I have been captivated lately by the Book of Job. Here, we have the account of a rich man from Ur, not even an Israelite, from even before the time of Abraham. I wish we could know who wrote down his story. And why did Israel keep hold of it?
As a new mom, I turned to Job to help me understand my own suffering. Between severe postpartum depression, a baby with health issues who didn’t sleep, and having no friends or family nearby, it all felt intense. It certainly challenged my faith, making me wonder if I was really loved by God. Like Job, I thought that my suffering was proof that God had forgotten or abandoned me.
It’s hard to remember now just how poor my mental health was, but my depression and anxiety scores were at the top of the charts. I mean, it’s likely the only thing keeping me out of the stress center was that we had no one to stay with Clarabelle if I wasn’t there.
All this to say, the question of suffering came up a lot in those days. Why do we suffer? Why was I suffering? Is it a punishment? God’s judgment? Did God just forget to care about me? Or maybe He didn’t care about me on purpose to prove a point (what do I need to do to prove I do, in fact, depend on Him for good things??).
And so, I could relate to Job, but I couldn’t make sense of what the book meant. I had two main questions for God:
“Why is this happening?”
and
“Do you care about me?”
We talk a lot in commentaries, small groups, and sermons about how Job was righteous and so his suffering wasn’t a result of sin. And he works hard to prove that to his friends, who keep arguing that he must be wicked and his suffering is proof of his sin.
But in Job’s efforts to prove his own integrity, he accuses God of neglecting him or even causing the hardship he was facing.
Isn’t this what most of us do when we meet trials? First, we might evaluate, like Job’s friends, whether we deserve what is happening based on our own actions. Then, if we can’t see that it comes as obvious consequences, we might go on to wonder if God even really cares about us. We feel forgotten, abandoned by God.
What happens next in Job is God rebukes Job and his friends. He humbles Job, too, reminding Him of all that He has made, everything He understands, intimately knows, controls. He rebukes Job’s friends for thinking God would only allow the wicked to suffer, and He rebukes Job for stating so boldly that He would ever not be in control over anything that is happening anywhere in the world.
And His answer for suffering?
He doesn’t give one. Instead He demonstrates that even if He told Job the purpose, even if He told him the exact reason why these tragic things had to happen to him, he wouldn’t understand.
This is how unsearchable—unknowable—God’s knowing is. The Psalmists made songs about this:
“Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it.
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?” Psalm 139:6-7
And again,
“But I will hope continually
and will praise you yet more and more.
My mouth will tell of your righteous acts,
of your deeds of salvation all the day,
for their number is past my knowledge.
With the mighty deeds of the Lord God I will come;
I will remind them of your righteousness, yours alone.”
The Psalmists remind us that God’s knowledge surpasses what we can know. So isn’t that true of the purpose of suffering and the effects of evil in the world? God’s answer is right there in the Bible, essentially, “you wouldn’t understand even I told you.” And yet we’re out here trying to come up with meaning for suffering all the time. We assure each other “everything happens for a reason,” as if that sorts out all of that.
I’m not saying everything we experience is meaningless. I’m saying that whatever the reason is, we will probably never know it. That’s not comforting, is it?
I’ll tell you what is. The God who created galaxies, hung every star, told the stags to leap in the fields and the water to lap over the rocky shore, holds you in His hand and cares about you more than all of these. I don’t know why He doesn’t stop suffering, but I know that if He doesn’t, He must know exactly why. And He must be right there, holding you through every painful thing.
The existence of evil sometimes makes it hard to believe in a good God. How could he let it exist? We tend to be so offended that God would allow our suffering that we forget the mere existence of suffering offends God.
The conclusion I’ve drawn is only a good God could exist in the presence of evil without doing evil.
Like the Psalms, we don’t come to any understanding by focusing on our own righteousness. The place where we find hope, assurance, comfort, and joy is in remembering the righteousness of God. If we think that the presence of evil makes God evil, we will never be able to see his goodness. If we can see He is good and therefore any evil we see does not come from Him, then we will begin to know His goodness.
When terrible things are happening, it can be hard to think on the goodness of God. Our minds naturally gravitate toward asking, “Why?” But maybe that’s the wrong question. Somehow, what helps is to remember how amazing and faithful God is to fulfill His purposes on earth. How in control He is over His own creation. How capable He is to handle everything you face and all your feelings about it, too.
The God of the good times is also God in the tragedies and sorrows.
The apostles wrote,
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2-4, esv).
And
“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Romans 5:3-5, esv).
So, while God is grieved by suffering, He has also called the product of our faith through enduring suffering good. And He is not a God who doesn’t know suffering, but in our suffering, we identify with what Jesus, who was God, endured on the cross.
When I was coming out of the depths of postpartum depression, it was the abiding goodness of God that strengthened my faith and increased my trust in Him.
Our faithfulness isn’t proven by how well we can prove our worthiness. Our worthiness is determined and proven by the faithfulness of God. The God of Job is the same God who saved and established Israel, suffered and died on the cross, and promised to return again to make all things new.
The story that was recorded and kept by His people is our reminder that we’re never alone in suffering. Not in our own life experiences, not throughout time, and most of all, because the God who restores all things has already begun that work.
It makes me so happy that that was your takeaway. That is absolutely the message I intended 😍
I’ve often heard Job preached from the attempts to explain why God let this happen to Job, or even to explain the perspectives of the friends, the righteousness of Job. I liked how you cleared that mostly away to leave up to the multiplicity of how God could and does show up for all of us and that the main and only thing we all have to cling to is God and All that He is.