Half full or half empty? It all depends on whether you’re pouring something in or drinking it up.
To coin a word, here’s the dominant question in the book of Job: Is the problem of evil, by merely human wisdom, figure-outable? The secularist might think Job was a pretty good man with a singularly awful stretch of bad luck. The naturalist would say it’s a waste of time to even pose the question because there’s no sense or morality in the universe. Others might posit an unjust or unloving deity, similar to the pagan gods of the ancients. Job’s friends halt between two opinions. He might be a good man who has fallen into sin and is being judged for it. Or he might be a religious hypocrite who’s been living a lie for years, but finally his deserved doom has come. Job pleads another view. Is it possible that, while not sinless by any means, the severe troubles in his life are not God’s judgment but His discipline? Job begins and ends this speech with a complaint about the way his friends are treating him. “As for me, is my complaint against man? And if it were, why should I not be impatient? Look at me and be astonished; put your hand over your mouth” (Job 21:4-5). At the end, he concludes, “How then can you comfort me with empty words, since falsehood remains in your answers?” (v 34). Instead of comfort, there’s confusion, empty words rather than empathy. But more, Job believes they’ve misread the lives of wicked men (vv 7-21). Faithful men don’t always prosper (as Job believes is his case), and faithless men aren’t always quickly dispatched. Life isn’t explained by a simple formula. Two millennia before Paul penned Romans 11:33, Job also observed, “He does great things past finding out” (9:10). That can be both frustrating and exciting, but the world doesn’t run according to our plans!