Orders will be processed after the Christmas Holiday.

Podcast: How to Endure Inexplicable Suffering (Eric Ortlund)

January 10, 2022 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Seasons of Suffering

In today's episode, Eric Ortlund looks at the example of Job and how, as Christians, we should respond when we face a Job-like ordeal—suffering that is so painful, so inexplicable, so seemingly pointless that we’re tempted to curse God.

Suffering Wisely and Well

Suffering Wisely and Well

Eric Ortlund

In Suffering Wisely and Well, Eric Ortlund explores different types of trials throughout Scripture, particularly the story of Job, revealing the spiritual purpose for pain and reassuring readers with God’s promise of restoration.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:00 - Suffering Wisely

Matt Tully
Eric, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Eric Ortlund
Thank you very much for having me. I’m glad to be here.

Matt Tully
The title of your book is Suffering Wisely and Well. Presumably, you picked those two words—wisely and well—intentionally. I think most of us, when we think about suffering, we have a sense for what it would mean to suffer well. That’s kind of a common idea and phrase. It’s hard to do, but it’s something that we understand. I wonder if the idea of suffering wisely is a bit more foreign and a bit less obvious to us. What do you mean when you say we need to suffer wisely? What might that entail?

Eric Ortlund
The title for the book is meant to be interesting and meant to grab attention, and it’s meant to be a setup for the book of Job, which is the thing I deeply, deeply wanted to talk about. When I started teaching I knew nothing about Job and I had to start teaching it. I expected the book to be helpful; I did not expect it to be so profoundly pastorally relevant to so many people. We don’t preach on it very much. I’ve never heard a sermon series on Job. I don’t know if you have, but it just doesn’t seem to be in the water in our church culture.

Matt Tully
Why do you think that is?

Eric Ortlund
I think Job is just the most difficult book in the Old Testament to interpret. It is so long. The debate between Job and his friends goes nowhere. I find it exhausting to read. By the time it’s not even halfway done I just want them to be quiet and I want God to talk. It is difficult to interpret what God says. I think what God says is clear, and I think it was clear to Job, but it’s not easy to make sense out of why it’s so meaning to Job, what God says at the end of the book. So, it’s really not easy. One of the things that surprised me that I did not see until I had to teach the book—and then I would talk with people about it afterwards and be connecting and resonating with them in all kinds of ways and they didn’t know the book well, so there was this dawning surprise for them—was that the book of Job complicates our usual explanations for why we suffer in Western twenty-first century evangelical culture. I think when suffering happens we tend to explain that in terms of you’ve sinned some way or God is growing you spiritually. Both of those explanations are utterly biblical and so helpful and relevant and we should absolutely remember them. But the book of Job explores profound suffering, and it had nothing to do with any sin in Job’s life. Not even the Accuser can find anything to accuse Job of. If there had been something in Job that could have explained the suffering, the Accuser would have found it. He doesn’t. Strange as it might sound, I don’t think Job is trying to grow Job spiritually, and I’m happy to talk about that more if you would like. I wanted to call it Suffering Wisely and Well because part of the reason everything looks different after I read the book of Job is it opens up this other category of sometimes God allows really terrible pain in our lives, and he’s not smacking us or mad at us or letting our past come back to haunt us, and he’s not trying to teach us a lesson. Although it doesn’t resolve everything, there’s an odd comfort to knowing that God is not trying to grow me up at all, whatever else is going on. I was teaching in Canada once and a student raised their hand and said, My mother is a Job. This is my mother’s story. I said how often did your mother’s Christian friends say, You’re either doing something wrong, and as soon as you stop doing that wrong thing the pain will stop; or, God is trying to teach you something? He said, Oh yeah. They told her that all the time. I asked if that was what it was. He thought for a moment, and then he said, No. That just wasn’t it*. He knew the normal explanations—which are perfectly valid and biblical on their own—didn’t apply, but he didn’t have that other third category. If we can suffer both well and more wisely, on the basis of the book of Job, that will be a good thing.

