The Testing of Your Faith [part 2] Job-The Wisdom of the Cross [Job 1:13-2:10]

We began last week looking at this series of four alternating scenes, two in heaven and two on earth. We looked at scene one last week, a scene in heaven when the question of Job’s genuine faith is brought up by Satan, who suggests Job is only pious because of his prosperity. So God tells Satan to go out and take away Job’s prosperity. We established that the main idea, or the main thing going on here is the glory of God is more important than our comfort. We stopped at verse 12, we’ll pick up in verse 13…now we won’t read all of the section at once, we’re going to break it up in the scenes and read and look at them as we get to them. So first we’ll look at…

Scene 2:Earth [Job 1:13-22]

Scene 2 is terrifying. We move now from Heaven to earth and from that first “day” (v. 6) to another “day” (v. 13). Like 9/11, this day begins normally enough. It seems to be the oldest brother’s party, another in the lovely annual round of family festivities. Job is in his own home, perhaps quietly rejoicing in the harmonious family God has given him, when a messenger knocks on the door and insists on being heard.

Job turns from whatever he is doing and listens quietly as the distraught messenger, tells his story. He has run in from the farm. “The oxen were plowing” (v. 14), so it was a normal farming day in early fall, preparing the fields after harvest to sow the seed for the next harvest. Beside them “the donkeys [were] feeding” after the hard work of carrying the harvest into the barns. It was just a normal day in the autumn when, quite suddenly, “the Sabeans”—roving peoples from either southwestern or northern Arabia—“fell upon them and took them and struck down the servants with the edge of the sword” (v. 15).

It was an unexpected, violent, sudden, and terrifyingly destructive terrorist attack, as terrible in its violence and bloodshed as a car bomb or a suicide bomber today. The protective “hedge” (v. 10) has been breached. Every victim of a house burglary knows the feeling of being violated at this invasion of what they thought was their safe space. It is like this with Job. The world he thought was safe has been turned into a killing field. All Job’s oxen and donkeys were stolen and all the associated farm workers were killed in one terrible attack. And—to add to the completeness of the terror, each returning servant said, “I alone have escaped to tell you” (v. 15; cf. vv. 16, 17, 19).

It is a devastating message. But before Job has time even to begin to take this in, while the first messenger is still speaking, another traumatized messenger appears in the doorway and interrupts: “The fire of God” (v. 16)—a conventional way of speaking of lightning—“fell from heaven and burned up the sheep and the servants and consumed them.” Not only the oxen and donkeys, but now the sheep too, with all the shepherds, were killed—not this time by terrorism but by a terrible act of God, a freak storm. The shock is not unlike the trauma experienced by victims of an earthquake or tsunami. And it comes on top of the trauma experienced by victims of terrorism. And again, to press home the completeness of the devastation, Job hears those awful words, “I alone have escaped to tell you” (v. 16).

But the trauma is not over. While this messenger is still telling his shocking story, a third messenger appears. “The Chaldeans”—nomads from southern Mesopotamia—“formed three groups”—a deliberate premeditated strategy of criminal aggression—“and made a raid on the camels and took them and struck down the servants with the edge of the sword” (v. 17). First the oxen and donkeys with their workers are killed, then the sheep with their shepherds, and now the camels are stolen and their keepers killed. And again, as Job listens in shocked silence, come the words, “I alone have escaped to tell you” (v. 17).

Job has been bankrupted. The greatest man of the region has been emptied of all his wealth in a day—from riches to rags. But poor Job doesn’t even have time to think about what he will say to the creditors who are even now making their way to his door, for there is worse to come.

While the third messenger is still blurting out his story of disaster, a fourth and final messenger runs in with a tearstained face: “Your sons and daughters were eating and drinking wine in their oldest brother’s house”—yes, I know that, we can imagine Job thinking, get on with the news—“and behold, a great wind came across the wilderness and struck the four corners of the house”—four corners to stress the completeness of the ensuing disaster—“and it fell upon the young people,” and before Job has time to ask if there were casualties, before he even has time to hope, “and they are dead.” All the remaining servants, all the children are dead, “and I alone have escaped to tell you” (vv. 18, 19).

