Don’t Question God
The overarching theme of the Book of Job essentially boils down to an eleventh commandment: don’t question God. Job is the unwittingly pawn in a chess match between God and Satan to test the limits of human faith. To that end, God inflicts unending and horrific suffering upon this man for what appears to be no other reason than to hear Job say how much he loves God. When Job has finally had enough and dares to think that he deserves some sort of answer for why God seems to have forsaken him, he presents the argument almost like a lawyer by presenting the evidence of his faithfulness versus the fairness of his treatment.
God does not respond to subpoenas, however, and instead of making refuting the evidence and laying out his case, he berates Job for not being able to do things like flick the light switch on the evening star or design wings for the ostrich. God’s reply is not which answers Job’s desire for an explanation, it is a boastful broadcast of His own unknowable greatness. Job learns the lesson: I will shut up now since I’m just dust compared to you.
Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
At the heart of the story of Job is the question that lies at heart of Judeo-Christian religion. If God is all-powerful and good, why did He create a world in which innocents suffer and psychopaths become President? Since the most obvious answers are untenable—that God is either not all-powerful or is petty and cruel—the struggle to question remains just as palpable today. The story of Job is a dramatic playing out of this paradox, but by the end its lack of reconciliation proves to be of little comfort for any but the most unquestioned believers. In essence, the story raises a theme without seriously addressing it.
In the end, God suddenly reverses course and blesses Job with twice as much as he had before, which sounds really great until you remember that during the course of his bet with Satan over how much Job could take before his faith was broken, his children were killed. And even though God is supposed to be all-powerful and all-good and therefore would have the power to bring the children back to life or just simply restore everything as it was, he doesn’t. The exploration of this thematic question in the end winds up with a completely unsatisfying conclusion: just because, now quit asking.
Does Goodness Actually Exist?
The damnation begins to fall upon Job simply as a result of God bragging about what a good person Job is because he worships him so faithfully. Satan takes note of the gap in God’s logic: Job has not been blessed by God because he is good, but rather he is good because God has blessed him. In order to prove this wrong, God gives permission to Satan to go at and take away literally everything God has blessed Job with only one exception: he can’t actually lay a hand on him. The stimulus for the plot of the story is therefore very simple, but very complicated. Do people do good things because they are good or do they do with the expectation of being rewarded. And if they are only doing good things to be rewarded, is that not really just selfishness? And since selfishness is usually considered a bad thing, doesn’t this make doing good things for one’s own gain actually a bad thing? Or, to put it more simply: does goodness really exist in the world is a driving theme of the story.
