While the suffering of Job is extreme, the pattern of his life is the normal pattern of all those who belong to Christ – suffering now, glory later. Suffering is part of the plan. Suffering is the normal pattern for Gods’ people, not in spite of their faith in God, but precisely because of it. Job did not suffer, even though he was a believer, he suffered precisely because he was a believer.

One of the most commonly raised objections to the Christian faith is the “problem of evil”. The challenge goes like this: If God is really all-good and all-powerful, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? It’s a fair question. The book of Job was written, in part, to destroy our assumptions of what God should be allowed to do. And in the process, it reveals to us a God much greater and more glorious and worthy of worship than the small god of our self-centered assumptions. 

Job’s life has been decimated by God, and it has shaken his faith. Job would like God to acknowledge that fact. Well, in chapter 38, Job gets his wish. The Lord comes to answer him.

If God is willing to bring devastation into our lives irrespective of our moral behavior -
What’s the point in being good? So, the great challenge was this: will Job still obey when it doesn’t pay? Will he still worship when there are no material benefits to being good? 

Job’s devastation is still a mystery – both for Job and his three friends. How are we to make sense of his suffering – and our own? What do you do when it seems like your Heavenly Father has failed to protect you from a tragedy and then remains silent as you grieve? How do we make sense of the Lord’s seeming absence and silence in our time of greatest need? 

This chapter is very helpful because it reveals to us, in wonderful detail what a righteous life looks like. We’ve been told in chapters 1 and 2, that Job was a blameless man, a man who feared God and shunned evil. But what does that actually mean? What does it look like in real life? If Proverbs 31 is a picture of a virtuous woman, Job 31 is a picture of a righteous man. 

Job was living his normal life, surrounded by his loving family and enjoying God’s good gifts, and then it seemed as if the dam broke and all the wrath of God and powers of hell were unleashed, and his life was swept away. All that was left was the ash-heap on which he sat, scraping his sores, and asking “why?” 

As we have been studying the book of Job, we have been watching the miracle of a
growing faith.  Job’s trials have not destroyed his faith in God. The vast majority of his speeches are addressed to God. He hasn’t lost his faith – his faith is the foundation for his laments. 

One of the most crucial things for a Christian to know is that the God who rules in heaven, cares for us. This is the stunning discovery Job makes in chapter 16. Job comes to a wonderful conviction that he has a Friend in Heaven, an Intercessor who would take up his cause and restore him to God.

We have one of the great questions in the Bible that we are going to ask today: “If a man dies, can he live again?” This is not a hypothetical question for Job. He asks it from the ash heap of his life, and in the shadow of his own demise. He believes he is about to die. In chapter 14 Job is reflecting on the matters of life, death and eternity from the perspective of a death bed.