An alternation of two human terrorist attacks and two “natural” disasters have deprived Job of everything. If we dwell for a few moments on this scene, it is hard not to weep with Job. Throughout the rest of this long book we must never forget the trauma of this scene. We are used in our cultures to post-traumatic stress disorders and to the training of trauma counselors to assist in times of natural disaster, terrorism, and war. But rarely if ever in human history can there have been a succession of such extreme disasters as this. Bankrupt and bereft, Job is basically left alone. His protective hedge has been broken, his outer skin so to speak violated, and all he had has been taken away.

The four messengers (who perhaps remind us of the four horsemen of the apocalypse in Revelation) fade away, and Job is on the stage alone. The greatest man of the region has now no possessions and no family (except his wife, who will make a brief and unhappy appearance soon). How will he respond? How he responds will reveal the true state of his heart—or so we have been led to believe by the Satan. Does Job serve God for what God gives him, or does Job serve God because God is worthy of his worship?

Job has been sitting to receive his terrible visitors. Now at last he can begin to respond. He “arose” (v. 20); perhaps he began to rise as each of the messengers neared the end of their tale, only to be nailed back to his seat by the onset of the next report of disaster. But now at last he can begin to respond and to grieve.

He rises; he tears his robe, the outer mantle worn by people of distinction, perhaps symbolizing the pain that is tearing at his heart.

He shaves his head, another conventional symbol of mourning, perhaps indicating identification with the dead.

And then he falls on the ground, not (yet) crushed by sadness, but in worship of the God he knows and loves. Quietly, with dignity and restraint, Job worships.

And then he speaks: 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. (v. 21)

Job knows that eventually he will die and take nothing away. It is almost as if he has died today. He understands that all his possessions and all his children were gifts from the Lord. Because God is God he gives, and it is therefore entirely his prerogative to take away as he sees fit, as and when he chooses. This is part of God being God.

So Job blesses the name of the Lord. He expresses the wish that all who hear his story will bless God for it. Satan said Job would curse God to his face. On the contrary, his response to terrible loss is wonderfully blessing the God who has given and has now seen fit to take away. In the moment of his loss his first thought is of the God who had first given.

The story seems to conclude, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong” (v. 22). What this man says about God is the key issue at stake. He has been anxious lest his children may have cursed God in their hearts. Satan has predicted that Job will curse God to his face. Instead he responds with blessing. It is a wonderful conclusion to a terrible story.

But it is not the conclusion. This is the next shock. We need to learn to be shocked and shocked and shocked again by this story and never to let familiarity dull the sharpness of the pain.

Scene 3: Heaven [Job 2:1-7a]

Suddenly we are taken back into Heaven to witness another “day,” another heavenly cabinet meeting. Job did not witness the first one, and he does not witness this one. But we, the readers, are allowed to be flies on the wall.

We have no indication of what time elapses between the disasters of scene two and the heavenly scene three, but this new scene begins almost word for word the same as the last scene in Heaven. This time we are explicitly told that Satan “came among them to present himself before the LORD” (v. 1). If we were in any doubt that the Satan is a minister or servant of the Lord, this lays that doubt to rest. Like all the other powers and principalities that share in the agency of governing the world, Satan is subservient to the Sovereign God. He comes “to present himself” and specifically to report back on “progress” since the last meeting, when he was sent to deprive Job of all his possessions and children. It is a horrifying task that the Satan has carried out.

The report begins with the same formulas as in the previous meeting—the same question, “From where have you come?” and the same evasive answer, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it,” (v. 2).

Then the Lord asks the same question as before but with something extra added: “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” (v. 3). If we were in any doubt about Job’s character, surely this must lay it to rest. Three times now he has been called blameless, upright, God-fearing, and penitent, once by the narrator and twice by God himself. Also twice God has called him “my servant.”

