Job and the Long Endurance

Today's Reading

Read Job 1:20-22 — the famous first response: "Then Job arose and tore his robe and shaved his head and fell on the ground and worshiped. And he said, 'Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.' In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong."

Read Job 2:7-10 — when the second wave hits and his wife says, "Curse God and die." Job answers, "Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?"

Then read Job 7:1-21 — and notice how different it sounds. This is the same man, weeks later, when the suffering has not lifted: "Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul... Why do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity?"

Finally read Job 19:25-27 — the verse Handel set to music: "For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God."

Reflection

We tend to remember Job for the first chapter and forget the next thirty-five.

The Job who says "blessed be the name of the Lord" in the opening scene is the Job that gets stitched onto sympathy cards. He has just lost his children, his livelihood, his servants — and he worships. It is one of the great lines in Scripture. It is also not the whole book. If we stopped reading there we would conclude that the right Christian response to catastrophic suffering is immediate doxology, and that anything less is failure.

Read Job 7. The same man, the same God, a few weeks of unrelieved misery later, sounds like this: "I loathe my life; I would not live forever. Leave me alone, for my days are a breath... When I lie down I say, 'When shall I arise?' But the night is long, and I am full of tossing till the dawn." He accuses God of watching him too closely, of refusing to look away even for the time it takes to swallow his spit (7:19). This is not a man writing devotional literature. This is a man at the end of his rope, talking to the only person he believes is actually there.

And here is the strange thing the book of Job is doing: it puts both speeches in the canon. The shining worship of chapter 1 and the raw wreckage of chapter 7 are both Job, both faithful, both — God will eventually say — speaking what is right (42:7-8). When God finally rebukes someone in the closing chapter, it is not Job. It is Job's friends, who arrived with explanations.

This is the patron saint of long suffering: not the man who handled it perfectly at every moment, but the man who refused to stop addressing God. Job complained, accused, argued, demanded a hearing, fell silent, and started over. What he never did was walk away. His wife told him to curse God and die. His friends told him to confess hidden sin. He did neither. He kept the conversation open, and the conversation, in the end, is what the book is about.

John Calvin preached one hundred and fifty-nine sermons on the book of Job between 1554 and 1555 in Geneva, and he did it while gout, kidney stones, and recurring fevers were already beginning to corrode his body. Calvin understood Job from the inside. He saw, more clearly than most modern readers, that the comfort of the book is not that it answers Job's questions — it does not — but that it preserves Job's right to ask them. The afflicted, Calvin says in those sermons, must know that the cross laid on them is not laid on them in vain. God works through it. But the working is hidden, and the hiddenness is a real darkness, not a pretend one.

Tim Keller, who walked through pancreatic cancer in his last years, returns to Job again and again in Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. He notices something most readers miss: Job's faithfulness does not depend on his composure. Some chapters Job is composed; many chapters he is not. The continuity is not in his emotional state but in the direction of his speech. He is always talking to God — even when he is yelling at him.

Many Christians in chronic pain have been quietly trained to think that real faith looks like Job 1, and that anything that sounds like Job 7 is backsliding. The book itself rejects this. Real faith, the kind that endures over years, will sound like Job 1 some weeks and Job 7 some weeks. What matters is that it keeps speaking.

And then, in the middle of the wreckage, Job 19. He has been arguing with his friends for chapters. He is not in a moment of consolation. His skin is breaking down. His grief is fresh. And out of that, with no apparent transition, he says: "I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God; I shall see him myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another."

This is one of the most extraordinary sentences in the Old Testament. It is the seed of the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection, spoken by a man whose body is being eaten alive. Notice what he is hoping for. Not escape from his body. Not a spiritual flight to a disembodied heaven. He is hoping that this same flesh, the flesh that hurts so badly, will one day stand and see God. The Christian hope is that the body that suffers will be the body that is raised.

Job does not get this hope because his pain has lifted. He gets it in the middle of the pain. The hope is not the absence of suffering but a stubborn confidence that the suffering does not get the last word.

What does Job teach the long-term sufferer?

First, that God does not require you to perform faith. Job's complaints were honest, and God preferred them to his friends' careful theology. If your prayers right now sound more like Job 7 than Job 1, you are not failing. You are praying like Job.

Second, that addressing God is itself an act of faith. To complain to God is structurally different from complaining about him. Job kept addressing him. So can you.

Third, that resurrection hope is not a feeling, it is a confession. Job did not feel his Redeemer alive. He was sitting in ashes. He confessed it anyway, against the evidence of his body. That confession, Christians have always said, is the kind of thing that endures.

The book of Job does not tell us why Job suffered. It barely tells Job. What it tells us is that the long endurance of unhealed suffering, with God still in the conversation, is not failure. It is the actual shape of faith for a great many of God's people.

Going Deeper

Read Job 19:25-27 aloud. Then read it again, and notice what tense the verbs are in. "I know," "he lives," "I shall see." Job is not asking. He is testifying. Try saying it about yourself today: "I know that my Redeemer lives. And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God." If the words feel too big for your mouth right now, that is fine. They were too big for Job's mouth too. Say them anyway.