dialogues were added. What the friends said that offended God cannot be known.

What is clear, though, is that God rewards Job for passing the test: he has not cursed God. Job is told to make a sacrifice and prayer on behalf of his friends, and he does so. God then restores everything that had been lost to Job, and even more: fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yokes of oxen, a thousand donkeys. And he gives him another seven sons and three daughters. Job lives out his days in peace and prosperity surrounded by children and grandchildren.

The overarching view of suffering in this folktale is clear: sometimes suffering comes to the innocent in order to see whether their pious devotion to God is genuine and disinterested. Are people faithful only when things are going well, or are they faithful no matter what the circumstances? Obviously for this author, no matter how bad things get, God still deserves worship and praise.

But serious questions can be raised about this perspective, questions raised by the text of the folktale itself. For one thing, many readers over the years have felt that God is not to be implicated in Job’s sufferings; after all, it is the Satan who causes them. But a close reading of the text shows that it is not that simple. It is precisely God who authorizes the Satan to do what he does; he could not do
anything without the Lord directing him to do it. Moreover, in a couple of places the text indicates that it is God himself who is ultimately responsible. After the first round of Job’s sufferings, God tells the Satan that Job “persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason” (Job 2:3). Here it is God who is responsible for Job’s innocent sufferings, at the Satan’s instigation. God also points out that there was “no reason” for Job to have to suffer. This coincides with what happens at the end of the tale, when Job’s family comes to comfort him after the trials are over, showing him sympathy “for all the evil that the L
ORD
had brought upon him” (Job 42:11).

God himself has caused the misery, pain, agony, and loss that Job experienced. You can’t just blame the Adversary. And it is important to remember what this loss entailed: not just loss of property, which is bad enough, but a ravaging of the body and the savage murder of Job’s ten children. And to what end? For “no reason”—other than to prove to the Satan that Job wouldn’t curse God even if he had every right to do so. Did he have the right to do so? Remember, he didn’t do anything to deserve this treatment. He actually was innocent, as God himself acknowledges. God did this to him in order to win a bet with the Satan. This is obviously a God above, beyond, and not subject to human standards. Anyone else who destroyed all your property, physically mauled you, and murdered your children—simply on a whim or a bet—would be liable to the most severe punishment that justice could mete out. But God is evidently above justice and can do whatever he pleases if he wants to prove a point.

Other Tests in the Bible

The idea that suffering comes as a test from God simply to see if his followers will obey can be found in other parts of the Bible as well. There are few stories that illustrate the view more clearly and more horribly than the “offering of Isaac” recounted in Genesis 22. The context of the story is this: The father of the Jews, Abraham, had
long been promised a son by God, a son who would then become the ancestor of a great and mighty people. But it was not until he and his wife were in extreme old age that the promise was fulfilled. Abraham was a ripe, and obviously fertile, hundred-year-old when Isaac was born (Gen. 21:1–7). But then, when Isaac, the fulfillment of God’s promise, is still a young man, or possibly even a boy, God issues a horrible directive to Abraham: he is to take his “only son Isaac” and offer him up as a “burnt offering” to God. The God who had promised him a son now wants him to destroy that son; the God who commands his people not to murder has now ordered the father of the Jews to sacrifice his own child.

Abraham takes his son Isaac and goes off to the wilderness with two servants and a donkey loaded with wood for the burnt offering (that is, the pyre on which he is to sacrifice his son’s body). As they head to the specified place, Isaac wonders what is happening: he sees the wood and the fire, but where is the sacrificial animal? Abraham tells him that God will provide it, not letting his son know what is to transpire. But then he seizes his son, ties him up, lays him upon the wood, and prepares to knife him to death. At the last second, God intervenes, sending an angel to stay the knife before it strikes. The angel then tells Abraham, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me” (Gen. 22:12). Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in a thicket; he captures the ram and offers it instead of Isaac as a burnt offering (Gen. 22:13–14).

It has all been a test, a horrible test, to see if Abraham will do what God asks, even if it means slaughtering his own son, the son God himself had promised to make the father of a great nation. The point of the story, like the point of Job’s story, is that being faithful to God is the most important thing in life: more important than life itself. Whatever God commands must be done, no matter how contrary to his nature (is he or is he not a God of love?), no matter how contrary to his own law (is he opposed to murder—or human sacrifice—or not?), no matter how contrary to every sense
of human decency. There have been many people since Abraham’s day who have murdered the innocent, claiming that God told them to do so. What do we do with such people? We lock them up in prison or execute them. And what do we do with Abraham? We call him a good and faithful servant. I often wonder about this view of suffering.

