The question that most, like Job, want to be answered is: “Why do seemingly senseless tragedies invade my life?”. What we see in the book of Job is not a book of solutions rather it is a book of revelation of both the human experience and God.
Years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner’s three-year-old son was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative disease that would take his life during his early teens.He faced one of life’s most difficult questions: “Why, God?” Years later, Rabbi Kushner wrote a book in an attempt to answer that question called “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” which spoke candidly of the doubts and fears that arise when tragedy strikes.
The first thing we learn in Job Chapter 1:1-5 is that Job is not a man that one would think would be a candidate for such disasters as befall him.
•He has moral integrity
•A selfless service to God
So why do these things happen to him, why is he a candidate?
Now Job was not privy to what we are in the book that bares his name as we are told in 1:7 of the accuser who has come before God “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.” The answer to “Why do bad things happen to good people” is we have an enemy who according to Peter in 1 Peter 5:8 is our “adversary the devil walking about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.”
Job now devoid of all (Finances, Family, Fitness and Friends) that we so often place before the only thing that can bring comfort, security, and identity in a relationship with God, Job does what many of us do in 3:1 “opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth.” Oh he did not take his brides advice and curse God and die but he did curse his life and wished his death. He has now lost even the sense of the intimacy of God, the sense that God is in control, and what is left is only two things:
•The sense of God
•The sense of self
Martyred missionary Jim Elliot said it this way, “He is no fool who gives up what he can never keep gaining what he can never lose!” As wonderful as Finances, Family, Fitness and Friends are they will never be the ONE thing that can never be taken from us. And what is that ONE thing? Listen to what the author of Hebrews in 13:5 tells us as we are told that “He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
Oh, dear ones the answer is not in the explanation of WHY but rather in the revelation of WHO! The final outcome is that God restores double everything Job has lost with the exception of his children as he is blessed with 10 more. Ah but why not double them as well? Well, my friend they were doubled as the first ten were never lost to him only placed into His master’s loving arms. Oh that we could say as Job did in 23:10 after such a time as this that “He knows the way that I take; when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.”