Chapter 20
JOB’S ANSWER
The book of Job doesn’t solve theodicy—it dissolves it.
20.1 The Setup
The book of Job is the oldest and most honest exploration of the problem of suffering in world literature.
The story begins simply. Job is a righteous man—blameless, upright, fearing God, turning away from evil. He’s also wealthy: thousands of sheep, camels, oxen, donkeys, plus seven sons and three daughters. He has everything.
Then, in a heavenly scene, Satan approaches God. (In this ancient text, “Satan” is not yet the devil of later tradition—he’s a member of the divine court, a kind of prosecuting attorney.) Satan suggests that Job’s piety is mercenary: Job is righteous because it pays. Take away the rewards, and Job will curse God.
God accepts the challenge. Job loses everything—livestock, servants, children, killed in a series of catastrophes. Then Job himself is struck with painful sores, head to foot. He sits in ashes, scraping his wounds with broken pottery.
His wife tells him to curse God and die. Job refuses. But he does not understand.
Three friends arrive to comfort him. They sit in silence for seven days—the proper response to grief. Then they begin to speak.
And in their speaking, they become instruments of torture.
20.2 The Friends
The friends—Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar—share a theology. It’s simple, coherent, and wrong.
Their theology: God rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. Suffering is punishment for sin. If Job is suffering, Job must have sinned. The solution is repentance.
Eliphaz puts it gently at first: “Consider: who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?” (4:7). Bildad is blunter: “If your children sinned against him, he delivered them into the hand of their transgression” (8:4). Zophar demands: “Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves” (11:6).
The logic is airtight. The conclusion is monstrous.
Job protests. He has not sinned—not grievously, not in proportion to his suffering. He’s not perfect, but he’s not wicked. The friends’ theology doesn’t fit his case.
The friends double down. They must be right; therefore Job must be lying or self-deceived. They cannot question their theology, so they question Job’s integrity.
Round after round, the argument continues. Job demands an audience with God. He wants to plead his case, to understand why this has happened, to receive an explanation. The friends keep insisting: repent, and all will be well.
Neither side yields. The dialogue reaches an impasse.
Then God appears.
20.3 The Whirlwind
God speaks from a whirlwind—a storm theophany, overwhelming in power.
But God doesn’t answer Job’s question.
Job asked: Why am I suffering? What did I do? Where is the justice?
God responds:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know!” (38:2-5)
The speech continues for four chapters. It’s a tour of creation—the earth’s foundations, the sea’s boundaries, the storehouses of snow and hail, the constellations, the rain that falls on empty deserts, the wild animals that live without human help.
God describes the mountain goat giving birth, the wild donkey roaming free, the ostrich foolishly leaving her eggs in sand, the war horse laughing at fear, the hawk soaring, the eagle nesting in cliffs.
Then two magnificent beasts: Behemoth (“look at him!”), a land creature of awesome power; and Leviathan, a sea monster that no human can catch or tame.
What is the point?
The point is: you are not the center.
The universe is vast. It contains creatures Job has never seen, processes Job doesn’t understand, beauty and terror that exist without reference to human needs. The wild donkey doesn’t serve humans. The rain falls where no one lives. Leviathan exists for its own sake, not for Job’s.
Job wanted an explanation—a reason for his suffering that made sense in human terms. God gives him something else: perspective. The cosmos is not arranged around Job. Job’s suffering is real, but it’s not the central fact of the universe.
20.4 The Non-Answer
Notice what God does not say.
God does not say Job sinned. The friends were wrong.
God does not say suffering is punishment. The retribution theology is rejected.
God does not say suffering serves a greater good. No soul-making, no mysterious plan.
God does not say Job will be compensated. (The epilogue does restore Job’s fortunes, but the speech doesn’t promise this.)
God does not explain why Job suffered. The question is left unanswered.
What God does is reframe.
Job’s question assumed that he was owed an explanation. That his suffering was cosmically significant in a way that required justification. That God’s goodness was measured by Job’s welfare.
God’s response challenges these assumptions. Who are you to demand explanations? Were you there at creation? Do you understand how the cosmos works? Can you tame Leviathan?
This isn’t bullying. It’s not “I’m bigger than you, so shut up.” It’s a genuine expansion of perspective. Job’s vision has been too narrow. He’s been seeing the universe through the keyhole of his own suffering. God opens the door.
The whirlwind speech doesn’t answer the question “why do I suffer?” It dissolves the question by showing that the frame within which it was asked is too small.
20.5 Job’s Response
How does Job respond?
“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” (42:5-6)
The translation is contested. “Despise myself” may be wrong; the Hebrew is ambiguous. Some render it: “I retract my words and repent of dust and ashes”—meaning Job is done with mourning, ready to move on.
But the key is the first part: “I had heard of you… but now my eye sees you.”
Job had a theology—ideas about God, beliefs about how the universe works. Now he’s had an encounter. Theory has become experience. Secondhand knowledge has become firsthand.
And in that encounter, something shifts. Job doesn’t get his answers. But he gets something better: presence. God showed up. God spoke. Whatever else remains mysterious, Job is not alone.
The questions don’t go away. The suffering wasn’t explained. But the relationship is restored. Job can live without answers because he has encountered the One who has the answers—even if they’re not given.
This is not intellectual satisfaction. It’s something else. Something more like trust, or surrender, or peace that surpasses understanding.
20.6 The Wisdom
What does Job teach us about suffering?
First: the retribution theology is false. The friends were wrong. Suffering is not proportional to sin. The innocent suffer; the wicked prosper. The universe is not a vending machine dispensing rewards for good behavior.
Second: we are not the center. The cosmos is vast, strange, filled with creatures and processes we don’t understand. Our suffering is real, but it’s not the central fact of existence. We are not owed explanations.
Third: some questions don’t have answers we can understand. Job never learns why he suffered. Perhaps there’s no “why” of the sort he wanted. Perhaps suffering just happens, part of the structure of finite existence. Perhaps God has reasons beyond our comprehension. The book doesn’t say.
Fourth: presence matters more than explanation. Job is satisfied not because he understands but because he has encountered God. The relationship is enough, even without the answers.
Fifth: honest protest is acceptable. Job argued with God, demanded answers, complained bitterly. God’s response does not condemn Job for this. At the end, God says Job spoke “what is right” while the friends spoke wrongly (42:7). Honest anguish is better than false comfort.
Coda: The Dissolution
The book of Job is not a theodicy. It doesn’t solve the problem of evil. It dissolves it.
Theodicies try to explain why God permits suffering—free will, soul-making, greater goods. They accept the question’s frame and attempt an answer within it.
Job rejects the frame.
The frame says: suffering requires justification. If we can’t justify it, God is indicted.
Job says: the frame is too small. You are not the center. The cosmos is not about you. Your demand for justification assumes a centrality you don’t have.
This is not comfort in the usual sense. It doesn’t make suffering hurt less. It doesn’t explain why your child died or your city flooded.
But it offers something else: release from the burden of requiring explanation. If suffering must be justified, every tragedy becomes an argument—against God, against meaning, against life itself. If suffering is simply part of finite existence, if we are creatures among creatures in a vast cosmos, then suffering can be borne without becoming a philosophical scandal.
The whirlwind doesn’t answer. It expands. It shows Job a universe so vast, so strange, so far beyond human comprehension that the demand for human-centered explanation seems… small.
And in that smallness, there is a strange freedom. Not understanding. Not comfort. But freedom.
Job’s friends tried to make suffering meaningful in human terms. They failed.
God tried something else: showing Job that human terms are not the only terms.
The darkness remains. But it’s not the final word.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness—vast and ancient and formless—has not overcome it.