Learn from Job How to Trust God Even Through Suffering

Suffering Produces Trust

Job is one of five books in the middle of our Old Testament that are called “wisdom books”—Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. In these books, there are no great events (like in the books of history or prophecy) and no new laws (like in the first five books of the Bible). These books aren’t so much about creation or God’s corporate people, Israel. Instead, these books focus on individual people who, in many respects, are like us. Like us, they experience highs and lows in life.

So it was for Job. Job was a man who had everything, lost it all, and then in a surprising turn of events gained it all back and then some.

The book of Job is about suffering and about God letting things happen to you that you don’t understand because you aren’t meant to. On the whole, Job speaks realistically about our suffering, explores the limits of what we can understand, and compels us to trust God completely.

We Can Always Trust God

In his letter to the Philippians, Paul talks about a “peace of God, which surpasses all understanding” (Phil. 4:7). Being reconciled with God, in other words, means that we can be more satisfied in God than in any understanding we may have about our passing circumstances. That’s quite a claim! But Paul says it clearly, and, if you’re a Christian, you’ve experienced as much.

The reason we must trust is precisely because we don’t understand. As someone who used to be a skeptic, I know that asking me to trust someone instead of understanding something can feel challenging. But this doesn’t make the requirement of trust any less necessary. In fact, it is impossible to be a Christian if we insist on living only according to what we understand apart from trust. Being a Christian requires that we trust God—even with the things we don’t understand, such as why we suffer.

The good news is, there are so many reasons to trust God! Let’s consider two.

1. God Is Powerful

First, God is powerful. The book of Job puts the power of God on display in beautiful and remarkable ways. The book asks us to contemplate God’s creation of all things. It reveals his power and his competency. It shows how he providentially cares for every detail in creation and how this care redounds to his glory.

God is more powerful than the greatest and most fearsome of creatures on land and sea. He is more powerful than the Behemoth and the Leviathan, two creatures described similarly to the hippopotamus and the crocodile—only super-sized (Job 40–41)! Some suggest these creatures are meant to stand for evil itself—including chaos and even Satan. Whatever these creatures may represent, they are no match for the God who made them. God is their creator, and he is more powerful than anything that he has made. We shouldn’t fear anything like we fear God himself. Everything and everyone answers to him.

Friend, what circumstances cause you fear right now? What would it mean for you to acknowledge that God is sovereign over them? And, if you were confident that he was sovereign even over them, what difference would it make in your life? Job learns the answer to this question. According to him, he had only heard of God before he suffered. Before the story ends, Job learns the extent of God’s sovereignty and likens it to seeing God (Job 42:5). Could this be the case for you?

2. God Is Good

The second reason to trust God is that he is good. God shows his goodness by prospering Job at the end of the book. There remains, however, another interesting detail in the book’s last chapter of Job: Job prays for his friends (Job 42:10). That strikes me as awfully magnanimous considering the way they had talked about him. Yet they ask Job to pray for them as God demanded (Job 42:8). By this demand, God makes it clear to Job’s friends that Job’s suffering was not caused by his moral inferiority to them. In fact, rather than Job being in the wrong, they were in the wrong, which is why they needed Job to pray for them.

It’s also interesting that Job’s responses to his friends throughout the book communicates a dismissiveness over the state of man’s life. In several hauntingly beautiful passages, Job speaks of man’s days being like a fleeting shadow, flying by faster than the weaver’s shuttle, certain to return to the dust. Yet even though he speaks this way, God and all his heavenly court remain attentive to the affairs of the sons and daughters of dust. Isn’t that amazing?

Though we are made of dust, God cares for us because he is good. This is particularly clear in the introductory heavenly scene from chapters 1 and 2 where God gives Job to Satan in order to test Job’s trust.

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Job was never told about this heavenly court scene. Unlike the reader of Job, Job himself appears clueless about Satan’s direct involvement in his sufferings. Now, it needs to be said that Satan was wrong in his charge of Job. Satan first accuses Job of serving God for his own selfish ends—for wealth and status (Job 1:9–11). God knows otherwise, but nonetheless he allows Satan to take away Job’s wealth. Yet Job still worships God. We read, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong” (Job 1:22). Job was very wealthy, but he did not worship God merely because he was wealthy. He worshiped God because of who God is. God is good.

His first effort having failed, Satan then accuses Job of only serving God because his health remains. Satan rebuffs Job’s resilience and says to God, “Skin for skin! All that a man has he will give for his life. But stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 2:4–5). God again knows otherwise. But for his own purposes, he allows Satan to take away Job’s health. In this second round of testing, Satan is again proven wrong. Even as Job’s own body decays and his wife wishes him dead, Job still worships God!

