This week, we finished off the Wisdom series with the book of Job. Now the book of Job is a great example of the type of wisdom taught in Ecclesiastes of how life can be unfair, such as when the bad happens to the good. In the book of Job, we are introduced to the character, well, Job, whom is a righteous and blameless man. God agrees. However, suffering is inflicted on him where he loses all he owns, and all those around him whom he loves. Job receives potential explanations from his three friends as to why God has put suffering on him. The main principal from which their explanations arose was this: God is just, therefore the world operates justly, and as such, Job must therefore have done something wrong in order to have been punished. However, Job makes a clear statement that he is innocent until the very end, which is in fact, completely true. He argues that he is innocent, and therefore makes a claim that God is unjust and the world operates unjustly. In the end of his many debates with this friends, he goes directly to God and demands an explanation. Ironically, God replies but without really answering his question. Instead, God goes on about asking Job if he knows how the world runs and how it was originally created.
God brings the point across to Job the scale of His wisdom which can not be comprehended by him even if God explained it to him. God teaches Job the degree of complexity and details that each one of His decisions factors in. He takes Job on a virtual tour of the world and how it was created and how it functions. At this, Job falls on his knees with humility and repents to God for trying to justify on his own why things happened the way it did. We learn through the book of Job that we should not strive towards trying to understand why things happen the way they do. When we try to explain and justify it ourselves, we either simplify it and get it wrong like Job’s friends did, or we accuse of God with our limited knowledge based on our short experience of life we’ve had so far. We are not in the position to bring any claim against God with our limited perspective. This is the wisdom that is taught to us in the book of Job: to simply entrust everything to God and His wisdom. When life does not go the way we planned or hoped for, rather than to justify the circumstance on our own, we are encouraged to bring the matter up to God honestly through prayer. By doing so, we are leaning and trusting it to God.