Matt Tully
I want to get into that core idea that you’re drawing out in this book about the book of Job and how it applies to our suffering, that there is this third category of suffering that, in a certain sense, doesn’t have a clear purpose in our lives. It’s just happening. We’ll get into why God would allow that to happen, but first I want to ask about that second category. I think for many of us Christians, it is more in the air today that it can be very unhelpful to just point to someone’s sin and say, You must have done something wrong. We see that clearly condemned in the book of Job, so we’re quick to try to avoid that. I actually want to come back to that in a minute because you do make a point of saying that that sometimes is what’s going on in our lives. But why would that second category—the idea of God growing us in some way—why is that not always an option? I guess our normal assumption would be that even if I don’t understand, there is a sense in which all suffering is meant to grow me in my faith in God and grow me in my trust of who he is. So, what are you saying there?

Eric Ortlund
Thank you for that question. Doubtless, God is at work all the time to grow us in beautiful ways. Through Job’s ordeal he definitely comes to a deeper knowledge of God, a deeper intimacy with God, and satisfaction and comfort in him. Almost the last thing he says is, “Now my eye sees you.” He’s just taken up in God. What I mean more is that the passages in Romans 5 and James 1 that list different fruits of the Spirit and Christian virtues that suffering gives us, like endurance and perseverance and character and what not, none of those apply in a Job-like ordeal. There are two reasons why they just do not apply when you’re in Job’s story and you’re living his story out in some significant way. The first is that Job is already a mature believer. The first verse in the book uses Old Testament wisdom language to talk about Christian maturity—not sinlessness; Job will be the first to admit that he still needs forgiveness—but there’s no level of immaturity in Job where sin is still the dominant pattern, where he’s lacking some virtue that God needs to grow him up in. He already has it. Secondly, the whole terms of the ordeal are, Does Job love God for God, or for some reason secondary to God. This is the old covenant, so God’s covenant relationship with his people is external and financial and agricultural and big families and so on. So, that’s what Job loses. But the terms of the ordeal are if God puts Job in a position where he has every earthly reason to give up on God, where the only reason he has to stay loyal to God is God and God himself because it’s costing him everything else, will Job stay with God or not? I think that’s spiritually and pastorally significant in all kinds of ways, just hugely significant. If Job were to benefit spiritually from his ordeal in some way, if he were a more mature Christian, if all the virtues of character, hope, faith, and love were more his by the end of that ordeal, then the accuser could always turn around and say, Well, of course Job says he loves you. Look at the spiritual virtues that he’s benefiting from. We are happier when we have those fruits of the Spirit more in our lives. It makes our life better. Job cannot benefit from his ordeal in any way whatsoever except a deeper intimacy with God. If Job gets any other benefit out of it, the Accuse can always turn around and say, He says he loves you, but what he really loves is this thing over here. I remember I was at a church once talking about psalms of lament, which is close to the book of Job but not the same thing, and a person raised their hand and said, That’s what God let happen to me. That happened to me, and I didn’t have a category for it. But now I get what that is and what God wants for me. So, I feel an urgency about this because God is going to be baptizing people in Job-like ordeals. They may not know what it is, but the peculiar quality of the Job-like ordeal is one in which you’re not going to benefit from it in any way except the Lord Jesus is going to be all-sufficient for you in a way he never was before.

Matt Tully
You made a comment there that this is something for which we don’t have a category for this sort of explanation, so to speak, for our suffering. And yet, you also note in the book, and I think we all intuitively have a sense for this, that Job’s story of suffering—severe and yet unexplained and seemingly pointless—is quite common. We’ve all experienced it, or we will at some point, and we know people who have, so why is it that, although this is a common experience for humanity, we nevertheless (as Christians) don’t have a category for it?

Eric Ortlund
I really like how you described that Job-like ordeal. In the first chapter of the book I’m trying to distinguish in categories different kinds of suffering like suffering for sin or persecuted for your faith, or something like that. The way I want to distinguish this peculiar chapter in our lives that God sometimes allows is that the suffering is extreme—you can’t bear it—and it’s inexplicable. It just does not make sense, and you don’t seem to be getting anything out of it. So, that’s exactly the right way to categorize it. Why don’t we know about it? I’m not sure. I think the difficulty of the book of Job and our ignorance of it is probably part of it. Also, it is just a really difficult, profound thing to talk about. The suffering in order to grow spiritually, that kind of makes sense intuitively. When I was young I would try to do push-ups, and they hurt! They were supposed to. That’s how you’re building your shoulders. That makes sense.

