Job 42:7-17

The Epilogue to Job ...

After the LORD had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, "I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has. So now take seven bulls and seven rams and go to my servant Job and sacrifice a burnt offering for yourselves. My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly. You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has." So Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite did what the LORD told them; and the LORD accepted Job's prayer.

After Job had prayed for his friends, the LORD made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before. All his brothers and sisters and everyone who had known him before came and ate with him in his house. They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the LORD had brought upon him, and each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold ring.

The LORD blessed the latter part of Job's life more than the first. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys. And he also had seven sons and three daughters. The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah and the third Keren-Happuch. Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job's daughters, and their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers.

After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. And so he died, old and full of years.

And so after all the turmoil and shouting and questioning and arguing, we do reach, "and they lived happily ever after ..."

Did Job know he was on the center stage in a spiritual battle described in Job 1-2?

We don't know.

If he did know, he didn't appear to make any comment about it. If he did know, God's "answer" of I am the Creator and you are not was enough for Job.

And so what if Job never knew about the spiritual battle?

God showing up was enough.

Each of us faces struggles in life. In my humanity, I know I have sometimes, often times, asked WHY?

Yancey in his book, Disappointment with God suggested getting an answer to the WHY question might not actually help us because God's perspective is so much larger than ours.

And so our WHY question is washed away when we sense we are not alone. God "showing up" through Jesus. God "showing up" by the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. God "showing up" when we are loved by family and friends. And indeed, God "shows up" in the kindness of strangers.

Is the story of Job true?

It is definitely true in the existential sense that all of us struggle with suffering and that we can argue ourselves into knots trying to explain it to ourselves and each other.

It is definitely true in that God "showing up" makes all the difference in the world.

But was the story "literally" true?

Will we meet Job in the afterlife?

If Job is a moral story than Job may or may not be a literal person. He could be a stand-in everyman for all who have faced suffering. The power of this tale doesn't rest on Job existing as is.

But, if Job was a literal person, did the story happen as literally described?

Job as a book has literary style. It is Hebrew poetry.

We do not talk to our friends in poetry. We talk in prose. We can reflect on life in poetry.

And so perhaps Job was a real man who suffered and his story was memorialized in the poetry of this book.

Another hint of "editing" or "stylizing" in Job was the speeches of Elihu.

Job was visited by his three friends and Job prayed for them.

As a side point, isn't it interesting how in life we go to comfort the sufferer and the sufferer winds up comforting the comforters?

But back to the idea of literary forms... Elihu isn't mentioned as one of the three friends yet he spoke in chapters 32-37 in pretty strong terms!

He was younger than the other three and held back until the end.

Yet, he isn't mentioned in any other way with the three friends.

Was he there all along and omitted in the friends list? Maybe he wasn't really close at all?

Or perhaps those chapters were added later?

Elihu's comments do have elements in common with God's speech at the very end. Maybe it was added by the editors of Job to foreshadow what God would say?

Don't know.

But whether Job's story is more or less as it was in here, underwent some editing or was a moral tale, I think the message stands regardless: suffering is real and our only comfort is having God show up not so much to explain it but to show us he cares for us as individuals.

"God with us" ... Immanuel = Heb. God with us. Jesus the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Lord, thank you that you invite me to bring my complaints to you. You hear my prayers. Thank you that you were not content to allow the world to continue in its course and so sent Abraham, Moses, the Prophets and most significantly Jesus. Though things seem lost now, you are at work restoring. Help me to receive that restoration and be an agent of it. Amen.