But now the Lord goes on, “He still holds fast his integrity”—his inside is the same as his outside—“although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason” (v. 3). We learn two more things here. First, that Job has maintained his integrity as a genuine and consistent believer. This is exactly what we thought from the conclusion of the last scene.

But, second, we learn the Satan’s actual motive. Satan sets up the test with a logic that has its foundation in the glory of God. But what he actually wants is not to see Job tested but to see Job destroyed. He wants God to destroy him, to swallow him alive, to kill him. There is no justification for this (it is “without reason” [v. 3]), but this is what Satan wants. Job’s sufferings are undeserved. And yet Satan is frustrated by the instructions he has been given—to take away what Job has but not to touch his person.

So Satan presses the matter further. “Skin for skin!” he says, using an idiom the meaning of which is not absolutely clear. “All that a man has he will give for his life” (v. 4). Which is to say, you can breach the protective hedge, the outer skin, around a man’s possessions and family, and you will hurt him; but there is an inner skin that protects the man himself, his body and soul. Until that skin is breached, a man will not really be tested to see if his piety is genuine. “But stretch out your hand and touch”—again to “touch” means to “strike”—“his bone and his flesh [the inside and outside of his own person], and he will curse you to your face” (v. 5).

The point here seems to be that there is a distinction between what a person has and what a person is. What a person is is closer to the person’s heart than what he has. I am attached to what I have, whether it be impersonal possessions or personal relations (family); it hurts me to have those taken away. But it does not ultimately hurt me as deeply as when my inner skin is penetrated and the attack reaches to who I am, to my own body and soul. This is what Satan demands.

Shockingly (and it is truly shocking) the Lord agrees. Having rebuked Satan for inciting him against Job without valid reason, the Lord says to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand; only spare his life” (v. 6). But Satan is frustrated in his desire to see Job swallowed up and utterly destroyed—he is not allowed to kill him.

Nevertheless, we must think hard about this second permission or instruction. Had we been writing the story, we would have had the Lord say to Satan, “Enough is enough. The man has suffered more than any human being in one day. He has been taken from riches to bankruptcy, from greatness to destitution, from a happy family to utter bereavement. That is enough, surely, to establish that his piety is genuine. The man worships me because he knows I am worthy of worship. End of trial.” That is what we would have said.

That the Lord disagrees with us must teach us something very deep. The glory of God really is more important than your or my comfort. When all that Job has is taken from him, we may get an approximate or provisional demonstration that God is worthy of worship. But an approximate or provisional demonstration is not sufficient for the ultimate glory of God. In the end it is necessary and right that this man should suffer personal and intimate attack upon himself, so that we see absolutely and without doubt that God is worthy of worship. It is necessary for this man to demonstrate a full and deep obedience to the glory of God.

So for a second time “Satan went out from the presence of the LORD” (v. 7). Thus the third scene comes to an end.

Scene 4: Earth [Job 2:7b-10]

The transition from scene 1 to scene 2 was, if we may say so, leisurely. There was a day for the heavenly scene, and then, at some unspecified date later, there was another day when the disasters happened on earth. Similarly there is no indication of how long elapsed between scene 2 and scene 3. The transition between scene 3 and scene 4 is immediate. One scene fades into the next, as in many cinematography sequences. There is no “there was a day” formula this time (1:13). The moment “Satan went out from the presence of the LORD” he “struck Job with loathsome sores” (v. 7). It was an immediate disaster. The pace has quickened.

The scene is intensified in another way. In the first four disasters the agents were either human (the Sabeans and the Chaldeans) or impersonal (lightning and hurricane). Here Satan is the immediate agent of Job’s sufferings: “Satan … struck Job” (v. 7). We are not told what medical causes are intermediate between Satan and the suffering. Satan struck Job’s person, not just his family or his possessions, afflicting his skin with “loathsome sores” (v. 7). And he did it “from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (v. 7). It was a total and intimate affliction with no reprieve. All of Job’s person is invaded; the last sense of any protective hedge has been destroyed.

