You will prepare and submit a term paper on Jobs Suffering Critique. Your paper should be a minimum of 1250 words in length. Job’s righteousness was not to be taken by Satan, who was always on the job of vindicating Job and God. The Book of Job tells the story of Job’s struggle with the numerous sufferings that Satan is allowed to bring upon him to see if his righteous character would vanish with his prosperity and health. The first few chapters describe how Satan directly tries to fool Job to make him believe that God has been unkind and unjustified to him. When these attempts of Satan fail to move Job, to break his faith in God’s justice, Satan strikes down Job’s family, cattle, wealth, and also brings down illnesses of all kinds upon him. All this in an attempt to convince Job that God has brought a curse upon him because of his sin.
As Satan begins to suffer Job, The Book of Job now reveals the discussions between Job and his three friends: Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar, who too are kings of their times. As his friends too, try to make him believe the false theology of Satan that is based on the rubric of retribution/recompense, Chapter 3 onwards refers to these three friends of Job while Satan is now stopping from directly accusing and suffering Job. As Job too begins to lament his condition and question God’s justice towards him, in the later chapters, Elihu tries to make Job see the sense in accepting the fact that God’s grace is supreme and omnipotent. After the discussions with Elihu, God himself speaks to Job to clear his doubts, but when standing before God, Job realizes that he cannot muster enough courage to speak before God in the foolish manner that he had before. When Job readily accepts God’s supremacy and grace being present irrespective of his righteousness or not, God restores his prosperous life and proves to Satan that a Job is indeed a righteous man.
Job was a wealthy and kind Egyptian king whom Satan threatens to destroy with God’s permission as Satan argues with God that Job was righteous and feared God for his selfish motives.
“There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job. and that man was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil.” (Job 1:1).
