Something curious about the story of Job is that the supposed cause of all his troubles is a wager between God and Satan about whether Job will remain faithful if he suffers. What’s striking is that this crucial “behind the scenes” detail is never revealed to Job. He lives and suffers without access to the explanation the reader is given.
Personally, I don’t read this story as strict history (I don’t believe God is so cavalier with our lives), but rather as a kind of holy thought experiment—a way of exploring questions about God’s interaction with us and the problem of evil. However we understand the story, it highlights our ignorance of the causes behind what we experience. So much of what happens to us—both apparently good and deeply painful—remains a mystery.
So if a particular circumstance, especially a hard or tragic one, unfolds for reasons unknown to me, what am I to do? And perhaps most pressing: how do I think about God’s role, or God’s will, in these matters?
One option is to believe that everything is happening exactly as God intends, directs, and causes. From this view, because God is good, we should trust that there is a good, divine reason for every experience. Certainly, some scriptures can be read as supporting this.
But as Job himself protests, that would make God the author of outrageously awful things. Are we then required to believe these occurrences are somehow good and not evil? At some point, this kind of suspension of our moral sense and reason becomes nearly impossible—especially when an event looks very much like what God says God abhors.
Can God denounce murder on one hand and then commit murder on the other for some hidden, divine purpose? Job refuses that explanation, even as his friends insist that God has killed his children because of some sin in Job’s life.
At the end of the story, God appears—not to accuse Job of wrongdoing—but to ask him a series of questions that Job cannot answer. What are we meant to conclude from this? At the very least, that there is much we do not know. So how do we live with such profound ignorance?
I want to suggest that we do not have to assume God is the author, cause, or even the “permitter” of everything that happens in the world. The Redeemer of all things is not working against himself. God is undoing and eradicating a real corruption that does not come from his goodness. Whatever, or whoever, lies behind specific evil events in our lives is not necessarily God.
Instead, we can trust that a good will of God is present in every moment, even if much of what shapes our experience in that moment is not of God. Each “now” may be complex: a real manifestation of grace and holy Presence intertwined with the real presence of what is not God and not God’s doing.
If that is true, then the challenge of living in communion with God is to learn to notice how God is coming to us no matter what else is happening.
We do not have to attribute each horrific event to the inscrutable love of God, as if there were only God and nothing else at work. God is ultimately over all, but Scripture itself testifies that evil spiritual forces are active in ways that do not reflect God’s will.
If our present experience is a mixture of good and evil, wheat and tares, then the spiritual path is to learn to seek and cling to the good in the field of this world. We don’t need to twist ourselves into knots trying to imagine that some wretched situation is actually good. Instead, we can hold fast to the good that still exists—even in a moment warped by evil—and meet God there.