I can't recall a single time I've heard the story of Job used to discuss anything but suffering. How do we respond to suffering? How can we trust God in our suffering? How can we best serve those who are suffering? And these are all good and valuable questions, and Job is a great place to go for answers. But God's response to the whole affair addresses far more than suffering.

​Go back and read chapters 38 and 39. God gives a comprehensive case for trusting in Him. Where the men throughout the book have cited their years as grounds to trust their knowledge, God shows that there is far deeper knowledge only seen by the One who was before time. Where the wisdom of man looked to the stars for guidance, God points beyond to the One who guides the stars. Where the best human minds see truth written in nature, God reminds Job that it was Him who wrote it there. Where mankind fears or tries to use the strength of beasts, God is the one who gives that strength and the only master known to the wild places.

It is true that when we are suffering, we can look to God and trust that His wisdom is not overlooked, and His strength is not being restrained, and His purposes shall be realized. This is also true when we are not suffering, but don't understand what God is doing or how He will act. When things are okay, but we know His promises in our life have not yet been fulfilled, are we as keen to look to Him? When things are going well, are we as eager to be reminded that He is in charge and not us? When we seek wisdom, do we stop at the levels of human teaching or do we look beyond to the God of all wisdom? The challenge to the faultfinder in contending with God applies just as well when we question His timing, and His methods, and His plans, no matter what our experience of that situation is.

God says quite a lot about who He is and our relation to Him in these couple chapters. Maybe we should read them, even when we are not suffering, and ask God if we are treating Him as the God He is. He promises to comfort us elsewhere, but He is the ultimate comforter precisely because He is so much more than that. What do we miss of this act of revelation by only coming to it for comfort?

A lot of my reading lately has been in the book of Job, and one thing I've been thinking about is how we characterize Job's friends. Make no mistake, they were wrong about Job, and this made them terrible friends and worse comforters in his time of need. They were mistaken to think that they knew exactly what the wrath of God would look like, largely by assuming it would always happen in this life. They were especially wrong to think they could discern the will and plan of God without any help from God, just based on their own wisdom. They were wrong in a great many ways and, in the end, require Job's intercession on their behalf to avoid judgement themselves.

But they weren't entirely wrong about the content of their words. That is, they keep circling back to ideas that no man is truly blameless, that we all have sin and that this basic, common degree of sin is itself enough to justify the full wrath of God, which is a terrible thing to receive. They have a right understanding of fallen man, they have a right understanding of God as just and the judge of the living. They were wrong not because they knew wrong things, in fact much of what they say will come on evildoers is repeated elsewhere in scripture, but because they knew so little about the story that was actually playing out.

But David understands in the psalm above that God sometimes allows the unrepentant to have their best life now. To enjoy wealth and prosperity, to pass down their good things to children who will hoard them just as they have. And James warns us against showing favor to those for whom life seems to be going well, giving preference to the rich, and calls out those who gain their wealth through the unjust treatment of others to expect wrath to come. It is very tempting to look at our own situation and then look at the goodness that others experience and get angry or jealous. It is easy to lose hope that we are on the right path when the path is so hard to walk. It is easy to be like Job's friends and think that the outward experience of this life is an accurate measure of how well one is pleasing God. But like Job, we must look beyond the situation and cry out to the God who is behind it, and see that He is good, even if we don't understand what is happening right now. If we will be like David, seeking after God's face and taking our joy in knowing Him, we will not have the time or the energy to be weighed down with jealousy for the lives of others. We can trust that He who did not withhold His only Son will surely not hold back the good that He intends for us.

Job is a type of Christ, in that we see in him a picture of some aspect of who Jesus would be and how He would fulfill the promises of God. This is nowhere more apparent than in chapter 42.

​Job has gone through a great trial. A massive affliction that he did not deserve was laid on his head, costing him all of his wealth and family (except his wife, who turned against him) and drawing others to point to it as evidence of evil in his heart. He bore the marks of condemnation on his very body. He was raised up for them as a symbolic curse, a lesson for those who oppose God, though he never had and those who made the accusation did so based on a misunderstanding of who God is. Job is the essence of the suffering servant, the righteous one who endures great trial. But the imagery that ties Job to Christ does not end at his suffering. In chapter 42, we get some more very important details. 

