One of my old youth group kids… (You know you’ve been in youth ministry for a while when your youth group kids have kids that are almost old enough to be in your youth group.) Anyway, one of my old youth group kids asked me, “What’s the deal with Job? Why does God allow such horrible things to happen to him?” I love it when they think! Makes me feel like I’m actually accomplishing something! Here’s my take. Do with it what you will.
The church’s answers are many and varied. Some people say, “It’s a test. God has the right to test his people. Stop whining.” Other people say, “It’s the devil! God doesn’t do evil, the devil does!” Some people say, “God allows evil so that we can better know the good by contrast.” So that’s the church answer. It really depends on who you ask because the church doesn’t have one “approved” answer.
Rob’s answer? Job is a metaphor. Job stands for us. We’re walking along minding our own business and wham, life kicks the crap out of us, and we go to God and say, “What’s the deal? I thought you were supposed to be watching out for me?” And our “friends” all gather round and give us really lousy advice that just makes us feel worse. And from our perspective none of it makes sense at all.
But then the story zooms back, way way back, and we see God and the Devil talking. The Devil’s question is “How do you know if he really means it? He only loves you because he gets something out of it.”
This is obviously stupid, because if God really is God, then he knows what’s in our hearts and has no need to prove anything to anyone, but it’s not supposed to be historical truth, it’s supposed to be a metaphor, or a campfire story with a moral, whatever, anyway. The point is, “How do we know our love is real? We know if our life sucks and we still love.”
Why does God let all the crappy stuff happen? Because there are only way two ways to stop evil in the world. You either fix people so they can’t treat each other like garbage (at which point they stop being people, and start being robots) or you teach people to choose love. First you teach them not to take ten eyes for an eye, then you teach them not to take one eye for an eye, then you teach them to give up their own eye rather than letting someone else go blind.
The story of Job is a small step in that process that says, there is bigger stuff going on here than you can understand. Your job is not to understand, your job is to love, even when, especially when, it doesn’t make sense. God is not a child burning ants for fun. God is a gambler taking long odds on the chance that our love might be real.
For whatever it is worth, your view of Job being a metaphor also happens to be the traditional Jewish view. I believe there is a statement in the Talmud to the effect of “Job never lived”. I’d imagine this is for the reasons you state… the idea that God makes deals with the devil and plays chess with Job’s life is a bit disturbing if you take it literally.
Cool. Thanks for the comment, Ryan.