So he sits “in the ashes” (v. 8) on the council incinerator and rubbish dump, where the rubbish is continually burned in a heap outside the city gate, the place that Jesus was later to use as the best human image to represent Hell (Gehenna, the valley of the sons of Hinnom, outside Jerusalem). Job “took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself” (v. 8). Everything about Job is broken now. And he is all alone.

So this really is the test. Now we shall see for a certainty whether he serves God only for what God gives him. Now God has taken it all away. God could not take any more away from Job without killing him, and then we would never know the result of the trial. So Job must live.

And yet there is one more trial. Job’s wife makes her only appearance in the drama. We must resist the temptation to romanticize Job and his wife. All we know of her is that at this moment of lonely suffering she pleads with him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity?”—as God says he does before this last trial (2:3)—“Curse God and die” (v. 9). She knows, as Job knows, that to curse God ultimately brings a human being under sentence of death. This is why Job had offered all those burnt offerings to protect his children from this fate. This is what Job has refused to do after the first trials, blessing God wonderfully in 1:21.

But here a wife has seen her husband suffering so terribly that she has wished him the peace of death. We shouldn’t make any moral judgment about Job’s wife. But whatever her motive, she is the mouthpiece of a terrible temptation, what Augustine calls “the devil’s assistant” and Calvin “Satan’s tool,” asking Job to do what Satan wants him to do. Job hears the pleading of his nearest and dearest to abandon his principles about God and just give in, let rip against God, and bring upon himself the inevitable judgment of death.

Job’s reply is a model of faith under trial. “But he said to her, ‘You speak as one of the foolish women would speak’ ” (v. 10). In kindness he does not actually call her a foolish woman. But he says that what she has suggested is not worthy of her. Hers is the suggestion that you would expect from a fool. She has spoken under stress, as if she were foolish.

Far from cursing God, Job says, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” (v. 10). Job speaks not self-centeredly of himself alone but of them both (“Shall we …?”) Again, as after the first trials, Job’s heart is full of God the Creator who is the author of all good gifts. All the good he has received, he received from God. Can he not trust this same God to give him harmful things and to believe that he knows best? The sense of “receive” is to accept, humbly bowing beneath God’s loving providence.

Now comes the conclusion: “In all this Job did not sin with his lips” (v. 10). This does not suggest that Job did sin in his heart; sin with the lips is what Satan had predicted, and sin with the lips is what Job has not done. We have here a simple affirmation that Job has passed the test. The question is settled, the trial concluded. Job’s piety results from Job’s heart conviction that God is the author of everything, the Creator who is worthy of all his worship in the bad times as well as the good.

In one sense the trial is settled. But as the book continues, Heaven is silent from now until the Lord speaks from chapter 38 onward. Only in chapter 42 will we know for sure that Job is vindicated. In the meantime the damaged and broken skin of Job speaks of a real believer in the process of a terrible and life-changing breakdown.

Conclusion: Does Satan attack Christians today?

This is a good time, before Job’s comforters are introduced and we launch into the many chapters of poetry, to pause and orient ourselves in the book of Job. How are we as Christian people to read Job today?

The first thing to say is that Job is an extreme book. Job is extravagantly rich, wonderfully happy, and extremely great. He is not only one among many great men—he is the greatest of all the people of his region. And then his downfall is extreme. He does not go from moderate riches to a measure of poverty; he goes from extravagant riches to absolute destitution. He does not do so gradually; he does so in a day. He does not experience the loss of one child or even two. He loses all ten children, and he does so in a day.

This poses a problem for us as we read the book. However deep our suffering, it is unlikely that our experience can ever do more than very approximately mirror Job’s. We have neither been so great as Job, nor so fallen, neither so happy, nor so lonely, neither so rich, nor so poor, neither so pious, nor so cursed. All of which points to a fulfillment greater and deeper than your life or mine.

