Suffering and the Triumph of God

Suffering is a perennially relevant theological and pastoral problem. Every Christian must face it. It is not reserved for extreme cases, such as those who are dying of cancer. Every believer encounters suffering regularly, for from a biblical viewpoint it marks the believer’s life as long as he remains a pilgrim in this present evil age, not yet enjoying the fullness of divine glory to be revealed when Christ returns.

The greatest problem that suffering presents, and one that pastors must confront directly as they minister to those who suffer, is the question, Why? Why does God permit his people to experience tribulation, physical and emotional pain, and even the troubles and difficulties of ordinary life?

One common answer is that suffering builds character. This is certainly one part of the biblical answer (Rom. 5:3–5), but it is not all that Scripture says. The panoramic perspective of redemptive history offers a deeper answer through the life of Job. According to the book of Job, the central issue in suffering is not human happiness but God’s triumph, for God achieves a mighty victory over the Enemy through the patient endurance of his people.

Exegesis of Job 1:1–12

The text divides into two major sections. Verses 1–5 describe the earthly scene of Job’s life, while verses 6–12 disclose the heavenly scene of a debate in the divine council in the upper register.

The Earthly Scene in Job 1:1–5

The opening paragraph has an alternating or chiastic structure:

• A. Verse 1: A general statement of Job’s outstanding godliness
• B. Verses 2–3: Job’s unparalleled prosperity
• A′. Verses 4–5: A specific illustration of Job’s outstanding godliness

Verse 1 describes Job’s outstanding godliness: “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job; and that man was blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil.” This is a general statement of his piety and reverence for God.

Verses 2–3 then describe Job’s unparalleled prosperity. He possessed seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred female donkeys. He was so wealthy that he was “the greatest of all the people of the east.”

Verses 4–5 return to the theme of Job’s godliness and provide a specific illustration of it. Job regularly offered sacrifices to atone for the sins of his children. This was not a generic ancient Near Eastern practice. His sacrifices indicated that he exercised saving faith in the divine promise of the coming Seed, whose death would provide the final atonement for sin.

The narrator thus presents Job from the outset as a man of faith and true biblical piety. He does not belong to the line of Cain or the seed of the Serpent but to the sphere of redemption. He fears the Lord, and this fear flows from saving trust in the Seed to come, whose sacrifice will be the final provision for sin.

These opening verses serve two purposes. First, Job’s counselors believe that only the wicked suffer. By pursuing this false logic, they confidently charge Job with sin (for example, Job 22:4–5). The opening verses inform the reader in advance that their accusations are baseless. Job is blameless, fears God, and turns away from evil.

Second, the paragraph raises an important and potentially troubling question: What, if any, is the causal connection between Job’s godliness and his prosperity? Is he prosperous because he is godly, or is he godly because he is prosperous? The narrator gives no answer at this point, except to establish that Job is both godly and prosperous. The question arises explicitly in the next section and remains a major theological issue throughout the book.

The Heavenly Scene in Job 1:6–12

The second section addresses the relationship between Job’s godliness and prosperity. The scene shifts from the earthly arena of Job’s family life and outward prosperity to the heavenly arena, where Almighty God presides over the divine council.

The sons of God are the angelic hosts, and Satan appears among them as the accuser of the brethren. Significantly, God initiates the conflict by asking Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job?” (v. 8). God engages the conflict because he knows that he will prevail.

Satan responds in verses 9–11:

Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.

Satan slanderously charges that Job’s piety is not the product of true religious devotion but an outward display sustained by a quid pro quo arrangement with God. The sarcastic opening question reveals the accusation: “Does Job fear God for nothing?”

The conflict between the Lord and Satan centers on the genuineness of Job’s faith. Satan accuses Job of hypocrisy and treats his godliness as empty ritual. By implication, Satan ultimately accuses God of fraud. God’s declaration that there is none like Job in all the earth is allegedly empty, because Job’s piety is supposedly not the fruit of redemption transforming him from a seed of the Serpent into a seed of the woman. On Satan’s account, Job has merely struck a cynical bargain in which God enriches him in return for his service.

The Outcome of the Conflict

The conflict in the heavenly council sets the stage for the rest of the book. Satan’s accusations must be proved false. Job becomes God’s champion, while Job’s counselors become Satan’s champions, much as David and Goliath represented their respective armies (1 Sam. 17:3–4).

God’s vindication against the accuser’s charges is bound up with the outcome of Job’s faith. Will Job continue to trust God when no earthly benefit follows? Will he say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him”? Confident that Job is a trophy of the redemptive enmity promised and initiated in Genesis 3:15, God permits his servant to pass through the valley of the shadow of death. Job loses all earthly prosperity, and even his body is afflicted with boils.

At first, Job responds with pious resignation: “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21). Beginning in chapter 3 and continuing through chapter 31, however, bitterness against God develops. Job condemns God in order to justify himself and thereby begins to adopt the false theology of his counselors.

In chapters 38–41, God finally grants Job the face-to-face encounter he requested. Speaking from the whirlwind, God demonstrates his sovereignty. Job responds by repenting of his bitterness even while he remains deprived of earthly prosperity. The question “Does Job serve God for nothing?” has now received a clear affirmative answer.

At the end of the book, Satan’s outrageous claim that Job’s faith is a sham is heard no more. Satan is silenced. His representatives, the three friends, are rejected, for God declares, “You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7). Job speaks rightly when he confesses his sin and thus vindicates God. Through the confession of his suffering servant de profundis, God triumphs over the Enemy. Job’s faith, though severely tried, proves genuine. He serves God not for earthly gain but for God’s sake alone, because God alone is his reward. Such confidence in the Lord while stripped of outward blessedness can arise only from a sovereign work of divine grace.