Matt Tully
You’re saying they don’t hurt anymore?

Eric Ortlund
I’m saying that I’ve given up by now. I just don’t do them at all. I’m too old! To suffer “uselessly.” When I say that in the book I put it in quotes because it’s very much not useless; it’s the salvation of our souls. God is fitting us for eternity in this. But to suffer where we get nothing out of it, and in a way it’s never resolved. Job never learned what we learned in chapter 1. He learns by the end that God is not his enemy, and God doesn’t regard him as his enemy, but he never got an explanation. There is something about our minds that rejects that. We don’t like persistent, unresolved, unexplained things in our lives. It’s hard to even think about.

12:24 - Permanent Ignorance

Matt Tully
That was another interesting point that I wanted to dig into. It seems like a big part of our struggle with that kind of suffering is that we want to understand the purpose. We want to understand what God intends and what good is going to come out of that. Yet, you write in your book that an essential element of a Job-like ordeal is permanent ignorance. This might be a bit speculative, but I wonder if you see any connections here: What do you think is God’s goal of putting us through suffering that we can’t understand? Why would he do that? Is there a reason that we could maybe suss out of Scripture for why he hides that understanding from us?

Eric Ortlund
Permanence and ignorance are essential parts of a Job-like ordeal because if Job knows what’s really going on, then the results of the ordeal would be in doubt. The accuser could always say, Yeah, of course Job says that, but you told him what was happening. It has to look to Job like God has turned on him for no reason and out of nowhere. That’s what it has to look like, but that’s not what happens. That’s really helpful in and of itself, that there are times when you’ll be thinking, I treat my kids better than my heavenly Father treats me. How incompetent is he? The book of Job is helping us see how God really is is not how he appears. His heart toward you is unchanged. Why God allows the sense of mystery and Did I make God mad somehow? Why won’t he tell me? What is going on?—that deepens the pain. I think the reason why God allows Job-like ordeals, the reason why he puts us in a position where it really starts to cost us everything to stay a Christian, where we start losing secondary blessings is, he is sealing our souls for eternity. He’s preparing us for heaven. I benefit from being a Christian in ways secondary to and external to the forgiveness of my sins and the gift of eternal life. I have a nice wife and a nice job and nice kids; I would not have those if the Holy Spirit had not been operative in my life for many years. But if I had to bury one of my kids—and this is terrifying. I don’t ask this lightly. This is terrifying to me. Maybe that’s another reason why we don’t know Job so well is because it’s so uncomfortable. But if I had to bury one of my kids, and I show up for church the next Sunday and I’m weeping and I’m in sackcloth, would I be just as enthusiastic about worshiping God for who he is in himself? Or would it come out that really what I liked was the secondary blessings God gave me? If the answer is actually, what Eric really likes—he says he loves God—but what he really likes is the nice life, then I’m going to be bored in heaven. What it means for heaven to be heaven is that all secondary, earthly blessings have fallen away and God is all in all. I’m not going to be married to my wife in heaven; we won’t marry or be given in marriage. She’ll always be special to me, but that’s part of this age. If I have to bury my spouse and all of a sudden I lose all interest in being a Christian, I’m proving what my motives are for being a Christian in the first place. Because God loves us, and because he is happily determined to make us utterly happy—unspeakably happy forever—he will be mostly really generous with secondary blessings. But he reserves the right to temporarily interrupt his policy of generosity and secondary blessings and give us a chance to prove, not theoretically but in sackcloth and ashes, that we really love God for God. If we can’t do that, we’re going to be bored in heaven. The whole point to the eschaton is loving God for himself. What I’m trying to say is that at the end of the day, the book of Job is about the all-sufficiency of knowing Yahweh, to take that beautiful phrase from Philippians 3, and it’s about God working it into our souls. It’s good to say, when your life is going pretty well, I love God more than all the blessings, but occasionally, sooner or later in some way, God will paint us into a corner and give us an opportunity to say it when it’s not theoretical anymore. And he has to. If he loves us, it’s going to happen somehow.

