Job, a righteous man in the eyes of God, is stricken with great sorrow when his possessions and family are destroyed. God allows this destruction in order that Job might be tested; God wants to prove that Job’s love for God is due to faith and not being blessed. Even when his wife gives up hope, Job refuses to curse God and still holds to his faith. Three friends come to visit Job, they sit with him in silence for a week, then Job speaks out. Job laments that he was born; he is in anguish and in need of comfort. Eliphaz responds to Job’s anguish by insinuating that there must be some sin against God in Job’s life that is causing this distress.
I have known several people in my life who believed that all misfortune was a result of sin. They believed that all crimes, injuries, and disasters were a result of man living out of unity with God. The natural conclusion of this argument is that if a person is truly living in fellowship with God then nothing bad would happen to them. This is the argument that Eliphaz seems to be making. I cannot accept this argument, and thankfully (as we discover later in the book) God does not accept this argument either.
When a bad thing happens I believe it happens for one of three reasons. First, God does allow bad things to happen in order for our faith to be tested. This is what is happening in Jobs case. God has allowed the accuser to test Job and see if he will curse God. Job passes the test and remains faithful, but Job still has to deal with results of the test.
Second, evil creates evil. Often times the result of one evil action is another evil action. In the hypothetical situation of an evil person entering my house and threatening my family, if I am given the choice of killing the intruder or allowing harm to come to my family, I will kill the intruder. The initial evil of the man threatening my family has created the evil of me killing the man. I believe that it was a sin for me to kill the man, but I believe that it was a sin forced upon me. I had an ethics professor in college who disagreed with me about whether this was a sinful action, but I was never convinced otherwise.
Finally, sometimes bad things just happen. The Boxing Day Tsunami was a bad thing, but I do not believe that God sent it to test mankind or that it was the result of some other evil; it just happened.
When bad things happen our role as Christians is to point people to the hope that is available to them in Jesus Christ. I cannot survive all the trials of life on my own, but I can survive if I lean on the arms of Jesus.
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