Bible Commentary - Job 1

In this chapter, God permits Satan to assail Job with terrible destruction, destroying his property and killing his children.

There are few chapters in the bible more commonly used by atheists to demonstrate that God is evil than this one.  The logic is simple: Job is a righteous person (v. 1 establishes this point clearly), and God permits Satan to inflict suffering upon him (v. 12).  If God lets bad things happen to good people, it is immoral and demonstrates that God himself is evil.  I’m glad this is something people feel strongly about because that shows Job is actually quite relevant to modern life and that the basic question (why do bad things happen to good people) is something that people still struggle with even in the modern world.

Anyway, I’m going to skip over the first couple verses that are introducing Job and his family, and get right to where the story goes a bit crazy.

In verse 6, “the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them.”  This part of the story is a bit surreal.  First, a minor point: “sons of God” is a common figure of speech that refers to angels.  The general idea of this verse is like there is a convocation where all the angels are filing into some big conference center, and Satan is also attending.  We are not specifically told who or what Satan is, but in English the Hebrew word Satan means “accuser” and in this context, it appears that Satan is one of the angels who is part of this big assembly.  The prosecuting angel attorney, perhaps.

Most people think of Satan as a fallen angel and also the leader and captain of all the fallen angels who rebelled against God.  Pop culture often presents Satan as an equal and opposite adversary to God, battling with each other to win dominion over people’s souls and perhaps the Earth itself.  This understanding is not meaningfully presented in Job.  First of all, there is no evidence in Job that Satan has any followers.  Second, Satan is not presented in Job as God’s equal, but rather his subordinate, much like the other angels in this grand convention.  Third, there is no direct conflict between God and Satan.  However, there are hints of an indirect conflict between Satan and God.  We see this conflict in three respects.

First, we see their conflict in God’s first question.  God asks Satan “Where are you coming from?”  I hope my readers understand that if God asks you a question, it’s not because he wants to know the answer; it’s because he wants you to know the answer.  God already knows where Satan came from, so he’s not asking the question because he wants the information.  God is asking because if Satan came from where God wanted him to be, then God would not have needed to ask.  The question is designed to emphasis the disconnection that exists between Satan and God, like if a mother asks her children where they have been all day; if the kids had been where the mother told them to go, then she wouldn’t need to ask.  In very similar terms, the first question in the bible is Genesis 3:9 when God asks Adam where he is hiding.  The reason why God asks is because Adam and Eve are not where they are supposed to be, they are deliberately hiding from God and more fundamentally, man’s sin had already begun to break the previously close relationship between man and God.  If Adam were in the place God wanted him, then God wouldn’t have had to ask.  In the same way, if Satan were in the place and doing the things that God wanted him to, God would not have to ask Satan where Satan was coming from.

We see similar dynamics when God asked Elijah, “What are you doing here?”  (1 Kings 19:9).  Again, God is not asking Elijah because God doesn’t know the answer, he is asking the question so that Elijah himself thinks about it.  God never told Elijah to go there, and it was never part of God’s plan for Elijah to run off into the desert and hide.  The question itself indicates that Elijah had drifted out of God’s will, and God was trying to call his attention to it so that he could be brought back in.  We can reasonably infer it is the same here with Satan living outside of God’s will and plan for him.

Second, we see their conflict in Satan’s answer.  Satan replies that he is roaming back and forth on the earth.  This is a subtle but also relatively simple point: Satan is not in heaven.  God is in heaven and Satan, most likely an angel of God, is dwelling on the earth except for this one moment, and he departs from the presence of the LORD at the end of this conversation.  Although other angels visit the earth in the bible, it seems unusual that an angel would dwell there so consistently.  Furthermore, I think the notion of “roaming back and forth” gives Satan a restless and frantic dimension that is different from the usual attitude of God’s messengers.  To me, this exchange conveys a subtle tension.

Third, we see their conflict in their different opinions about Job.  God asserts that Job is a righteous man, and Satan immediately challenges him, insisting that Job’s worship is driven by pragmatism and material considerations.  In essence, Satan is claiming that Job’s worship is insincere; if God were not blessing Job and filling his life with prosperity then Job would turn and “curse you to your face”.  God thinks that Job is righteous and Satan believes that Job is secretly just using God, with the implication that Job is not truly righteous for that reason.

I think this is a really interesting point because the bible is replete with promises of material blessings for obeying the LORD.  They go hand-in-hand nearly everywhere, especially in the Old Testament.  But more than that, I think it’s interesting that God never contradicts Satan’s basic assumption.  While Satan and God disagree about whether Job *in particular* has ulterior motives, they evidently agree that disingenuous worship is not true worship at all.  This has deep implications.  According to the logic of this chapter, worship cannot be an exchange, it can’t be a trade, it cannot be a service provided for compensation.  By its nature and definition, worship must be something given without return.  We must “fear God for nothing” (v. 9), which is a remarkable concept because of how deeply blessings (both material and spiritual) are interwoven with worship and God’s covenant.  Even just untangling those motives and figuring out for ourselves what drives our worship seems like a daunting task.

Except, of course, in the midst of a crisis.  In the middle of a crisis, we can finally understand what is driving our worship.  This is the first lesson of the book of Job.  I don’t want to say this is the only reason why bad things happen to good people, life is more complicated than that, but I think we can learn from Job that it’s sometimes one of the reasons.  Satan and God disagreed about Job’s righteousness, and Satan proposed a test: in the midst of a crisis when everything Job possessed was taken away, they would all see what heart and attitude lay within Job this whole time.  It was a moment of revealing.  Not only to God and Satan, but Job’s wife, friends and ultimately Job himself get to see that too.

To put it in different terms, even nasty people can pretend to be nice if they are happy and things are going well.  But if things are going badly then only truly good people will continue to be nice and kind to others.  As it reflects on others, we can use disasters or crises as a spiritual magnifying glass to peer into the soul of others and learn what are their true values. As it reflects on ourselves, every crisis is an opportunity to understand ourselves better, and ultimately that becomes an opportunity to grow and to fix bad attitudes.  One of the worst things we can do is waste a crisis by refusing to learn from it, which people most often do by externalizing blame and responsibility onto others.  This leaves one’s own mistakes uninspected, undisturbed and intact, thereby guaranteeing future crises.

This chapter concludes with a statement that “Job did not sin or blame God”.  Again it has a relatively clear implication: if Job had indeed “cursed God to his face” that would have been a sin.  In a very clear sense, this passage (v. 20-22) confirms that Job is righteous like God originally claimed.  In the midst of tragedy, Job maintained his honor and worshiped God with sincerity; he remains blameless.

In the next chapter, things get even worse as Job is struck with a second, more personal disaster.