To be perfectly candid, I didn’t see this coming. A friend had texted me some memes, one of which pictured a bearded Job, with boils on his skin, sitting cross-legged on the ground. The simple caption read: “Satan thought he had taken everything from Job . . . but to Job, God was his everything.” Liking the message, I posted the meme on the AskDrBrown Facebook page. At present, it has reached more than 580,000 people, received 67,000 engagements, including more than 13,000 likes, and it has been shared more than 7,800 times. Why?
I have spent many years studying and teaching the Book of Job, culminating in a major work in 2019: Job: The Faith to Challenge God. A New Translation and Commentary.
In the early chapters of the book, the Lord Himself says of Job, “there is no man like him on earth.” Commentators have heaped similar praise on the book itself: There is no book on earth like it.
As I noted in the Introduction to my commentary, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1861) exclaimed, “A Noble Book; All Men’s Book! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit.”
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) hailed it as “the greatest poem, whether of ancient or modern literature.”
A. Froude (1818-1894) placed it “far above all the poetry of the world.”
And Victor Hugo (1802-1885) went as far as to say, “Tomorrow, if all literature was to be destroyed and it was left to me to retain one work only, I should save Job.”
What extraordinary praise for an extraordinary book about an extraordinary man.
Job Ran To God
When it comes to the message of the meme, Job did not know that it was Satan who stole everything from him. He did not know that it was Satan who killed his 10 children and who stole his wealth, his reputation, and his health. In Job’s mind, this was the work of God, which led to a massive theological and emotional conflict.
As a worshiper of God, he knew that the Creator could not be questioned. Everything he does is right. At the same time, Job knew that the Creator was also just and good, and since Job did not deserve such terrible treatment, being a righteous man himself, then the Creator must have acted cruelly.
Job’s integrity would not allow him to blaspheme God, nor would it allow him to excuse God. What was he to do?
Much of the Book of Job addresses this acute theological problem, responding to Job’s protests in the most unexpected way, followed by an even more unexpected ending. That is part of the ageless appeal of the book.