Job and the Problem of Evil

The book of Job deals with the problem of evil, but a key part of the story is often missed. Something important happened that Job did not know about. He had no idea that the evil one was involved in his troubles.

The action began when Satan went into the presence of God and demanded the right to get stuck into Job. Prior to the cross, Satan had the right to go into the presence of God and make accusations against the people on earth. This gave him the right to do evil in the world. When Jesus died, rose and ascended into heaven, the devil lost this right.

Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven… Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb (Rev 12:7-11).

The blood of Jesus dealt with sin, so the accuser lost his privileges in heaven, and could only work on earth by deception.

In Job’s time, the devil still had a right to enter heaven. He left the presence of God to work his evil on earth.

• Fire came down from heavens and destroyed his flocks of sheep.
• The Sabeans attacked and stole all his oxen and donkeys.
• The Chaldeans attacked and carried off all his camels.
• A wind blew from the dessert and destroyed the house of his youngest son. His children, who were in the house, were also killed.

These events seemed to be natural disasters, so insurance companies would call them Acts of God. However, we know from Job 1 that they were the works of the evil one and his spiritual forces.

When Job continued to honour God, the devil decided on a second attack. He afflicted Job with boils. A doctor would say that Job had caught an infection, because he was run down by his grief, but we know something different was going on. The sickness was a direct attack by an angry devil.

Job’s comforters were a miserable lot. Each had a different perspective, but they all argued that he was suffering because he had sinned. Job refused to accept that diagnosis. He knew he could trust God, so he knew that God did not bring evil on him. His troubles were not an Act of God.

Job also knew that he had not sinned. If he had sinned, he would not be justified in complaining about his troubles, because he would have brought them on himself, but he was sure that he had not sinned.

This left Job with a dilemma. He had clearly experienced great evil. He refused to blame God, but he could not see that he was at fault, either. From his perfective there did not seem to be another alternative.

Job’s frinds kept hammering away at Jobs’ failings, but the accusation fell on deaf ears. If he lived today, his friends would have taken the opposite approach and blamed God. They would have claimed that either God is not good, is not all-powerful, or does not exist, but Job’s friends were better than this.

The book of Job ends with God answering him out of a storm. The usual interpretation is that when Job heard God speak, he learned to worship and lost interested in understanding the causes of evil.

This interpretation misses something important. In Job 40:15, God tells Job to look at the Behemoth hiding in the waters.

Look at Behemoth,
which I made along with you.

God then warns that he is dreadful and frightening. The word “behemoth” is a Hebrew word that describes a powerful beast. We know from Daniel 7 that a beast coming out of the sea represents a powerful political empire. Revelation describes a Terrible Beast, which is the greatest powerful evil empire to ever appear on earth.

God was explaining to Job that part of his troubles were the result of the activities of evil political power. The camels were stolen by the Chaldeans, the forerunners of the Babylonian Empire. Job had encountered a fledgling evil empire and the result was nasty. His oxen were killed by the Sabaens. They were a powerful empire established in the Arabian peninsular, in what is now Yemen. They had become rich through political and military power.

God was explaining that the evil that affects us all is often caused by the misuse of political power. This is a warning to God’s people. The presence of the Beast in the book of Revelation means that political power will always be a threat to the Kingdom of God.

After describing the behemoth, God asked Job what he knew about Leviathan.

Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook
or tie down its tongue with a rope (Job 41:1)?

The commentators assume that Leviathan is a great sea creature. This is wrong, because it makes the climax of the book of Job irrelevant to its major theme. God explains that Leviathan is too strong for humans to subdue. He has powerful armour and does great evil. Nothing on earth can match his power and all other creatures are afraid of him. The devil is the only creature that fits this description.

God was giving Job a description of the devil’s power in language that someone who did not know about the spiritual world could understand. Job probably did not grasp this, but God was answering his questions about the nature of evil. Job 40,41 explains to Job what we already know from Job 1,2, that Job’s troubles was not caused by God or his own sin. Evil is always caused by the evil one and his evil forces.