Matt Tully
That is, as you say, such a beautiful vision and that is the hope for which we long for. However, it is scary to think about that because I think we all wonder, How would I respond to that? We can’t really fully know. One other question I had was concerning a passage that came to mind when I thought about this idea of our inherent nature and desire to want to understand. I wonder if you see this here, or if this is a little off base. Going back to Genesis 3 where we see Adam and Eve in this garden that God created, and before them is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The text says that Eve, before she took the fruit, she saw that the fruit was desirable to make one wise; to give her understanding that God, for some reason, didn’t want them to have about good and evil. Have you ever seen a connection there between this desire to understand that God holds back from his people sometimes in something that was going on back in the garden?

Eric Ortlund
That’s a really interesting connection to make. I do think there’s something there. Submitting to permanent ignorance in a Job-like ordeal and telling God, You could ruin my life, and you don’t have to explain yourself to me. I’ll stay loyal to you anyway just because of who you are. That lets God be God. I say at one point in the book that if you—and this is a terrible example, so I won’t use you—but if a drunk driver runs over one of my kids, and they never call or write or apologize or stop drinking or go to AA, I would not remain friends with that person. I would sever that relationship. But if God does not cause—and I want to be clear about that. God did not kill Job’s children. He allowed it and he takes responsibility for it, but he was not the direct cause of Job’s suffering. God is Job’s Shepherd, not his torturer.

Matt Tully
What would you say to the Christian listening who says that’s a distinction without a difference?

Eric Ortlund
I would say the difference is that when God allows something terrible to happen and does not explain himself to you and you stay friends with him anyway, you are showing that you’re treating him like God and not just like another human relationship. I think that’s the difference. It’s only an imperfect analogy, and if any of the dear listeners who are loved of God are listening to this and it’s hard for you to listen to this, please only take it as an analogy. When I talk about going through a Job-like ordeal, I do not mean that our Job-like ordeal will be as intense or extensive as Job’s was. Everything in Job’s life goes wrong. Usually with less heroic saints like me, it’s like one thing that happens—just so that’s clear. And for whatever it’s worth, Job should not have made it to the end of the book. He should have cursed God. There are a number of points where I think, Oh, he’s going to fall over the cliff edge, and he doesn’t. There are a couple of points where Job himself seems to be surprised by the things he is saying. As we wonder about what we would say if we were in that position, and it’s not bad for us to be scared about that, God the Holy Spirit himself is going to be enabling us to stay a Christian. So, when I talk about a Job-like ordeal, please keep that in mind. But yes, I think there is a connection to letting God be God, which means we won’t know everything.

20:24 - Suffering and the Sovereignty of God

Matt Tully
As I’ve thought about the book of Job, and when reading your book in particular, do you think that Christians who have a robust belief and trust in the sovereignty of God, who would read the book of Job and never once feel like they would be tempted to say God is not in control and instead say, No, I know God is in control over my suffering—could it be uniquely difficult, or could there be a unique temptation for people in that position too, because we believe God is in control, we also have this sense that there must be a purpose for this. So, we want to know what that purpose is. Do you know what I’m asking, and do you ever sense that among yourself or others?

Eric Ortlund
Absolutely. I think God has put something in the human mind that we want to understand what’s going on around us. That’s part of being in his image. It’s not bad in itself. I do think a Job-like ordeal has a purpose; he’s saving our souls. It just doesn’t have an immediate sort of payoff—a quick, easy resolution. Job gets an answer that satisfies him, but he doesn’t get an explanation, and he never does. In the book I say “purposeless suffering” (in quotations) because it’s not really purposeless. And yes, Job retains a very strong doctrine of God’s sovereignty. In fact, the only doctrine he gives up is God’s goodness. He continues to believe everything he used to about God, except that he’s not safe with this person anymore. And yes, if you have a healthy and developed view of God’s fatherly providence over the minuscule details of your life, it can be easier for a Job-like ordeal can hurt more because you’re convinced that there must be a reason and why isn’t God telling me.

Matt Tully
That is probably one of the dominant reasons why some people who would reject an all-encompassing doctrine of God’s sovereignty or good providence would do that. They would say, I just can’t believe in a God who would allow so much terrible suffering. It’s easier for me to say that God is in control of the big things, but there are certain things that happen that he doesn’t desire and that he hasn’t caused in any real sense and that are kind of beyond his power.

