“In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.” Job 1:22
The book of Job is a difficult book. Beyond the profound loss and the struggle to understand hard circumstances in life, it presents a situation where God sovereignly permits all of what Job experiences.
That is challenging to say the least.
It’s not simply that Satan is to blame for all that happens to Job. Job doesn’t allow for that cop-out response.
And the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?”
Challenging to modern, hopeful, humanistic, man-centered ideas about God. How dare God allow this? How dare he subject Job to these unfair attacks? How dare God be God?
I heard someone profess just the other day, “God is a gentleman.” He never forces His will on anyone. I suppose Job would have an opinion on that subject. But yet without sin.
I don’t think Job lets us have such meager ideas without a few (or a lot of) challenges to this errant notion.
So how do we solve this problem?
That’s one of life’s biggest, perhaps the BIGGEST questions there is.
That’s a question we all do well to struggle with, seriously, soberly and unrelentingly until we see God for who He says He is.
No simple, sweet, unobjectionable, “God’s our friend” sort of answers will suffice. Knowing God means not being satisfied with neat little bumper sticker platitudes about Him who commands every molecule in all of time to His own purpose.
He’s not a gentleman.
He is God.
It’s quite a serious error to confuse human categories as if God somehow conforms to our expectations. He does not, won’t and can’t if He is truly God. I believe He is exactly how the whole of His Scriptures reveal Him and that is both a comfort and a terror. Jesus is His Son and he’s not the kinder of the two. They are One God so there’s no wriggling out of the problem that way either.
There’s a solution. It involves knowing God’s solution to human depravity. It requires both His Grace and His just justice and both of these tax our whole mind in conformity to Him.
If all we know of God is His love…
OR
If all we know of God is His Justice…
THEN
we know precisely half of what we ought to know.
God’s Love AND His Justice go together all the time. This makes what Jesus has done all the more important and He doesn’t leave important things up to broken, depraved and incapable souls to figure out.
This is a job only for the God of Job. It would be one of the best resolutions this year to get to know Him as He has revealed Himself to us. The whole God. Not just the comfortable ideas that permeate our current Americanized theology.
Why This Series Matters: Job as a Shadow of the Savior
In this series, Shadows of the Savior: Discovering Christ in the Book of Job, we will explore the book chapter by chapter and theme by theme, seeing how Job positively prefigures Christ—the ultimate innocent Sufferer who endured far greater trials under the Father’s sovereign plan for our redemption. Job’s undeserved afflictions, his cry for a mediator, his vindication, and his restoration all point forward to Jesus, the true and greater Job, who suffered perfectly without sin to secure our salvation.
Yet this prefiguring is positive but not complete or identical. While Job mirrors Christ in many profound ways, important discontinuities exist to highlight Christ’s superiority. Job is chastised (though gently) by God for his complaints and limited understanding of the divine purposes (Job 38–42), whereas Christ, in perfect obedience, never sins, never complains against the Father, and never requires correction for misunderstanding the plan (Hebrews 4:15; John 8:29; Isaiah 53:9). Job’s restoration is double but earthly and temporary; Christ’s exaltation is eternal and cosmic (Philippians 2:9–11). These distinctions remind us that Job is a true shadow—illuminating but not exhausting the reality fulfilled in Jesus.
What to Expect in the Series
We’ll begin with summaries of key chapters (starting with 6–8), move to an overview of the full book, assess its core message on suffering and sovereignty, explore dating debates and their implications for Messianic shadows, address interpretive strengths and weaknesses, and finally apply New Testament typology to see Job meeting Jesus.
Through it all, the goal is to wrestle honestly with the sovereign God of Job—and to find deeper comfort and awe in the sovereign God revealed in Christ, who turned the greatest suffering into the greatest victory.
Soli Deo Gloria
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