Trusting God in the Darkness

A Guide to Understanding the Book of Job

Christopher Ash

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781433570148
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

It's easy for us to trust God when life is going well.

But when suffering comes, trusting God's goodness, his attentiveness to what's going on in the world, and his justice becomes far more difficult. In times of intense suffering, many of us ask, Why does God allow these things to happen?

In the Bible, Job is known for facing intense personal suffering. Yet, upon closer examination, we find the book of Job is about more than just Job's calamities; it's a story about God and his relationship to Christ and his people in their suffering. In this helpful guide, Christopher Ash helps us explore the question, Where is God in the midst of suffering? As we read, meditate, and pray through the book of Job, we will find assurance that God will be with us in Christ through every season and trial.

1

Getting to Know the Book of Job

This book began as a sermon series on the book of Job. Twelve days before the first sermon, on January 14, 2003, a police officer was stabbed and killed in Manchester, England. Why? This officer was an upright man, a faithful husband, and a loving father. What is more, he was a Christian and a committed member of his church, where he sometimes used to preach. The newspapers reported the moving statement by his father, whom I have since met, a former chairman of the United Kingdom Christian Police Association; he said through his tears that he was praying for the man who had killed his son. The media told of the quiet dignity of the officer’s widow. They showed the happy family snapshots with his teenage son and daughters.

So why was he killed? Does this not make us angry? If we are going to be honest, we will admit that there were others who deserved to die more than he did. Perhaps there was a corrupt police officer somewhere who had unjustly put innocent people in prison, or a crooked police officer who had taken bribes. Or perhaps there was another police officer who was carrying on an affair with his neighbor’s wife. If one of those had been killed, we might have said that although we were sad, at least there would have appeared to be some moral logic to this death. But this was a family of, dare we say it, good people. Not sinless, of course, but believers living upright lives. So why was this pointless and terrible loss inflicted on them?

We need to be honest and face the kind of world we live in. Why does God allow these things? Why does he do nothing to put these things right? And why, on the other hand, do people who could not care less about God and justice thrive? Here in contemporary expression is the angry voice of an honest man from long ago, who also struggled with these same injustices:

Why do the wicked have it so good,

live to a ripe old age and get rich?

They get to see their children succeed,

get to watch and enjoy their grandchildren.

Their homes are peaceful and free from fear;

they never experience God’s disciplining rod.

Their bulls breed with great vigor

and their cows calve without fail.

They send their children out to play

and watch them frolic like spring lambs.

They make music with fiddles and flutes,

have good times singing and dancing.

They have a long life on easy street,

and die painlessly in their sleep. (Job 21:7–13 MSG)

“Let’s be honest,” Job effectively says. “Let’s have no more of this pious make-believe that life goes well for good people and badly for bad people. You look around the world and see that it’s simply not true. By and large people who do not care about God live happier, longer lives with less suffering than do believers. Why? What kind of God runs a world like this?”

We face hard questions like this in the book of Job. But there are two ways to ask these questions. We may ask them as “armchair questions,” or we may ask them as “wheelchair questions.” We ask them as “armchair questions” if we ourselves are remote from suffering. As Shakespeare said, “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”1 The troubled Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote eloquently and almost bitterly:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there.2

We grapple with God with “wheelchair questions” when we do not hold this terror cheap, when we ourselves or those we love are suffering. Job asks the “wheelchair questions.”

Every pastor knows that behind most front doors lies pain, often hidden, sometimes long-drawn-out, sometimes very deep. I was discussing how to preach a passage from Job with four fellow ministers, when I paused to consider each of them. For a moment I lost my concentration on the text as I realized that one of them, some years before, had lost his wife in a car accident in their first year of marriage; the second was bringing up a seriously handicapped daughter. The third had broken his neck and come within two millimeters of total paralysis or death six years previously. And the fourth had undergone repeated radical surgery, which had changed his life. As my concentration returned to the text of Job, I thought, “This book is not merely academic: it is both about and for people who know suffering.”

Job is a fireball book. It is a staggeringly honest book. It is a book that knows what people actually say and think—and not just what they say publicly in church. It knows what people say behind closed doors and in whispers, and it knows what we say in our tears. It is not merely an academic book. If we listen to it with any care, it will touch, trouble, and unsettle us at a deep level.

Before we launch into the book, let me make two introductory points.

Job Is a Very Long Book

Job is forty-two chapters long. We may consider that rather an obvious observation, but the point is this: in his wisdom God has given us a very long book. He has done so for a reason. It is easy to preach just the beginning and the end, and to skip rather quickly over the endless arguments in between as if it would not much matter if they were not there. But God has put them there.

Why? Perhaps it’s because when the suffering question and the “Where is God?” question and the “What kind of God?” question are asked from the wheelchair, they cannot be answered in a tweet. If we ask, “What kind of God allows this kind of world?” God gives us a forty-two-chapter book. Far from saying, “The message of Job can be summarized in a tweet and here it is,” he says, “Come with me on a journey, one that will take time. There is no instant answer.” Job cannot be distilled. It is a narrative with a slow pace (after the frenetic beginning) and long delays. Why? Because there is no instantaneous working through grief, no quick fix to pain, no message of Job in a nutshell. God has given us a forty-two-chapter journey with no satisfactory bypass.

Indeed, if this short study is treated as an alternative to reading the text of Job, it will be like reading a guidebook to a foreign country as a substitute for actually visiting it, rather than as a preparation and accompaniment. This study is to help us read the book of Job itself, for we must read it, at length and at leisure.

This is just a short introductory study. I make no apology for that. When I was sent to Rome some years ago on business, I managed during one weekend to scrape together twenty-four hours to visit Florence. It seemed almost insulting to the riches of the Uffizi Gallery alone to give just one day to it. But it was better than nothing, and it gave me the desire to go back and explore further. If this book achieves that, it will have been worthwhile. My much fuller commentary, Job: The Wisdom of the Cross (Crossway, 2014) takes you through every verse of the book of Job. If you want to take your studies of Job further, this would be a help. But my longer work is also no su...