A False Theology Demolished

The life of Job rules out one proposed explanation for the suffering of God’s people: suffering is not necessarily an indication that divine favor has been lost. Outward prosperity does not prove that one is righteous and accepted before God; conversely, the absence of material blessing does not prove rejection by God.

Job’s three friends hold a naive theology of divine moral government. They believe that sinners always receive their due and that the righteous always prosper. Suffering must therefore indicate divine displeasure on account of sin. Job’s life demolishes this popular answer to the problem of suffering. The narrator carefully establishes at the beginning that Job is righteous, and God explicitly condemns the theological assumptions of Job’s counselors at the end, declaring that they have spoken falsely about him.

God’s purposes cannot be read easily from providence. In the speeches from the storm in chapters 38–41, God invokes the mighty Behemoth and Leviathan to teach that his ways transcend human ways and his thoughts human thoughts. God is sovereign and does not answer to finite moral calculations. The book therefore refutes the health-and-wealth gospel, a theology also contradicted by the plain teaching of the New Testament (for example, Rom. 8:35–37).

Job as a Type of Christ

Why does the book conclude with God restoring Job’s fortunes twofold (Job 42:10–17)? Does this ending reinforce the false theology of Job’s friends by suggesting that the righteous must ultimately prosper in this life? Job’s restoration must instead be understood within its redemptive-historical context. The reversal of his fortunes is typological and points to the exaltation of Christ.

Job and Christ share several significant features. Both are God’s champions in the conflict with Satan. Genesis 3:15 promises that God will destroy the Serpent’s work through the suffering of the coming Seed. In the book of Job, God achieves a limited and typological victory over the Serpent through the sufferings of his righteous servant. The lives of Job and Jesus also follow a threefold movement. Each begins in the splendor and glory of divine favor, descends for a season into agony and suffering, and ends in vindication and exaltation.

The book of Job must not be interpreted apart from the whole course of redemptive history, which finds its fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Job typifies Christ imperfectly. In his darkest moments he doubts God’s goodness and justice, whereas Christ suffers obediently under God’s mighty hand without murmuring. Yet imperfection belongs to the Old Testament’s typological system. David typified Christ even though, as a sinner, his life was only a shadow—and at times even an antithesis—of Christ’s perfect obedience.

Why Suffering? A Redemptive-Historical Answer

For the redeemed, suffering is a form of spiritual warfare. It must be understood against the cosmic background of Satan’s accusation that the redemptive enmity promised in Genesis 3:15 cannot secure a people who will serve God for his sake alone.

Christ’s faithfulness is ultimately at stake in this conflict. The issue is the legitimacy of God’s claim to have fulfilled Genesis 3:15 through Christ and through the application of Christ’s work in the effectual calling of the elect throughout history. God sovereignly permits his people to suffer in order to silence Satan’s accusations. Their persevering faith under tribulation vindicates God’s claim that the work of his Son has secured a people who belong to him.

Through the patient endurance of believers, God triumphs over the Adversary. The seed of the woman in Genesis 3:15 has two interconnected referents. At one level it refers to the individual Seed, the Messiah, as Paul argues in Galatians 3:16. At another level it refers to the collective seed, the elect united to Christ (Gal. 3:29). The promise that God will crush the Serpent’s head is therefore fulfilled through Christ’s obedience, accursed death, resurrection, and exaltation, and also through the sufferings of Christ’s body. Those whom sovereign grace enables to persevere despite the loss of all things participate in Christ’s sufferings and therefore also in his victory over Satan.

God demonstrates the power of redemption by calling a people out of the fallen mass of the Serpent’s seed to serve him without earthly reward. By grace they can say, “Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you” (Ps. 73:25).

The greatest temptation in suffering is to question whether God still loves his people. Suffering naturally tempts a person toward self-pity and inward preoccupation. Job also fell into this sin, although grace restored him. His tribulations became a means of grace. They taught him to abandon the expectation of receiving his final reward in this present evil age and to look toward the coming age inaugurated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In his darkest hour, Job confessed by faith:

I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God. —Job 19:25–26

This fixed hope in the resurrection enabled Job to repent in dust and ashes before God while he remained destitute and afflicted.

Job lived in the pre-Messianic era of type and shadow, yet he was enabled to take up his cross, forsake the world’s offer of earthly advancement, and follow Christ in the hope of a better resurrection. Believers now live in the last days inaugurated by Christ’s resurrection and therefore possess even stronger grounds for hope. Job, from the limited perspective of the earthly scene, knew little of the spiritual warfare occurring in the heavenly council, yet he trusted the promise of a heavenly reward. The gospel opens the heavenly realm to believers and displays the victory achieved by the suffering and now-glorified Forerunner who has passed within the veil.

Those who trust in Jesus Christ and suffer as pilgrims at the end of the ages must look beyond the limited perspective of earthly life to the heavenly perspective supplied by redemptive history. Jesus Christ is the greater Job, and believers are united to him. Through effectual calling, they are trophies of divine grace, for God enables them to place their hope fully in the heavenly reward even when stripped of the things of this life.

Those who continue to confess Christ amid suffering, looking with Job toward the resurrection at Christ’s return, are God’s triumphant answer to the Devil’s slander. “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom. 16:20).