Quick (?) Thoughts on the Book of Job

As the title suggests, I've been reading in Job. I won't claim any profound discoveries. Job is a multi-person debate about why Job has lost almost everything. Readers are told what happened, but Job and his friends did not know. Job's three friends held to a simplistic doctrinaire view of God: God is just, therefore good people will not suffer. Consequently, they argued, Job must have sinned. Job asserted that he had not, and part way into the debate started to say that he wished he could assert his innocence before God, face to face. Near the end of the debate, a younger man interposed to chew on Job's other friends for their failure to show that Job had sinned, and on Job for not glorifying God as truly just. At that point, God interrupted the young man, to reprove Job for speaking far beyond his knowledge and understanding, and to reprove his friends for wrongly accusing Job.

Two sources of Job's suffering were things God specifically permitted Satan to do: take away everything Job had, things and family; take away Job's health. God's purposes for doing so are not explicitly explained. My speculation is that God used the whole process to fine-tune Job's relationship with Him and to teach Job that there are things relevant to his life that Job won't ever understand, and that that is OK. The third source of suffering, however, was not necessarily brought on by Satan. There is no mention of Satan stirring up either Job's wife or his friends.

All this should be instructive to the reader. And it's almost as if God anticipated the classic "problem of pain" and gave the Book of Job as His answer. First, life isn't simple, and no one is guaranteed a life of ease, not even "good" people. Second, one source of things we perceive as painful is God working in our lives. Third, some sources of pain are just sinful humans and/or a sin-corrupted natural world being what they are. This, also, God often allows. In all this, we usually will not "understand" why while it is happening (if ever). We simply must trust God and rely on Him in all things.