Justice for Job

Passage: Job 8

Job has just finished contending that he is innocent before God. One of his “friends”, Bildad, confronts him. Bildad’s basic argument is this: either you’ve sinned, and brought God’s judgment upon yourself, or you haven’t sinned, and God’s punishing you unjustly. God is incapable of acting unjustly, so you must be mistaken about having sinned. Just repent and be done with it!
Job’s friends insist that there are only these two possibilities: On the one hand God is just and brings suffering into people’s lives as punishment for sin; on the other God is unjust and causes people to suffer unfairly. To conclude the latter is blasphemy against God, therefore there’s really only one possibility: that people suffer when they have sinned, and the only way to alleviate one’s suffering is to repent.

Job demands that there is another possibility. Job both defends his innocence and defends God’s character. In all things, we’re told, Job refrains from charging God with wrongdoing. There must be some other explanation, says Job.

The Book of Job invites us to imagine that there is another possibility. Countless religious people within the Judeo-Christian tradition assume that there’s a linear relationship between sin and suffering. If I’m suffering, the logic goes, I must have done something wrong. If I can just figure out what I did wrong, I can apologize for it, make up for it, and be relieved of the suffering.

The wrench in the works is this: globally speaking we believe that people suffer because the world has been broken by human sin. We suffer because human beings and human communities and ecosystems and the world as a whole don’t work the way they’re supposed to. God doesn’t cause the events that lead to our suffering. They’re an embedded part of our reality that God allows us to experience. Theologically we accept that we deserve what we get because we’re part of the problem. What we assume is that if we have a relationship with God, and if we play by the rules, God will make sure bad things don’t happen to us. We cry foul when we think we’ve been good and bad stuff still happens. We claim that God has acted unjustly.

Job forces us to revisit God’s justice. If we follow the logic of the Creation – Fall – Redemption trajectory of the Bible, we have to come to terms with this reality: all people deserve to suffer. Why? Because suffering is the natural consequence of rebelling against God and his created order. We tend to think of hardship and suffering as God reaching out and afflicting us on a case-by-case basis. We tend to see others’ hardship and suffering that way, too. That’s not how it works. The default human experience is suffering (think Wesley’s line in The Princess Bride: “Life is pain, princess. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.”). The anomaly is a life relatively free of suffering. What we should be asking isn’t, “Why am I suffering?” but rather, “Why am I not suffering?” The truth is that God’s justice is tempered immeasurably by God’s mercy. To Bildad’s point, God is unjust. But God is unjust in our favor.

What’s the point, then, of being aligned with God? If God doesn’t guarantee a life of minimal suffering and optimal enjoyment, why bother? There are two basic answers, from a Biblical perspective. The first is that we were designed to live in close relationship with God. It is in our natures to long for and thrive within such a relationship. The second is that faith in God helps us weather the storm of suffering. We believe that all the things we experience serve God’s purposes; that in fact God is working all things toward a good end. When we locate ourselves in the story of Job we accept that we may never know those purposes, nor even experience them as good in our own lifetimes. But we find some peace knowing that a good – even just – God is in control, and that all things are ordered according to God’s plan.