Eric Ortlund
I’ve had friends say that to me. I do disagree with that biblically and theologically. There are good reasons against that. I feel compassion for people who say that because they really are struggling. I think behind that question is, Am I utterly, absolutely, deeply safe with God all the time no matter what? No matter what. That can be a hard question to answer. I’m a dad, so these are the analogies I tend to think of, but we’ve all been wrestling with our kids and then we accidentally bonk them on the head or something. They cry and we say I’m sorry. Your kid still wrestles with you, but there’s just always that sense of, Oh, I don’t want things to get too rough, and it gets way, way, way too rough in the book of Job. Am I deeply safe with God? Who will allow those kinds of things to happen to me? I never want to push someone who, through that abstract theological question, is actually in a way saying, I’m not utterly safe with God. I’d rather be in the hands of fate or chance or randomness or the devil. I would want to try to find a way to say, You are utterly, aboundingly safe, even in the midst of tragedy.

Matt Tully
It’s almost like they would rather believe in a God who is at every turn trying to, in their mind, do us good. Even if his power is limited because of the desire to protect our freedom or what have you, it almost feels safer to have a God who nevertheless is trying to protect us at times vs. a God who willingly, knowingly subjects us to some of the suffering that we face.

Eric Ortlund
Yes, it is. I don’t want to be offensive to any Christians listening to this, but in a way that’s a broken cistern. There’s no real comfort there. To say, My heavenly Father means well, but he just wasn’t that involved in that situation. With my student here on Monday, we were going through David’s census in 2 Samuel 24 and the plague that happens. It’s amazing what David says. It’s a sobering chapter. We talked about why David’s sin is so awful, and God essentially says to him, Tell me how you want the people of God to die? The three options that God lists for David in that chapter will all spell the end for Israel. David begins by asking for forgiveness, and it looks as if God’s, No, you’re not forgiven. Tell me how you want the nation to die. It’s terrifying. It’s famine, war, or plague, and in David’s mind the plague would have come directly from God, so he asks for the plague. He says, Let me fall into the hands of God, not the hands of men, even if God is mad at me. It’s an amazingly faithful thing to do, to say I’d rather be in God’s hands then randomness or the devil. So, I would feel deep sympathy for someone who tried to keep God at arm’s length because they’ve suffered, but there’s no real comfort there.

25:43 - The Danger of Being a Bad Friend

Matt Tully
That is maybe a good segue into another big topic that the book of Job gives us help with, and that is how to be good Christian friends to those who are suffering in a situation like Job’s. I do wonder if you could just broadly answer, What does the story of Job teach us about the danger of being bad friends to those who are suffering?

Eric Ortlund
For all the complexities and difficulties of the book of Job, this is pretty easy. And actually, I think the book of Job really worries about this. This seems to be on the agenda for a lot of the book. There are so many reasons not to be a bad friend and blame someone and say, There must have been something that you did. The first is, you’re going to torture someone that God is incredibly proud of. Job deeply loves God. He is resigned to the death of children, but the fact that God and he are not friends, that drives him up the wall. It’s all he talks about. He never once asks for his blessing. Imagine how it felt for him to be told by trusted friends, God is so mad at you, and he has good reason for it. That would have broken him inside. All Job wants is to be friends with God again. The second reason is you will be unintentionally advancing the devil’s agenda for that person. The reason I say that is if Job gives into the friend’s advice and invents a sin to confess so that God can restore him and give the blessed life back, then Job is proving that he values a blessed life more than integrity with God, which is what the devil was trying to prove. So, telling people they might have sinned—you might be playing into the devil’s hands with them. The third reason is God will get really mad at you. God says, My anger burns against Job’s three friends. They have to do seven sacrifices. One of the reasons you are safe with God is that when God allows—he does not cause—but when he does allow something really terrible and other Christians try to help and they just torture you, God really cares about that. That matters to him. There is coming a time when he will publicly vindicate you, because you really matter to him. Job has to do seven sacrifices. Normally, only one is required. I think that means God is really angry over what the friends have done. So, there is a time to say, Is this God’s gentle way? Have you been leading a double life? There’s a time to say that, but we have to be very careful with heroes. There are a lot of heroes listening to this podcast right now who don’t think that they are and they don’t know that they are. But they are heroes, for the simple reason that they’re not giving up on God. That’s how you qualify for heroic Job-like faith in the book of Job. That’s it! God sets the bar pretty low. If I can put it this way, I think that’s heroic in God’s eyes, and God really cares when other people torture people that he thinks are heroes.

