The Struggle of Job and His Friends: Ashley Palmer

Every Christian must reckon with the question of why God lets the good suffer and the evil prosper. Every single one, for this world is unfair and broken. And when confronted with an all-powerful God who reigns in truth and justice, how do we answer that? 

This year I have been working my way through a devotional journal my grandmother got me last Christmas. It has overall been fruitful—I take the excerpted passage of Scripture, read the relevant chapter/section in my Bible, then pray through journaling on what sticks out to me. Then I return to the excerpted passage in the devotional and read the writer’s prayer to see what stuck out to her, then respond to that in the provided lines. Then I sit in silence and listen for what God has to say. 

While I’ve been trying to learn the discipline of not reading too much Scripture all at once and instead narrowing my prayer and meditation on even just a few words, I am a great lover of context—hence the turn to my own Bible. Recently it was relevant. I have been in a season of struggle with the eternal “why do bad things happen to good people” question. So when I opened the devotional and the passage was from Job, I was happy to see it. The Book of Job, after all, is the Old Testament’s answer to that question. 

Job, we hear in the first verse of the long book, is “blameless—a man of complete integrity.” Part of the fruit of Job’s integrity is that he often rises early to offer a burnt offering on behalf of his children, wanting to be their intercessor in case they have “sinned and cursed God in their hearts” (Job 1:5). It is those children who are first to be taken from him by the Accuser (Satan) in this strange deal with God that we see play out in the first two chapters. The Accuser argues that Job isn’t really a man of integrity, since anyone can be virtuous when they’re prosperous (Job 1:10). So God allows the Accuser to take everything away from Job, including his wealth, his children, and the health of his body. Job’s left with his friends, who come to visit him in his grief and mourn with him: “They sat on the ground with him for seven days and nights. No one said a word to Job, for they saw his suffering was too great for words” (Job 2:13). 

When Job finally does speak, it is to curse the day of his birth. 

Because they love him, his friends protest. 

The rest of the Book of Job is mainly composed of the debates between Job and his friends, who generally mean well, but ultimately blame Job (and his children) for his suffering. This is the section from which the devotional’s quotation was drawn. One of Job’s friends says, “But if you pray to God and seek the favor of the Almighty, and if you are pure and live with integrity, he will surely rise up and restore your happy home. And though you started with little, you will end with much” (Job 8:5-7). Now, to the devotional writer’s credit, in her written prayer, she says that Jesus is the way through which we are made pure, and that in God’s own time our happy homes will be restored. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that God Himself says this to the most outspoken of Job’s friends in the final chapter of this book: “I am angry with you and your two friends, for you have not spoken accurately about me, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:7). It also doesn’t change the fact that in the verse prior to the one quoted, Job’s friend said that Job’s children surely must have sinned, “so their punishment was well deserved” (Job 8:4). Job’s friends believe they live in a world where God punishes the bad people and rewards the good ones. 

But indeed, so many of our experiences cry out against that. Even the idea that in time, things will work out for good. Sometimes the world is just bad. Sometimes the world is just unfair. And not just because of humans. Natural disasters and illness are fully out of our human control, and still strike everyone alike. 

And even if Job does become healthy and prosperous again by the end of the story, he still has lost the children that he interceded for, that he clearly loved deeply. There is still grief. 

So what is the Book of Job’s answer to this eternal question? It doesn’t offer a clear-cut or satisfying answer. When God shows up, He doesn’t outright comfort Job. Instead He goes on for several chapters in detailed natural imagery describing His own power and might—which is exactly the root of the question! If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t He stretch out his arm to heal, to save, to cease our suffering? If He loves us, why do we suffer? 

But Job is satisfied with God’s answer. “I know that you can do anything, and no one can stop you. [...] I had only heard about you before,” he says, “but now I have seen you with my own eyes. I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance” (Job 42:2, 5-6). 

And that feels like a betrayal, somehow. Here Job has been giving voice to human misery, wishing he’d never been born, wanting to argue with God. But he gives up! 

Because he’s never actually met God. He’s offered animals on an altar on behalf of his children. He’s performed the actions of worship. But never actually encountered the Most High. 

We Christians are supposed to be pretty familiar with God. We call Him Father more frequently than we call Him the Almighty. But you know, there’s nothing to make you wonder if you actually know God than when a fellow Christian (who you perhaps consider to be a pretty good person and a beloved child of God) gets sick and suffers. Or loses a parent, or a spouse, or a child. 

What’s more, when God calls Job’s friends out on not speaking about him accurately, He tells them to offer a burnt offering of bulls and rams—and let Job pray on their behalf. Just as Job once prayed for his children. Job becomes the intercessor once again, and after many chapters of emotionally-charged debate, Job reconciles with his friends by praying for their forgiveness. And after Job does that, he is blessed with wealth once again, and ten more children, and his daughters inherit with the sons. He lives to see four generations of his offspring and dies having lived a long, full life. 

The part that I think can address us in our suffering and grief, even when our earthly fortunes aren’t restored as Job’s were, is that Job needed to be reconciled with his friends. His friends, who spent the whole book blaming him, even if they wanted the best for Job and were pained when he said he wished he’d never been born. It is difficult to be the one suffering, but it is also difficult to be the comforter, and it is so easy to say what is not true about God… especially if we don’t know Him that well ourselves. But even when we do, it is so easy for our words intended for comfort to be distressing, empty, useless. There’s forgiveness for that too. There’s love when we fail to represent God accurately. 

And for the one suffering, there’s healing in truly embracing and being embraced by one’s friends. In forgiving them for the way that there are no words of comfort that can change what happened. In forgiving their missteps, because there is still love there. 

Community is where healing is found. Not simply “I’ll be praying for you” messages, but truly living alongside the one suffering. 

As Christians, we have an intercessor who has truly never sinned, who suffered on the cross so we might be reconciled to God and become His children, co-heirs with Him who suffered. He sheds tears for our pain and offers His blood for our redemption. He could have come down from the cross, but He didn’t. He now lives alongside us still, if we welcome Him in. 

I contend that there’s no answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people that doesn’t blame the sufferer or make a martyr out of them (when unlike Jesus, they didn’t choose their fate). The blame and the martyrdom can become tangled, because it’s so easy to wonder why healing doesn’t happen in the present like it did in the Book of Acts—is it because we’re less holy, or that God doesn’t want to answer us? But even keeping in mind that people in the early church suffered too, the martyrdom explanation feels just as empty in the midst of suffering as the blame does. We don’t want to suffer. We don’t want our loved ones to suffer. Nobody really wants to be a martyr, and certainly nobody wants their loved one to be a martyr. Nobody wants to be told that they or their loved one is suffering for some good purpose, or so that others might turn to God or something. Perhaps that’s just human selfishness. But right now I feel that it is left a mystery, a mystery we can only accept by truly knowing God. A mystery we have to accept again and again. 

When the whole idea of good things coming from present suffering feels disgusting or overly cruel, we have nothing left to do but to submit to that mystery in faith. And to embrace one another.

Ashley Palmer (a recent LA Tech graduate of Computer Science and English) is a blessing to The Wesley. As she continues to live in Ruston, she works as a remote Software Developer for Praeses, LLC in Shreveport. She is also a fantasy novelist currently editing her first novel: Among the Skies. In addition to writing, Ashley enjoys making attractive websites and apps, digital art, reading, and good food. She is kind, knowledgeable, and devoted to her relationship with the Lord. We love her and are thankful to have her in our community!