Job’s losses and his first response: Job 1–3

Job is quite the hero. Right at the start, we are told:

^1:1 He was blameless—a man of complete integrity. He feared God and stayed away from evil.

But Job lost everything except his own life and his wife, and not because of any specific sin. Evil things happen to good people, sometimes through no fault of their own.

In this case, it is just because God boasts on Job, and Satan immediately seeks to undermine the idea that anyone could obey God for the sake of it (rather than for the benefits).

It sounds a bit unfair to our modern way of thinking, but now, thousands of years later, Job is held as one of the heroes of the faith. How many of us would like to be held in that esteem by God?

Indeed, Job’s first response to his losses is one that most of us would find hard, if not impossible:

^1:20-22  He said, “I came naked from my mother’s womb, and I will be naked when I leave. The Lord gave me what I had, and the Lord has taken it away. Praise the name of the Lord!”In all of this, Job did not sin by blaming God.

Then Job lost his health, and still refused to curse God for his misfortune (despite pressure from his wife):

^2:10 Should we accept only good things from the hand of God and never anything bad?” So in all this, Job said nothing wrong.

Then his friends joined him as an act of support, and things went downhill from there as the whole situation started to get to him.

Starting with wishing he’d never been born, then that he could die, then that:

^3:25-26 What I always feared has happened to me. What I dreaded has come true.I have no peace, no quietness. I have no rest; only trouble comes.

Even a blameless man of complete integrity had moments of worrying about losing what he had (while he had it), then grieving after he lost it, but all without losing his faith in God.