Matt Tully
Why do you think it is that we’re so often, even as Christians and with seemingly good intentions, we can do and say unhelpful things in trying to explain the suffering of others around us? Why is that such a common temptation that I think we all have felt that struggle with?

Eric Ortlund
The answer is very simple: I am a Pharisee. You know the mantra of Alcoholics Anonymous—My name is Eric, . . . . * So, my name is Eric, and I am a recovering Pharisee. I’ve had a good ten seconds, and then I revert back to Pharisaism. I’m being a little facetious when I say that. There’s more than one way to approach that very important question. One way to do it is this: Job has a theology of grace. He says, The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away. He doesn’t see the rewards for obedience as wages that he is owed; he sees it as a gift. The friends do not see it that way. The friends see the blessed life that comes from obedience—and obedience does give blessing. You really do reap what you sow, and the book of Job doesn’t deny that. The friends see those blessings—the thing that you reap when you sow obedience—as something God has to give you that you can enjoy on your own and be proud about. They tend to have a more distant God, and I think they have a Pelagian view of repentance. The friend’s view of repentance is not the prodigal throwing himself on his face and saying, I don’t deserve anything from you. I get the sense from the friends that they think of repentance as you clean yourself up and work your way back into God’s favor, and God recognizes that and gives you something that is your right and that you are owed. Against that background, the thought that God might take away their blessed life for no reason—even when they’ve done nothing wrong—is deeply threatening and terrifying to them. The friends are thinking, Do you mean I could serve God so scrupulously and it would all be for nothing? God would just take it away? Why am I in a relationship with God at all in the first place? They tend to speak of the rewards for obedience as payment, and they don’t give any indication that they’re interested in God outside of that. The more the talk, the less they talk about God. They just talk about how blessed it is to be obedient—the blessings of righteousness. There’s a lot going on in your question. I think the temptation to be a friend of Job is the legalistic bent of our hearts. It’s tempting to blame a Job because it’s a way to insulate yourself from the pain. The friends say You must have done something to deserve it because if they haven’t done anything to deserve it, then Job’s tragedy will never happen to them. On the other hand, if Job might suffer for no reason, then what happens to Job might happen to them, and that is scary.

31:42 - The Temptation to Comfort Ourselves When Another Suffers

Matt Tully
That’s another point that you draw out that I really wanted to dig into a little bit. You have this fascinating quote where you write, “The temptation to comfort ourselves is so sneaky that we
must never stop asking ourselves, when talking with a suffering friend, ‘The thing I’m about to say—who am I trying to make feel better? My friend or myself?’” Help us understand that. You’re getting at something really deep and, in some ways, insidious in our hearts when we’re seemingly trying to help someone else.

Eric Ortlund
The temptation is so sneaky. I remember when I was on staff at a church in Chicago and a woman was going through a divorce. She would just come to church in tears every week. There was a dear, saintly, Job-like lady at my church in Canada, and she had really suffered. There as no self-pity in her, but she would come to church and she would weep. I would talk with her and pray with her and be her friend. I remember seeing her across the way once and she was talking with someone and I thought, I just don’t want to talk to her right now. It’s just painful to be around her. It’s painful to be around pain. I’m ashamed of myself for that. That is not how Jesus is with us—or with me! I was not being very Christlike when I did that, but it is painful to be around pain. It’s even more painful when there’s nothing you can say. It is less painful and less troubling and less disturbing to not be around it. I remember I was in the hospital once and a guy was coming in with a smoker’s cough, and the doctor said, As soon as you quit the cigarettes, that horrible, hacking cough will go away. It is so comforting to be able to say that as soon as you stop whatever it is you did, it will be over. And it comforts you. To sit with someone, without blaming them, and to be quiet and basically say, Let me wait with you for God to restore you, because he will sooner or later. This is only one chapter in your life. That hurts. That is difficult. It’s tempting because if we say You must have done something wrong to deserve this and you must confess your sin in order to get relief, we’re putting ourselves in a morally superior position. We’re saying, This will never happen to me because I haven’t sinned that way, and we’re saying, I’m better than you. That is so sneaky. That is so sneaky. It’s not going to comfort my friend. It’s going to make me feel better because it’s going to insulate me from their pain.

