Bible Commentary - Job 2

In this chapter, Job is stricken with a painful, chronic disease.

This chapter begins in much the same way as the previous chapter.  There is an angel convention in some heavenly conference center, and Satan once again appears before the LORD for his holy performance review (I am paraphrasing a little).  They repeat their earlier conversation with little variation: God asks Satan where he came from, and after Satan’s response God once again calls attention to the righteous man Job.  The one deviation here is in v. 3 God adds that Job has held onto his “integrity” and that Satan caused God to “ruin him without cause”.

Satan repeats his ploy from the earlier day, again insisting that with the right pressure, Job would reveal his true self and curse God.  This time, rather than take away his children and material possessions, Satan wants to take away Job’s physical health, and once again permits him to do so.  In both the previous chapter and this chapter, it’s interesting to note that while God grants Satan’s request, God also places a limitation on the harm that Satan is allowed to inflict.  In Job 1:12, God says that Satan could destroy “all that [Job] has”, but could not touch his body (i.e. physical health).  In v. 6, God similarly permits Satan to harm Job’s body, but not take his life.  This reinforces the power dynamic between God and Satan, where God is the clear authority and Satan is only allowed to act within the parameters that God sets for him.

In verse 10, we see Job’s attitude towards adversity.  He says that if we accept good from the LORD, we must also be willing to accept adversity.  This is very similar to Job’s attitude in the previous chapter where he said “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away.  Blessed be the name of the LORD.” (v. 21)  Essentially his attitude is that the LORD is the source of all good things, and if the LORD chooses to place hardships in our lives, then it is hypocritical for us to refuse to take the bad with the good.  More to the point, if God brings a good thing into your life, it is his right to take it away if he wants to.  We enter life naked, possessing nothing.  There is nothing that God can take away that he did not first give to us, which means that anything God takes away was never really ours in the first place.

In this attitude, I think Job is substantially correct.  Everything we have does come from God, and it belongs to God.  This is why the bible twice asserts that Job did not sin in what he said (1:22, 2:10), because his perspective is true at a basic level.  Of course, it would be pretty boring if the story stopped here with “Job suffers a bunch but he has the right attitude”.  Indeed, the story goes on quite a bit longer, and we see the setup for the rest of the book when Job’s three friends joined together to meet with Job at an appointed time to “sympathize with him and comfort him.”

The three friends say nothing, but in the next chapter Job will break the silence by lamenting the day of his birth.