Many months ago, I wrote a few blog posts about the book of Job because I had studied it while leaning on Christopher Ash’s excellent commentary in the Preaching the Word commentary series from Crossway. He has revisited that content for a new book no doubt aimed at a general readership.
The new book is called Trusting God in the Darkness. He answers a few questions about Job on the Crossway blog.
The central character, Job himself, is not just everyman, a human being in general. No, he is most emphatically a man who is “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). The narrator tells us this in the first verse and God says it twice more (Job 1:8; 2:3). That is to say, Job is a believer walking through life with a clear conscience. The book of Job is—to quote the title of a book that first helped me get into studying Job—about how God treats his friends. It is about the struggles of a suffering and yet innocent believer.
How should we understand Job’s comforters? “Much of what they say seems to make a lot of sense,” but God rejects their words in the end.
When we read their speeches we need to think carefully. Sometimes they say things that are true but that don’t fit Job. They accuse him of being an unforgiven sinner, and he isn’t. Most seriously, there is no place in their thinking for innocent suffering (e.g., Job 4:7), which means that, in the end, there is no place in their theology for the cross of Christ.