Matt Tully
I’m struck that sometimes we don’t even need to actually say that to our suffering friend. Maybe we have the wisdom to not tell that woman, Hey, maybe you should have thought about this when you got married the first time, but we might be thinking that to ourselves and kind of consoling ourselves by saying that’s not going to happen to me. God is never going to allow that in my life.

Eric Ortlund
It’s a deeply un-Christlike attitude. Jesus doesn’t come near to us when we’re weeping and say, Well . . . . He doesn’t wag his finger and nag us. If he needs to confront us in some way, he will in his own gracious way. But he never nags us or wags his finger or gives us advice or something.

34:48 - The Defeat of Evil

Matt Tully
Another thing that you argue for as an important theme in the book of Job is this idea of God’s defeat of evil—his conquering of evil in the world—which does connect in some way to the suffering that we sometimes face. As I thought about that, it’s a theme that maybe we all sense is present in Job to some extent, but it doesn’t feel like a very significant art of the book of Job to us. We don’t really see this idea of God cursing Satan or defeating Satan in all of these accusations that he’s leveling. He kind of disappears from the picture by the end of the book. Yet, you argue that this is an important point for the book of Job. Could you unpack that for us a little bit?

Eric Ortlund
Yes, thank you for asking me that. I’m going to try to remain calm as I talk about this, because I tend to get irritable reader syndrome when I talk about this. It’s common in English-speaking evangelical circles to see Leviathan as a crocodile. It’s understandable, if you read the physical description, but it makes the book of Job deeply unsatisfying. Deeply unsatisfying for God to say, I can kill a crocodile. I mean, honestly. Who cares? It’s just not true to the Old Testament context. It’s taken me a long time to see this, but the word “cosmology” means your picture of the world and the universe, and ancient Israelites would have had a more complicated and wiser view. Even though they were primitive scientifically, they were wiser about their cosmology spiritually. It can be easy for modern-day Western Christians to have God on his throne in eternity, and have a created empirical reality—obeying personal, scientific laws. And to them, that’s the world. In other other cultures—for example, African Christians—they will pick up on this right away. They’re just wiser than we are. They will have a middle tier supernatural category. Angels and demons and Michael and the book of Daniel and going to fight the prince of Persia (or whoever it is) and the weird pestilence that walks at night in Psalm 91—

Matt Tully
All passages that we don’t know what to do with.

Eric Ortlund
All the passages we don’t know what to do with—the powers and principalities and all that—they would have a very healthy, developed category for mid-level supernatural powers. The book of Job is just so much more satisfying when you just keep that in mind, that that’s the biblical worldview, and it’s the true one. It’s so much more satisfying when we keep in mind that Leviathan is mentioned elsewhere. It’s never a crocodile; it’s always a supernatural monster. And it’s an appropriate symbol for chaos and evil that is bigger than human beings but not bigger than God. So, when God says, Can you fill Leviathan’s side with spears?, or Get out your spear and kill Behemoth, he’s speaking in an ancient Semitic way to say, Job, I know how much you have suffered. In fact, I see better than you how you’ve suffered. You thought I just clobbered you for no reason because you thought I was a bully. Actually, you’ve been caught up in a war in heaven. I’m the only person who sees the full dimension of your suffering. I tolerate that evil for now, but there is coming a time when I’m going to unsheathe my sword and scour every last bit of evil from my creation. I like to think that we’re going to get a front row seat to see that, as day one of eternity. So, the urgency I feel here is that I think what was obvious to Job about God’s speech about Leviathan is not obvious to us because of our cultural distance. But it’s a very simple point. You can see it in the Bible and everything just looks better and happier. God doesn’t explain himself, but he’s essentially saying to Job, I see the problem more clearly than you do. I see what’s wrong with my world. I see what happened to you. I tolerate it for now. I wont’ forever. Will you trust me in the meantime? That’s a profound answer. It’s so helpful for me to think about this as a Christian: God is at work in the world preaching the gospel; the Holy Spirit is at work building the church and forgiving sins, and part of what he’s doing is defeating and fighting and driving back the powers of darkness and saving people who have been taken captive. Christopher Ash, in his beautiful commentary on Job, says every Christian should wake up every morning and say, A deep, dark spiritual battle is being fought over me today. That whole dimension of created reality that I can’t see directly and that’s not bigger than God but is still there—I just don’t have a very well developed category for that. But I should.

