Where Is God in My Suffering?

The book of Job is an agonizing journey through the suffering of a godly man. We listen to his heart-wrenching thoughts and prayers and feel his confusion. Each person inevitably reads this story out of their own experience with disappointment and suffering. What is God up to? Why is this happening? Does he even care how we hurt?

In Job: Where Is God in My Suffering?, Marc Davis guides readers to understand the message of Job more fully, helping them reflect on Job’s suffering and their own in relationship to the suffering of Jesus. The eight lessons in this study offer a place for prayers, reflections, and conversations in which Job’s story, your story, and Jesus’s story all come together. All who suffer (and that’s everyone) will find greater meaning and significance in their own experience as they encounter the God who sent his perfect Son to suffer for us.

“The book of Job is not an easy read for twenty-first-century Western people. Its opening and closing chapters feel disturbing to many of us. The bulk of the book is a cycle of dialogues that seem to lead nowhere productive. And God’s answer to Job at the end of the book can seem to be no answer at all,” Davis writes. “But the rewards of studying Job come to those who are willing to give it a slow read, to camp out in its questions and  talk to God about the issues it raises, and to engage relationally with him within the spaces the book creates for such conversations.”

In this interview with Davis, we talk to him more about his study.

Q: Job is not an easy book of the Bible to read or study. Why is it important for Christians today to take a slow, deep look Job’s experience instead of rushing through to check it off their reading plan?

Job contains a lot of big emotions, desperate ideas, and very important heart questions. It’s hard to read fast, and it’s also hard to read only a chapter at a time. The book is not served up in bite-size portions; it actually only makes sense as a whole. So that makes it hard to study—it’s like going through the cafeteria line and getting a heaping helping that just feels like way more than you asked for.

Much of the book is a long, rambly conversation between Job and his friends. On the one side it’s a rant, an overflow of a heart in deep pain. For over forty-two chapters Job repeats himself, doubles back on things he’s said before, and sometimes he says big messy things that you might hesitate to say in polite company. And his rant is in dialogue with canned, repetitive, boilerplate theology, courtesy of Job’s friends. The friends’ theology is not up to the task of dealing with the size, honesty, and outside-the-lines quality of all that comes bubbling out of Job—and yet their conversation can be instructive to us today, if only in its inconclusiveness and lack of productivity. Sometimes we learn how to have better conversations by exposing ourselves more deeply to ones that go nowhere and do not offer help.

In an age of simplistic, predictable religious jargon, all kinds of people (Christian or otherwise) would benefit from marinating in a different kind of conversation, one that’s not embarrassed by big emotions or impolite questions. The book of Job demonstrates that God welcomes honest conversations and he is big enough for our big pain and emotion. You can’t rush this kind of deep human agony, but why would you want to?

Q: How does your study bring the suffering of Job, the suffering of Jesus, and our own suffering all together?

Whenever we read any part of Scripture, we quite naturally read it through the lens of our own experience—I think we’re meant to do so. The book of Job, even for its original audience, was a story about a man who lived long ago and far away. And it would be comforting to keep the story at arm’s length because we hope that surely nothing like this could happen today.

And yet naturally as we listen to Job, we try his words on for size and test them against our own experience and our own ideas. If we’ve suffered in any significant way, we relate to him more easily and intuitively. As he feels his mortality, we feel our mortality. As he puzzles over the way his good choices led to bad outcomes, we also think about all the times we looked for blessing but got sadness and sorrow.

Jesus, of course, is only glimpsed dimly in the book of Job. He is, you might say, a “Christ of the gaps.” Job’s book creates an aching longing for the places where there should be a Savior, a mediator that could lay his hands both on God and on suffering people, to allow for the possibility of a conversation and a relationship (9:33). Job describes the “what if” Savior and gets very close to the Savior who actually comes “in the fullness of time.” And when he does come—wonder of wonders—he is a Savior who suffers. Much more than my limited suffering, Christ’s acute suffering maps onto Job’s experience. Job’s words can often be put into the mouth of Jesus with great resonance. For instance, in Job 6:4 we read, “The arrows of the Almighty are in me, my spirit drinks in their poison; God’s terrors are marshaled against me.”What Job feels in part, Jesus actually experiences to the uttermost.

As an example of how the intersection of our suffering with Job’s and Jesus’s comes together, there’s an essay in the study called “That Was Then, This is Now.” It’s about the experience of loss, “coming down in the world,” going from a good situation to a much worse one. This section of Job (chapters 29–30) is, on the surface, about Job. But how do you enter into that portion of Scripture? With the echoes of your own experience, and of Christ’s experience, ringing in your ears. It’s within Jesus’s experience that my experience, and Job’s experience, begin to make sense.

Q: Will this Bible study help the reader understand why he or she is going through a time of suffering?

Short answer: no.

But—and this is a big but—the book of Job is all about the experience of suffering that makes no sense; Job’s voice is the voice of a man who doesn’t understand the why of whathe is going through. So for starters, Job gives such a reader some language for their experience and a companion in that experience. That’s worth a lot.

I hope that the study provides some tracks for people to run on in the midst of suffering—ways of talking to God, ways of glimpsing his character. And ultimately, in the study of the last chapters of the book, a way of engaging with a big, undomesticated God who actually does understand, much better than I do, what the world is about and how it operates. A vision of that kind of God gives us some hope that there is purpose in all things, that there are things that I don’t understand that are nonetheless real and good. Even if there’s much that I don’t understand, He understands it all, and he is good, and I am able to trust him with it.

Q: When we are going through something, we often commiserate with our friends much like Job did and we get similar results. Talk to us about the importance of lamenting to God instead.

