Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Final thought on Job

I find it very interesting that chapter 4 contained the demonic encounter which influenced the perspective of his 3 friends. Their argument was essentially a karma theory - bad things happen to bad people. The friends took the karma theory one step further to say that God does bad things to bad people and only bad things to bad people. If bad things happen to someone, then that person is bad. This would put the entire blame for everything that happened to Job (or anyone else) on God. It would also skew righteousness as one would look to the presence of bad things happening for validity of one's way of life.

Rather, in Job 1-2, we find that it was Satan that did those awful things to Job, not God. Yet, if we accept the Job 4 encounter as coming from Satan, then he convinced Job's 3 friends that God (or karma) was to blame, rather than Satan. The rest of Job stands as a refutation of this belief.

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