Some people in the Bible are told to be faithful to God even though it leads to their own deaths. The model in the New Testament, of course, is Jesus himself, who is portrayed in the passion accounts as praying to God to “let this cup pass from before me” (Mark 14:36). In other words, Jesus did not want to have to die. But it was the will of God, and so he goes through his horrible passion (being rejected, mocked, flogged, and beaten to a pulp) and death by crucifixion—all because that is what God told him to do. But the end result—as was the case for both Job and Abraham—was good; these stories have happy endings. For Jesus, it led to his resurrection and exaltation to heaven. As one of our pre-Gospel sources tells us:

The followers of Jesus are to follow suit, being willing to suffer to prove their steadfast devotion to God. Thus as Christians are told in the book of 1 Peter:

The suffering that Christians endure is a “test” to see if they can remain faithful to God to the very end, even to death. And so, rather than complaining in their misery, they are to rejoice, happy that they can suffer as Christ did. And for what reason? Because that’s what God wants. But why does he want it? That, I’m afraid, is something that we can evidently never know for certain. It appears to be a test, a kind of final exam.

What, then, are we to make of this view of suffering, that suffering sometimes comes as a test of faith? I suppose people who have a blind trust in God might see suffering as a way of displaying their devotion to him, and this could indeed be a very good thing. If nothing else, it can provide inward fortitude and a sense that despite everything that happens, God is ultimately in charge of this world and all that occurs in it. But is this really a satisfying answer to the question of why people are compelled to endure pain and misery? Are we to imagine a divine being who wants to torment his creatures just to see if he can force them to abandon their trust in him? What exactly are they trusting him to do? Certainly not to do what is best for them: it is hard to believe that God inflicts people with cancer, flu, or AIDS in order to make sure they praise him to the end. Praise him for what? Mutilation and torture? For his great power to inflict pain and misery on innocent people?

It is important to remember that God himself acknowledged that Job was innocent—that is, that Job had done nothing to deserve his torment. And God did not simply torment him by taking away his hard-earned possessions and physical health. He killed Job’s children. And why? To prove his point; to win his bet. What kind of God is this? Many readers have taken comfort in the circumstance that once Job passed the test, God rewarded him—just as God rewarded Abraham before him, and Jesus after him, just as God rewards his followers now who suffer misery so that God can prove his case. But what about Job’s children? Why were they senselessly slaughtered? So that God could prove a point? Does this
mean that God is willing—even eager—to take
my
children in order to see how I’ll react? Am I that important, that God is willing to destroy innocent lives just to see whether I’ll be faithful to him when he has not been faithful to me? Possibly the most offensive part of the book of Job is at the end, when God restores all that Job had lost—including additional children. Job lost seven sons and three daughters and, as a reward for his faithfulness, God gives him an additional seven sons and three daughters. What was this author thinking? That the pain of a child’s death will be removed by the birth of another? That children are expendable and replaceable like a faulty computer or
DVD
player? What kind of God is this? Do we think that everything would be made right if the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were “replaced” by six million additional Jews born in the next generation?

As satisfying as the book of Job has been to people over the ages, I have to say I find it supremely dissatisfying. If God tortures, maims, and murders people just to see how they will react—to see if they will not blame him, when in fact he is to blame—then this does not seem to me to be a God worthy of worship. Worthy of fear, yes. Of praise, no.

The Poetic Dialogues of Job: There Is No Answer

As I indicated at the beginning of this discussion, the view of suffering in the poetic dialogues of Job differs radically from that found in the narrative framing story of the prologue and epilogue. The issue dealt with in the dialogues, however, is the same: if God is ultimately in charge of all of life, why is it that the innocent suffer? In the folktale, it is because God tests people to see if they can retain their piety despite undeserved pain and misery. In the poetic dialogues, there are different answers for different figures involved: for Job’s so-called friends, suffering comes as a punishment for sin (this view appears to be rejected by the narrator). Job
himself, in the poetic speeches, cannot figure out a reason for innocent suffering. And God, who appears at the end of the poetic exchanges, refuses to give a reason. It appears that for this author, the answer to innocent suffering is that there is no answer.