39:32 - One of the Most Joyful Interludes in the Entire Bible

Matt Tully
That leads right into the ending of the book of Job, which you call “one of the most joyful interludes in the entire Bible.” Why do you say that?

Eric Ortlund
I don’t know how to say it. Every time I try to get at this, I’m unsatisfied with how I have expressed it. So you will just have to open up Job 41 and ask the Holy Spirit to help you. What amazes me—I stumbling around my words—is not just that God say, Job, I’m going to kill Leviathan one day and this suffering will stop. That’s profound and beautiful in itself. He goes on to describe the monster at length, and it’s obviously hard to tell the tone with which somebody said something in an ancient written text, but God sounds anything but defensive or morose or apologetic or worried. He sounds happy. In verse 12, he even talks about Leviathan’s goodly frame, or gracious form (you can translate that in different ways). It’s like he’s saying, Job, look out at the sea. I want to show you something. And this bubbling, writhing, massive chaos rises to the surface. Job knows the name Leviathan, but he has never seen it up close. God puts his arm around Job and says, Look at those claws. Look at those fangs, that fire, and those tentacles and those scales. Isn’t that amazing? I can’t wait for the day that I unsheathe my sword and finally defeat him. God sounds so happy and joyful as he describes Leviathan. It cannot be because Leviathan is good, because everything he says about Leviathan is terrifying. The mere promise that God will defeat all evil, that’s enough; but for God to describe it so joyfully—one way to say this is that the person who is most realistic about what still needs to be redeemed in his creation is the one person who describes it the most joyfully. I get the strong sense that God can look Leviathan square in the eyes and see that deep spiritual evil that we only have a faint glimmer of, and he is still so happy that the sun rose this morning. Not even Leviathan can diminish God’s joy in creation. So, I’m dimly aware of the horrors that have happened today. Children have been abused today, and people have been trafficked. People have dementia. I’m vaguely aware of some of that going on. God sees all of it, and he’s still so happy to give us the gift called today. It’s not because he’s unrealistic or viewing the world through rose-colored glasses. If that’s true, then I must be able to be utterly realistic about the world and be utterly joyful about an unsafe world before the redemption of all things. That must be possible. I’m not sure I know how, but it must be possible.

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question, Eric, is there a favorite verse or passage in the book of Job that you have? Read that for us and then just briefly comment on why it’s your favorite.

Eric Ortlund
I have a lot of favorites. Let me just turn to Job 42. There’s more than one way to translate this verse. Job 42:5–6: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” That’s a good translation. The ESV has a note that you could translate that I am comforted in dust and ashes. I think Job is saying both at the same time. What I find so moving about that is Job is still on the ash heap, covered in sores, he still is alienated from his wife, he’s still smarting from the accusations of his friends. Nothing external in his life has improved. And yet, he’s able to see God for who God is. He thought God was his persecutor. It turns out that God is his great champion and friend. He says, I am utterly comforted over everything I lost. I am absolutely fine with everything I went through, and nothing external in his life has improved. An essential part of a Job-like ordeal is God coming to you and comforting you with his own purpose before anything else in your life gets better. God, in his all-sufficiency—is able to do that for someone who nursed a spouse through dementia or had to bury one of their children or has cancer—all the different things that happen to us. God is able to draw that close to someone.

Matt Tully
Eric, thank you so much for walking us through this incredible biblical book. A book all of us would do well to perhaps slow down and read more thoughtfully in the future. We appreciate you taking the time.

Eric Ortlund
Thank you so much for having me. I’ve enjoyed it, Matt. Thank you.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.