Here’s a good Job-related e-mail (heh). If folks could keep these to a minimum because I won’t be able to monitor my e-mail for much of the day (hitting the road again) and I don’t want it to get filled-up with e-mails of Biblical proportions. Normally, I love this sort of thing:

Jonah, The story of Job is presented as a divinely arranged test of a righteous man’s faith, an experiment conducted to see whether Job serves God only because he enjoys the blessings of health, wealth, and progeny, and so will prove faithless to God when these are withdrawn. The opening two chapters of Job tell how this test is proposed by “the Satan” (i.e., the Accuser, the prosecuting attorney in the heavenly court; not yet the malevolent rebel against God’s rule of later Jewish and Christian texts). The key question to which the book explores the answer is “Does Job fear God for naught?” (1:9). And as to why God authorizes such a test, the answer of the book (in chaps. 38–41) is, more or less, “That’s above your pay grade”; the mysteries of the created order can only be comprehended by the Creator. So God doesn’t “smack Job around just for kicks,” but he does permit what certainly seems an unjust distribution of suffering for purposes that (it’s suggested) are larger than we can comprehend. There’s lots more and deeper in the book, of course, but that’s pretty well the gist on the question you were addressing.