📖 Bible Characters — Unit 2: Job — Faith That Holds When Everything Is Stripped Away

There is no harder question in all of life than the suffering of good people, and no book faces it more honestly than the book of Job. Job was a man who did everything right and lost everything anyway — his wealth, his children, his health, and the comfort of those closest to him. Out of his ashes the book answers two of the deepest questions the human heart ever asks: why do good men suffer, and why do the wicked prosper? And it teaches us that when God permits the righteous to suffer, He is neither absent nor unjust.

Subject: Job — faith that holds when everything is stripped away.

Proposition: When God permits the righteous to suffer, He is refining faith and will, in His own time, set every account right — so we can say with Job, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him."

The Story

In the land of Uz lived a man named Job, of whom Scripture says he "was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil" (Job 1:1). He was blessed with a fine family and great wealth. Then Satan came before God to accuse him: Job, he sneered, only serves God for the blessings — strip them away, and he will curse You to Your face. God permitted the testing; this was His permissive will, for Satan could do nothing without God's leave. And four waves fell on Job, one after another. First his material goods were swept away, and he went from prosperity to poverty. Second, all ten of his children were killed in a single day when a great wind struck the house — the unimaginable heartache of a parent losing every child at once. Third, his health was taken, and he was covered with painful boils from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. Fourth, even his companions turned: his wife said, "Curse God and die," and his three friends insisted he must be hiding some secret sin, or God would never have let him suffer so. Through it all, Job gave the answer that has steadied suffering saints ever since:

And early on he worshiped, saying, "The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD" (Job 1:21).

I. Why Do Good Men Suffer?

First, trouble does not always come from God. God did not strike Job's family, did not cause his sores, did not turn his wife and friends against him. The old dilemma of the skeptic — that God must be either not all-good or not all-powerful — fails, because God is not the only agent of power in the world. This is the permissive will of God: He allows what He does not author. And when God does discipline His people, it is because He loves them. Whose children do you spank — your own, or the neighbor's? The Lord corrects His own because they are His.

Second, not every trouble is the result of sin. This was the great error of Job's friends, who sat wagging their heads as if to say, "It finally caught up with you." But when the disciples saw a man born blind and asked whose sin had caused it, Jesus answered, "Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but that the works of God should be revealed in him" (John 9:3). Some suffering comes from neither God nor personal sin, and to accuse a sufferer of secret wickedness, as Job's friends did, is both cruel and false.

Third, some trouble is caused by Satan, the prince of this world. It was Satan, not God, who stood behind Job's calamities. Yet here is the wonder of it: through all that the enemy meant for evil, God brought good, exactly as He promises — "all things work together for good to those who love God" (Romans 8:28), and "count it all joy when you fall into various trials" (James 1:2). Three good things grew out of Job's grief. His pride was broken: all through the book Job justified himself rather than God, until at last he saw the Lord and repented, confessing himself a mere man with no right to question the Almighty — "now my eye sees You. Therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes" (Job 42:5-6). He learned patience: Job kept his faith but lost his patience, even cursing the day he was born, for the hardest thing in the world is to wait on God. And he learned the providence of God: the whole world fell in around him, yet God was still in control. As one of his friends finally said rightly, "Now acquaint yourself with Him, and be at peace" (Job 22:21). Charles Allen pictured a great mountain battered all night by storm and lightning, yet standing calm in the sunshine when the clouds cleared at dawn — and God is greater than the mountain. In the end God restored to Job more than he had ever lost. The New Testament says the same to every believer: "We must through many tribulations enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22). The road home often runs through hardship, and the Father uses even the hardest stretches of it to shape His children and to deepen a faith that prosperity alone could never produce.

II. Why Do the Wicked Prosper? (Job 21:7-13)

The second question is the mirror of the first, and Job himself raised it: why do the wicked live on, grow old, and grow mighty in power? Here the book gives three answers.

First, things are not always as they appear. We judge by wealth, power, and fame, and we assume the wicked must be happy — but we do not see the wages of sin being quietly paid. Some who seemed to have everything, admired and envied by all, ended their own lives in despair at the very top. John D. Rockefeller clawed his way to become the richest man on earth, and by fifty-three he was so sick and shrunken that his doctors gave him a year to live. Then he began to give his fortune away to churches and to the poor — and he lived to ninety-eight. The wages of sin and the rewards of grace are not always visible on the surface. We are tempted to envy the prospering wicked, just as the psalmist confessed he nearly stumbled in doing — until he went into the sanctuary of God and at last understood their end.

Second, the wicked live to show the patience and mercy of God. Imagine an angel poised over some great sin, asking, "Shall I strike now?" and God answering, "No — not now." That patience is mercy, leaving room for grace. Saul the persecutor, who held the coats while Stephen was stoned, became Paul the apostle, a monument of God's saving grace. Jerry McAuley was a convict whom men said the world would be better off without, yet he was saved one cold night in a mission and went on to open a mission of his own where hundreds of broken men found Christ. God's delay in judgment is the open door of His mercy.

Third, the wicked live because one day God will make all things right. Not every wrong is righted now. There was a man who boasted that he plowed and harvested on Sundays and still got a better crop than his churchgoing neighbors — to which a wise believer replied, "God does not always settle His accounts in October." The swindler may have a grand funeral and a fine headstone while a godly widow is laid in an unmarked pauper's grave, but there is a day of adjustment coming. When the young lawyer Charles Finney was asked what he meant to do with his life, he answered, "Get rich." "Then what?" "Then die." "Then what?" "Then the judgment." He could not shake the question; he ran into the woods to pray and came out with a Savior. Every account will be settled at the last.

Though He Slay Me

This is the message of Job: God's permissive will is not God's absence. In the dark, when the storm has stripped away everything we leaned on, God is still there — refining the faith of His own, bearing patiently with the wicked to leave room for grace, and storing up a day when He will set every account right. We do not always understand, and we are not promised that we will. But we are given something better than an explanation: we are given the Lord Himself, who is greater than the mountain and master of the storm. The innocent sufferer of Uz even points us forward to a greater Innocent Sufferer, the Lord Jesus, who entered our darkness and came out the other side in resurrection light. And so, with Job, the believer can rest even in the darkness on the Solid Rock and say, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him."