Theopedia

Job

Overview

Job was a wealthy, upright man of the patriarchal era whose sudden loss of family, wealth, and health, and the dialogue it provoked with his friends over why a righteous man suffers, is recorded in the Book of Job. Scripture treats him as a real historical figure rather than a literary device: Ezekiel names him alongside Noah and Daniel as a man of proven righteousness (Ezek. 14:14, 20), and James points to the outcome of his trial as an example of the Lord’s compassion and mercy toward his suffering people (James 5:11).1

Life and Ministry

Job lived in the land of Uz, outside Israel’s later borders, in a household governed by patriarchal rather than Mosaic custom: he offered sacrifices for his own family without a priest (Job 1:5), and his wealth was measured in flocks, servants, and children rather than land under the law. Barrows dated him to the patriarchal period on the evidence of his life span, since he lived a hundred and forty years after his trial and was already advanced in age when it began (Job 42:16), placing him as early as Abraham; the book records no idolatry beyond the worship of the heavenly bodies, another mark of that early age.1

Job’s trial began when an accuser challenged the sincerity of his piety before God, and God permitted the loss of his possessions, his children, and finally his own health (Job 1:6-2:7). Three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, and a younger man, Elihu, argued with him over the cause of his suffering, until God himself answered Job from a whirlwind; the full course of that dialogue, along with the debate over the book’s own authorship and date, is treated at the Book of Job. Job’s fortunes were ultimately restored twofold after he interceded for the friends who had disputed with him (Job 42:10-17).

Theological Contribution

Job’s trial has served Reformed theologians as the standard illustration of how God can concur with an evil act without his own holiness being compromised. Charnock used it to distinguish God’s end in an action from the evil agent’s end in the same action: “God concurred with Satan in spoiling Job of his goods, and scarifying his body; God gave Satan licence to do it, and Job acknowledges it to be God’s act (Job i. 12-21); but their ends were different; God concurred with Satan for the clearing the integrity of his servant, when Satan aimed at nothing but the provoking him to curse his Creator.”2 On this reading, the same event that Satan intended for Job’s ruin, God intended for the vindication of Job’s own genuine godliness.

Historical Significance

Later Scripture treats Job’s righteousness as established fact rather than literary invention. In Ezekiel 14, God names Noah, Daniel, and Job three times over as men whose own righteousness would deliver only their own lives, not the nation’s, underscoring both their individual uprightness and the limits of any one man’s righteousness before God when a whole people has turned away.3 James, writing centuries later, appeals to the outcome of Job’s trial, not merely his patience during it, as grounds for his readers’ own hope under suffering (James 5:11).1

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), chap. 21, 283-284. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 2, “Discourse XI: On the Holiness of God,” 161-162. ↩

  3. Micah John McCormick, “Messiah’s Obedience for Eternal Life Foreshadowed,” in “The Active Obedience of Jesus Christ” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2010), 188n26. ↩