There are a few things here worth noting. One, Eliphaz is probably a descendant of Abraham. Genesis 36:10-11 tells us that Esau had a son named Eliphaz to his wife Adah, and Eliphaz had a son named Teman. If he is not to be read as an archetype, then, Eliphaz the Temanite is likely from the clan of Teman and bearing a family name. Bildad the Shuhite may also be descended from Abraham, a member of the clan of Shuah, a son of Abraham by his second wife, Keturah, from Genesis 25. What we have in Job 42, then, is a descendant of Abraham who lives outside the promise made to Abraham receiving direct word from God that the only way he and his companions (another descendant of Abraham outside the promise, and a man likely unrelated to Abraham at all) can be made right before God is to go to the man they had scorned as cursed by God and welcome the sacrifice that he would make on their behalf. Through this, God did not directly promise to accept them, but did accept Job because of his sacrifice and, near as we can tell, accept the others on Job's behalf.

Why did Job have so much blessing at the end of his life? The end of the book records a massive amount of wealth and a broad family coming to Job, and I have heard it preached as though God was repaying Job for all that had been taken away from him. But the verse above seems to indicate another angle: God did not reward Job as a direct result of his suffering, but as a result of his sacrifice and prayer offered on behalf of the people who had condemned him.

Let's tie this all together. Job points forward to Christ not only as the suffering servant, but as the only way to find restoration to God for both the blood of Abraham and the gentile, especially because both parties have rejected and condemned him due to a misunderstanding of who God is. As a result of interceding and making sacrifice on their behalf, God not only accepts them but glorifies him. All of this is true of Christ.

We, by being born of the spirit and turning to the Christ that the world has rejected, are welcomed by God while Christ, who was perfect but suffered and offered his own life as sacrifice on our behalf, is glorified for His work to save us. The whole gospel is imaged in the Old Testament, if only we will allow ourselves to see it.

How many times have we heard atheists, when asked about what they would do if they actually met God, explain that they would demand answers about how the world is. "How dare you," general thrust of these questions tends to go, "how dare you allow a world that has these things in it?"​

When God finally addresses Job, starting in chapter 38 of the book named for him, He challenges Job to stand up and raise charges. He charges Job multiple times to "gird up your loins and stand up like a man" and lay out his case against God in the midst of his trials. Job, for his part, answers very briefly in chapter 40.

The theme of the day's reading is God's supreme power, but beyond that, God's supreme right to judge. God is the very foundation of the concept of justice, He is the cornerstone upon which everything we know and value rests. We cannot hold Him to a standard because He is the one true standard, and we can never know either His creation or the proper application of His law better than He does. He creates, He sustains, He tames the most powerful wild forces and humbles the most exalted mortal soul. Confronted with His glory, none may stand and lay a charge. If we allow ourselves for even a moment to believe that we have something to condemn in Him, then our idea of God is a pale comparison to the One revealed in scripture.

We must remember that this God we serve is so much greater than we can even imagine, and His methods are perfect on a scale we cannot comprehend. When we get lost in our concerns about the troubles we face in this life, we can come back to confidence in the knowledge that God has things under control, God knows what He is doing and what He is allowing, and that His promise that those in Him shall be glorified with Him will not be interrupted by momentary muck and mire. And we can look forward to the completion of His perfect plan and justice, and say with Abraham,

This will be short, as I'm coming down with something and it is deeply affecting my mental clarity. I'll just give an overview and some passages and encourage you to read them further.

The primary thrust of today's reading was about God marking and protecting those who are His. Psalm 91 is a general promise that God is with His people, to ensure that no evil lays hold of them. The motif of staying safe and secure while terror rages around the people of God is also found in Exodus 12, where Moses begins in verse 21 to direct the people concerning the first Passover, in which the people were marked as God's and calamity passed over them to afflict the Egyptians around them. While specific interpretation may vary, Revelation 7 begins with the account of 144,000 individuals marked as belonging to God. In Matthew 18, Jesus condemns anything that causes one of His people, especially a child, to stumble; even if the thing causing one to stumble is their own body. But this is all contrasted with the cry of Job in Job 3, when he curses the day of his birth and asks why he was even allowed to grow old if this was all that was in store for him.

Was God not protecting Job? Well, yes, He was. The most overt thing is that God places limitations on what Satan can do to Job in chapters 1 and 2, protecting Job from the full scope of Satan's trials. More to the point, though, none of these passages suggest that hard times and great trials will not come. Matthew 18 especially focuses on the fact that things will arise to be a stumbling block in the path of His people. But God will rightly judge all those things which cause trouble for His people, and will deliver His people ultimately out of the full scope of evil's reach. We will endure some pain in this life, but the greatest weapons evil has against us will never prosper. If we are His, He will see to our ultimate rescue.