 Job
Back to Job for a second, I'd like you guys to consider the story from a different perspective.
I don’t know if you’ve ever read Socrates’ book, The Republic, but in it Socrates argued that it was better to be a good man and yet have all the appearance and reputation of being bad, than to be a bad man who had all the appearance and reputation of being good. Basically Job is a real life manifestation of Socrates’ hypothetical example. Job was a man from whom everything was stripped except his righteousness. Satan believed that if you take away the benefits of being good, like health and prosperity, then there is no worth to being righteous, no point. God, on the other hand, set out to prove that righteousness was desirable for its own sake. He set out to show that God is to be loved for who He is, not for what He gives. And Job did not follow his wife’s advice to “curse God and die.” His response to her was tantamount to saying: to curse God now would be to prove that I have served and blessed Him not for what He is, but for the good-fortune which for so long He gave me; now that ill-fortune has befallen me I can show that I serve Him for what He is.” Job ultimately only cared about one thing. He was troubled by the idea that God may have turned away from Job, no longer regarding him as a friend. He was willing to accept all the suffering in the world that came his way, as long as he felt that God was with him. However, he and everyone he knew had the idea that if you suffered, then you must be sinning (which is false), so Job had to rethink what he thought about God, because he was innocent and viewed his suffering as unjust punishment. But God was only proving the genuineness of a righteous heart to Satan and to the world.  |