Summing Up

Job 42

            In the end, Job is repentant. Not for some presumed fault that led to his suffering but for his presumption in how he talked to and about the Lord. Verse 5 suggests a different kind of knowledge of God: “I’d heard of you but now I see,” Job says. It’s one thing to have a sort of abstract head-knowledge that God is omnipotent; it is a whole other thing to have lived through terrible suffering and to know in your very bones that the Lord can be trusted. Of course, for New Testament believers like us, that lesson is centered in God’s ultimate act of mercy, the death of His Son, Jesus. If the Lord loves us like that… Or, as Paul puts it in Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?”

            The Lord condemns Job’s friends for not speaking the truth about Him. They had lots of theologically true and interesting things to say, but they misconstrued the character of God. They had prioritized His justice over His grace. In terms of Lutheran theology, they had confused His alien work, the work that He does because He has to although He takes no delight in it, such as punishing sin, with His proper work, the work that is most true to His character, namely, showing compassion to His beloved creatures. Job, for his part, had spoken the truth about the Lord. As we have seen, he may have gone too far in his presumption, but he looked for mercy from his God.

            Ultimately, Job is doubly blessed. He accumulates twice the livestock he had before. He is blessed with seven more sons and three more daughters, as beautiful women as could be found. And he dies an old man. (There is some question whether Job lives an additional 140 year or if 140 is his age at death. Either way, it’s an age worthy of the patriarchs.) In our suffering, there is no guarantee that we will be so abundantly blessed with the things of this age of the world. But we who are in Christ will be blessed in the age to come, with eternal life in the very presence of our God. Christians look at these things eschatologically, that is, with the End in mind