You’re absolutely right that Job gets very little help from his friends—and he quickly perceives this! Already in 6:21 he tells them, “Now you too have proved to be of no help!” Interestingly, however, in Job’s dialogue with the friends, sometimes the pronouns shift, and you get the sense that he is talking past them, addressing himself directly to God. He has some doubt that God hears him—a conversation with God actually feels quite impossible—but here and there Job’s speech shifts from, “This is what I wish I could say to God” to actually saying it.

The book of Job teaches, at least implicitly, that the thing to do when you’re in trouble is to speak your trouble. And even better, speak your trouble to God. Job says hairy, messy, borderline blasphemous things. (His friends certainly consider them blasphemous; one of their messages consistently is, “Don’t say that!”) Though at the end of the book he “repents” of “speaking of things he did not understand” (42:2), 42:7 also affirms that, even in his messy honesty, Job has “spoken of [God] what is right.” Speaking as honestly as you can to God about your experience is not something to be ashamed of, and is always a good “next thing to do.”

Also, it’s worth noting that, although God does not answer Job’s questions, he does answer Job! In its own way, the book teaches the same lesson as Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount: “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7). God wants a relationship with us! He is always seeking a conversation with us. It’s never a bad idea to talk to him, to pour out whatever is in your heart.

Q: How can we know that God is listening and cares about our suffering and losses?

Well, I’m glad I don’t have to answer this question exclusively from the book of Job. Hopefully it’s not cheating to give a “whole canon” answer! Because in Job, for most of the book, the jury’s out. Maybe he listens, maybe he cares? Or maybe not.

What you get in Job, at the very end of the book, are these two things—both of them often feel a little unsatisfying to 21st-century Westerners. First, as above, you get a God who ultimately answers the one who cries out to him. He doesn’t answer on Job’s terms, in the way Job was hoping for, but he answers. God answers Job with a fire hose of rapid-fire questions about the cosmos and everything in it; it’s an answer that puts Job in his place but also honors him as a welcome conversation partner. The book of Job teaches that God wants a relationship with us.

The second thing you get in the last chapter of Job is a glimpse of restoration, setting things right. A wave of blessing that exceeds the wave of suffering. Now admittedly to our sensibilities, this chapter doesn’t quite “work” (what about the children who died in chapter 1?)—but I’m convinced that within the economy of the book it’s supposed to be an expression of justice and mercy. In the end, all’s right with the world. That’s where the story lands—and it’s a foretaste of where the Big Story lands, too.

Ultimately, though, I’m glad we have the whole canon of Scripture. I need the God who goes looking for Adam and Eve in the garden (Genesis 3:9). I need the God who hears the groans of his people under their slave drivers in Egypt and responds with kind concern (Exodus 3:7). And I need most of all the God who in love sends his own Son to make a way for eternal life in his presence (John 3:16). It’s that bigger story that speaks a stronger word to our hearts about his listening care.

Q: We often look at Job and his story of undeserved suffering, but can you talk a little bit about how his story also is about underserved mercy?

So we don’t actually want to rush past the “undeserved suffering” motif. Job really is an innocent sufferer—the friends try to deny that and they are wrong to do so. Their assumption is that “you get what you deserve . . . what goes around comes around.” But they are deeply wrong. Engaging with Job the innocent sufferer helps us get to Jesus, the ultimate innocent sufferer.

You and I, too, in small ways sometimes have the lived experience of getting a raw deal. We do something good and seem to be repaid with trouble. Sometimes we get treated unjustly. It’s real. Our lived experience of “karma” is out of whack; the world is not fair. And the book of Job helps us with that experience.

But of course, that is not our whole story, or even, for most of us, a particularly prominent theme. It’s just not. And in an important way, the story of Job really explodes the whole idea that you get what you have coming. It’s an important piece in the larger whole-Bible story that undermines the principle of performance and reward and replaces it with a principle of grace, unmerited favor. When God answers Job, it’s not because Job deserves it. It’s because of his mercy. When God restores Job, it’s not because Job deserves it. It’s because of his mercy. The friends are locked into a performance and reward theology, and it’s inadequate—it does not reflect reality and it has to be replaced with a better, more robust theology of grace.

Q: What is the most important thing we learn about the gospel from reading Job?

For most of the book of Job, God seems kind of scary. He doesn’t seem to play by the rules. He’s unpredictable. It seems best to lie low and hope he doesn’t notice you! And this is the lived experience of many people in cultures around the world. We at Serge are all about the communication of the gospel in many places and in many cultural/religious contexts; a common thread across many of these is that the gods are capricious. Shame is debilitating. It’s impossible to imagine the idea that we might have a love relationship with the God of the universe, that I might be able to stand up straight and, in a sense, make eye contact with God, and that he and I might be friends.

But Job lays the groundwork for that kind of conception of God—which is a thoroughly, uniquely Christian way of thinking and of living. It doesn’t get there fast, or comprehensively—we’re not there at the end of the book. But we have begun to have glimmers—glimmers of a two-way, mutual relationship of love. For instance, in chapter 14, Job declares:

I will wait for my renewal to come. You will call and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made. Surely then you will count my steps but not keep track of my sin. My offenses will be sealed up in a bag; you will cover over my sin (14:14–17).

This is a whole new ball game, a relationship of (dare we say it?) affection. Men and women may come out of hiding and know a God who, in the end, turns out not to be capricious in the least, but is instead consistently good and kind. Job, as I say, doesn’t entirely get us there, but it starts a ball rolling that will continue to roll through progressive revelation of God’s character through the whole Bible to a place that ends very well indeed.

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