Job's Worldview

A little boy with internal bleeding. A woman taken hostage by IS and killed after a year and a half. A plane falling into the sea in a thunderstorm. The news is full of horrible things; people post them on social media sites as glibly as they share what they ate for breakfast.

A close friend is having health issues. Again. When I heard, my instant thought was, "Why, God? Haven't You allowed them to go through enough already? They don't deserve this." The fragility of life scares me every time it seems to crumble. The next thoughts were the usual comforting ones. If we can't praise God in the bad times, when can we praise Him? God didn't promise us no pain; He promised us He would be with us in the pain. And so on.

This morning the thought returned. It was not replaced by comforting ones though, instead I thought of Job. He went through so much more and his "friends" tried to comfort him by assuming he had sinned. Their worldview was vastly different from his for they believed that if you sinned, then God punished you. Job believed that even if God should kill him, he would still have reason to hope in God (Job 13:15). A closer examination of the chapter seems to indicate that Job would welcome death because then he would be able to speak to God face-to-face to defend himself and his blameless life.

Job suffered, yes, but in the end of the book we learn that God restored his fortune twice as much as before and gave him more children (Job 42). That frustrated me because there is no guarantee of reward on this earth. Those stories I began this post with do not have happy endings. My close friend may simply have to struggle along with their health issues rather than find healing. Life is not easy and it's not pretty.

The only way I can read the end of Job and syncretize it with my worldview in a way that makes sense is to believe that it is prophetic. One day, when this difficult life is over and we live in an earth burned clean of sin, we will have the riches exceeding what we have in this life. We will be close to Jesus and able to see Him face-to-face, not to defend ourselves, but to hear Him speak love. We may have lost family and dear friends in this life because they chose not to follow God, but God has an uncounted multitude of family and dear friends waiting for us.

It still doesn't make it easy to accept the horrible. It does, however, give me hope to hold to.