Job’s changing circumstances prove that his trust in God isn’t because God has given him wealth or health. From this, we learn that true worship of God is not dependent on circumstances. We can and should certainly give thanks for good circumstances, but true worship recognizes God’s supreme worth over the greatest of temporal blessings and the worst of worldly woes.

In fact, this point draws out one of the most central ironies of the book of Job. Throughout the book, Job’s friends assume he suffers because he sinned. Eliphaz even begins the final cycle of the debate by asking Job, “Is it for your fear of him that he reproves you and enters into judgment with you?” (Job 22:4). To this question, the reader wants to say “Yes! Exactly!” The trouble is that Eliphaz means the question as a rhetorical one. His stance is not the shrugging shoulders and upturned palms of Job, but the squinting eyes and pointing finger of the Accuser himself. Eliphaz is denying that Job has any fear of God at all. In this, Eliphaz’s disposition toward Job is more like Satan’s than like God’s.

The reader knows that Job is qualified to suffer because he was righteous. Ironically, had Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar been more righteous—like Job—they also may have been selected to join Job in suffering. You see, the story begins with God looking over the world to identify someone to brag about to Satan, and he lands on Job. God is the one who proposed Job to Satan (Job 1:8; 2:3). It is God’s proposal to Satan that kicks off the entire story.

What does all this mean for us? It means that our trust of God should not be based on our own character (holy, strong, clever, etc.). Instead, our trust must be in God’s character because his character is perfectly trustworthy. God is both all powerful and entirely good.

Sometime ago, I sat securely on a plane as we taxied for take-off from the Kansas City Airport. As we prepared to take off, I suppose I could have stood up and shouted, “Stop the plane!” I could have then gone to the cockpit and demanded that the captain show me copies of our taxying route, the runway we’d be using, and the timetable for other flights taking off around the same time. I could have done all this in order to satisfy myself that we would, in fact, be safe taking off in Kansas City amid so many other planes. As I say, I could have done that. I didn’t do any of those things. Why? Because I trust the pilot and the air traffic controllers. So instead of barging into the cockpit, I sat back and relaxed as the plane rolled around the tarmac and eventually lifted into the sky.

Likewise, we must trust the true Controller, who makes no errors, who never sleeps nor slumbers, and in whom is not the slightest touch of evil. At times, God sometimes graciously lets us see some of how he uses a difficult situation for our good, and we should thank him for such occasions. But there is danger in assuming that he must give us such understanding. God never means for us to trust our own ability to figure out God’s purpose in a difficult circumstance. He means for us to trust God and his character.

God is both all powerful and entirely good.

To be sure, a counterfeit trust in God might work sometimes, but it will not finally work. Ultimately, only God is trustworthy. Job knew as much when he declared, “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25).

How would Job’s Redeemer redeem? By living more perfectly than Job ever could and by taking upon himself more suffering than Job ever knew. Job’s patience amid suffering was finally meant to point us to the genuinely perfect righteousness and wholly undeserved suffering of Jesus Christ on the cross. Through Christ’s death on the cross and his resurrection on the third day, Christ would defeat the powers of sin and death. God then promises to forgive everyone who repents of their sins and trusts in Christ. Everyone who does just that, along with Job, will stand with their Redeemer in the end. We best understand Job by understanding Jesus. As John Stott put it, “The cross does not solve the problem of suffering, but it gives us the right perspective from which to view it.”¹

If you are a child of God, reconciled to him through Christ, realize that even your suffering can exquisitely display the glory of God as you trust him. It may just be that God is sitting in heaven right now, saying to the heavenly host around him, “Have you considered my servant, [insert your name]?” Could it be that one day you will watch as God shows to all creation the presently unrevealed glories of what he has accomplished through your suffering?

Job’s suffering begins to help us construct an understanding of the suffering of the righteous. Suffering is most normally associated with sin in our fallen world—and rightly so. Sin is where suffering comes from. But Job’s friends mistakenly took the general rule of the Proverbs—suffering is predicated by personal sin—as though it were the only rule of suffering. This fails, however, to acknowledge a crucial category—that of righteous suffering. Job was digging out the basement, as it were, for the suffering that Jesus himself would one day know. As Job suffered because he was righteous, so Jesus would suffer as the only true righteous man. Only in Jesus’s case, he suffered not only because he was righteous but also for the unrighteous. He did this so that, in him, we may be made righteous like he is.

Sunday by Sunday, members of churches encourage each other with this truth. We sing of it in our hymns. We pray for each other to keep trusting the Lord. We long together for our heavenly relief, and we grow in our confidence in the promises that he has set before us. Everything that God does he does for his own glory.

This article is adapted from The Message of the Old Testament: Promises Made by Mark Dever.

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