About the problem generally, for the theist, there are only a few possible responses:
- We suffer because we deserve it (the attitude of Job's friends)
- We suffer because we are righteous (hinted at by Jesus in the NT) while the world around us is wicked -- it's God's way of bettering us -- but it will be righted in the end (the Apocalyptic view)
- We suffer because the world is wicked and we deserve it, as we are all wicked (we are to blame for both) and we may not blame God for it at all (Rom 9)
God has heard enough, it's his turn to ask questions, the answers to which are clearly implied; these are rhetorical questions.So the only "answer" Job may provide is that the laws of nature themselves are not used as tools of god's justice, but instead callous impersonal forces of the world. Job's "error" is in assuming that the world ought to be just if there was a god behind it who was just. And so this just brings in Occam's Razor to cut away whether a god is behind it all regardless...
[Job 38 ff]
Where were you when I laid the earth's foundations?
Speak if you have understanding.
Do you know who fixed its dimensions
Or who measured it with a line?"
You did, God.
…Have you ever commanded the day to break,
Assigned the dawn its place,
…Have you penetrated to the sources of the sea,
Or walked in the recesses of the deep?
No, no human has. And God continues with these rhetorical questions, questions regarding the animals, their various powers and attributes, but one wonders what the purpose of all these questions is.
One senses that they are irrelevant. Job has posed some very specific challenges to God. Why am I suffering? Is there a pattern to existence? Is God's refusal to answer these challenges a way of saying there is no answer? Or is it God's way of saying that justice is beyond human understanding? Or is this theophany of God in nature and the focus on creation, an implicit assault on the fundamental tenant of Israelite religion that God is known and made manifest through his interactions with humans, his rewards and punishments in historical time.
You'll recall that the monotheistic revolution is generally understood to have effected a break from mythological conceptions of the gods as indistinguishable from various natural forces, limited by meta-divine powers and forces of the cosmos.
The biblical God wasn't another Ancient Near Eastern or Canaanite nature God ultimately, but a wholly transcendent power--He was figured this way in many parts of the Bible--known not through the involuntary and recurring cycles of nature but through His freely willed and non-repeating actions in historical time. Such a view of God underwrites the whole system of divine retributive justice.
Only an essentially good God who transcends and is unconstrained by mechanistic natural forces can establish and administer a system of retributive justice, dealing out punishment and reward in response to the actions of humans in time.
Is the author of Job suggesting that history and the events that befall the just and the unjust are not the medium of revelation? Is God a god of nature after all, encountered in the repeating cycles of the natural world and not in the unpredictable and incoherent arena of human history and action? If so, then this is a third fundamental biblical assumption that has been radically subverted.
So we'll turn now to God's direct speech to Job in 40:8, 40, verse 8, excuse me. "Would you impugn my justice? / Would you condemn Me that you be right?" God, I think, is now getting at the heart of the matter: your friends Job were wrong, they condemned you. They attributed sin to you, so that they might be right. But you, too, have been wrong condemning Me, attributing wickedness to Me so that you might be right.
Job's friends erred because they assumed that there's a system of retributive justice at work in the world and that assumption led them to infer that all who suffer are sinful, and that's a blatant falsehood. But Job also errs; if he assumes that although there isn't a system of retributive justice, there really ought to be one. It's that assumption that leads him to infer that suffering is a sign of an indifferent or wicked God, and that is equally a falsehood. Job needs to move beyond the anthropocentrism that characterizes the rest of Scripture and the Genesis 1 account of creation, according to which humankind is the goal of the entire process of creation.
God's creation, the Book of Job seems to suggest, defies such teleological and rational categories. In a nutshell, God refuses to be seen as a moral accountant. The idea of God as a moral accountant is responsible for two major errors: the interpretation of suffering as an indicator of sin, or the ascription of injustice to God. In his final speech, Job confesses to a new firsthand knowledge of God that he lacked before, and as a result of this knowledge Job repents, "Therefore, I recant and relent, / Being but dust and ashes," 42:6.
Here we see the other meaning of Job's name, "one who repents," suddenly leap to the fore. What is he repenting of? Certainly not of sin; God has not upheld the accusations against Job. Indeed he states explicitly in a moment that the friends were wrong to say he had sinned. But he has indicated that guilt and innocence, reward and punishment are not what the game is all about, and while Job had long been disabused of the notion that the wicked and the righteous actually get what they deserve, he nevertheless had clung to the idea that ideally they should. And it's that mistaken idea--the idea that led him to ascribe wickedness to God--that Job now recants. With this new understanding of God, Job is liberated from what he would now see as a false expectation raised by the Deuteronomistic notion of a covenant relationship between God and humankind, enforced by a system of divine justice.
At the end of the story Job is fully restored to his fortunes. God asserts he did no evil and the conventional, impeccably Deuteronomistic view of the three friends is clearly denounced by God. He says of them, "They have not spoken of Me what is right as my servant Job has," 42:7. For some, the happy ending seems anticlimactic, a capitulation to the demand for a happy ending of just desserts that runs counter to the whole thrust of the book, and yet in a way I think the ending is superbly fitting. It's the last in a series of reversals that subverts our expectations. Suffering comes inexplicably, so does restoration; blessed be the name of the Lord.
God doesn't attempt to justify or explain Job's suffering and yet somehow by the end of the book, our grumbling, embittered, raging Job is satisfied. Perhaps he's realized that an automatic principle of reward and punishment would make it impossible for humans to do the good for purely disinterested motives. It's precisely when righteousness is seen to be absurd and meaningless that the choice to be righteous paradoxically becomes meaningful. God and Job, however we are to interpret their speeches, are reconciled.
The suffering and injustice that characterize the world have baffled humankind for millennia. And the Book of Job provides no answer in the sense of an explanation or a justification of suffering and injustice, but what it does offer is a stern warning to avoid the Scylla of blaspheming against the victims by assuming their wickedness, and the Charybdis of blaspheming against God by assuming his. Nor is moral nihilism an option, as our hero, yearning for, but ultimately renouncing divine order and justice, clings to his integrity and chooses virtue for nothing.
Remember Ehrman's explication of the Apocalyptic view of evil in the world, which is somewhat more satisfying than this one, but lacks in logic still.
