Is God a Monster or a Savior? Examining Job – the Ultimate Rorschach Test

By Camille French

When I was in eighth grade, I liked to get coffee with my friends. It was so grown-up. Sure, our parents drove us there and picked us up, some of us worried about staining our braces, and the rest of us could barely sip anything stronger than orange juice. But this was the middle-school version of playing dress-up. We would sip our heavily sugared coffee and talk about the biggest and grandest things we could. In our make-believe world of adulthood, we could talk about life, love, our dreams–things that seemed to belong to a higher realm. We could try on the costumes of older, wiser people to see if they fit.

One day my friend Kara and I talked about fate. I knew her because of tragedy. Her parents, one Korean and one Pakistani, abandoned her before she was six months old. Eventually a sweet, blonde family adopted her and introduced her to the Fourth of July, birthday cake, and drinking coffee till your teeth turn yellow. The American way. She was telling me about how random her life feels—that if there was some cosmic author who planned her life, that author must be insane.

As she spoke, I couldn’t get a certain story out of my mind.

“Have you read the book of Job? It’s in the Bible.”

She rolled her eyes and laughed. “No, but let me guess. God plans for someone to live a long, happy life. Then they follow all the rules and God gives them a million kids. Something like that.”

“Actually, the book starts with God and Satan gambling over someone’s life.”

I started reading the first chapter out loud to her, but when I got to the part where God hands control of Job’s life over to Satan, Kara snatched the phone from my hand.

“There is no way that’s in the Bible.” She skimmed the little words on my iPhone screen. Her voice faded out when she hit the line, “The fire of God fell from heaven and burned…and consumed them, and I alone have escaped to tell you.”

“This is my author?” she whispered, “Who is he? And who is this character–God?”

 —–

The book of Job is shocking from the first chapter and continues to confuse until the very end. The middle of the book is full of rich, deeply personal poetry in which Job questions God, his friends try to explain the world away, and God appears in a whirlwind. There is weeping, groaning, laughing, and fighting.  But the middle of the book is wildly different from the rest. The opening and closing parts are where, as Joan Acocella puts it, “God bargains with Job’s life and then, at the end, pays him off.”  There are so many things to wrestle with in the book of Job. We could look at the poetry, the story, the morality—the possibilities are endless. But we always get caught on the character that complicates everything: God.

Apparently God and Satan have routine conversations. God makes bets with Satan. Satan has to ask for God’s permission to do anything. God allows Job to suffer because he is innocent. Then he appears in a whirlwind and demonstrates his power with thunder and sarcasm. God is not what we expect.

David Hume famously said, “Is he  (God) willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”

The book of Job makes it clear that God is all-powerful. In fact, in the opening scene, Satan appears be an officer of God. The HarperCollins Study Bible describes him as a sort of CIA agent.

Now the story gets difficult. If God is all-powerful, he must have a hand in all the evil that happens to Job and the rest of us. Job’s children were killed. His wealth was stolen. Our hearts are broken. Our loved ones are lost. All of these things have God’s permission-slip.

John Larrimore (author of The Book of Job: a Biography) summarized a popular belief by rabbi Robert Rubenstein that the death of Job’s children “should put us in mind of the frequency of divine infanticide in the Bible. The track record of the God of the Jews is, in fact, too awful to contemplate. Rubenstein imagines that a modern-day comforter might counsel Job to admit to guilt, even though he was innocent. Lie, or the truth will out, that God is a demon—if he exists at all.”

 —–

Now let’s meet someone else. Nate Saint was a young man when he and his missionary friends were brutally murdered by the tribe they were trying to help. His son Steve Saint was only five when the radio connection to his dad suddenly and finally shut off. Fifty years later, Steve says that he still feels the heartache of losing his father. But instead of seeking revenge or even leaving, he and his family moved in with the murderous Waodani tribe. He was even adopted by a tribe leader. But when he was asked about that terrible day, I was shocked by his answer. He told CBN News, “What the Waodani meant for evil, God used for good, given the chance to rewrite the story, I would not be willing to change it.” He goes on to say that he believes that God planned for his family to die.

“There are too many factors that all had to work together to have allowed the events to happen as they did. Too many for me to believe it was just chance. I know that might offend some. But I don’t think what happened to my dad and his four friends caught God by surprise.”

Look at these two men, Steve Saint and Richard Rubenstein. Both agree that God is actively allowing our sorrows. One concludes that God is a demon. The other concludes that he is a savior.

We see this exact argument between Job and his wife in chapter two.

“So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself while he sat in the ashes. Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.” But he said to her, You speak as one of the foolish women would speak.”

“Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?”

 —–

At the end of the book, God’s voice booms out of a storm. “Who is this that obscures my plans with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone—while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God] shouted for joy?”

Who is this? Where were we?

Job answered these questions by saying, “I know that you can do all things; no purpose of yours can be thwarted. You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.”

Job, Kara, you, me–we are all just kids playing dress up, pretending to understand things too big for us.

Camille French is a sixteen year old student who lives in Middle Tennessee.