Job in his extremity is actually but a shadow of a reality more extreme still, of a man who was not just blameless but sinless, who was not just the greatest man in a region, but the greatest human being in history, greater even than merely human, who emptied himself of all his glory, became incarnate, and went all the way down to a degrading, naked, shameful death on the cross, whose journey took him from eternal fellowship with the Father to utter aloneness on the cross. The story of Job is a shadow of the greater story of Jesus Christ.

And yet we cannot stop there. For the story of Job is, in a measure, your story and mine as Christian believers, as men and women in Christ. Before the cross Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you [“you” here is plural, referring to all the apostolic band], that he might sift you like wheat.” Just as the Satan demanded to have Job to sift and test him, to see if he was—as it were—wheat or chaff, so he demanded to sift the apostolic band.

And just as God the Father sent Satan off to do that to Job, so he does with the apostles. Jesus does not go on to say, “But my Father has forbidden Satan from doing this.” Rather, he says, “But I have prayed for you [“you” here is singular, Simon Peter specifically] that your faith may not fail. And when you have turned again, strengthen your brothers” (Luke 22:31, 32). Clearly Satan’s demand is to be granted; the apostles are to be sifted by Satan, to see if their faith is genuine. And their faith will prove genuine, not least because God the Son prays to God the Father for Peter, and then Peter becomes the instrument to strengthen the faith of the others.

Later in his life, as we have seen, Peter writes to Christian believers under trial to explain that their trials are necessary “so that the tested genuineness” of their faith “may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:6, 7). An enemy, “your adversary the devil,” “prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour,” and he can be resisted only by faith (“Resist him, firm in your faith”) (1 Peter 5:8, 9).

Paul exhorts Christian people to put on “the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil” (Ephesians 6:11). So we are naive and mistaken if we suppose that Satan no longer wants to attack believers or that God the Father has changed his mind about giving Satan permission to launch such attacks. We have a dangerous enemy who continues to attack us, as he attacked Job and as he even assaulted the Lord Jesus Christ himself.

The book of Job is a scary book, not like a horror movie (where we can enjoy the scariness, knowing that it is not about to strike us), but because of the real understanding that this terrible story may in some way become our story too. Our horror in reading the story of Job is more than an empathetic horror; it is a personal horror.

But there is one difference. We live after the cross of Christ and therefore after the fulfillment of the story of Job. In the cross of Christ, God has “disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them” in Jesus and his cross (Colossians 2:15). Through his death Jesus will “destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who though fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Hebrews 2:14, 15). “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil” (1 John 3:8). The cross changes things.

We learn what the cross changes from a vivid apocalyptic passage in Revelation 12.

As a result of the victory of the cross, Satan is no longer present in the council of God, as he was in Job 1, 2, to accuse believers before the Father. He has been thrown down to earth. He no longer has access to the throne room of Heaven. What does this mean, since he is still dangerous, ranges the earth and sea with great anger, and indeed can only be conquered by those who “loved not their lives even unto death” (v. 11)?

The key truth is that he who was “the accuser of our brothers” is no longer able to accuse Christian believers before God (v. 10). He accuses us, and we need to learn what to do with his accusation. But when he accuses us, God is not listening. The devil no longer has that access. The issue of our justification has been decisively settled at the cross. This is the gospel truth of the cross: there is no longer any condemnation to those in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and our consciences have been cleansed by the blood of Christ (Hebrews 9:14).

So as we read the story of Job we think first and primarily of the greater story of Jesus, who walked the way of Job for us, who plumbed the depths of Job’s suffering for us, and who was vindicated for us. Satan is still able to attack us, and he spends what short life is left to him angrily doing that, like a hungry lion on the prowl. We must be realistic about this. Still we have to endure (“Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints,” Revelation 13:10). But if we are in Christ, Satan is no longer able to accuse us before God. He no longer has that access.