Job 42: 1-6
Mark 10:46-52

Scott Peck opened his book, The Road Less Traveled, by saying, "Life is difficult."  One of the major things that makes life difficult is life is unfair.  Everyone of us at some point in our lives has placed a curse on a situation.  We have asked God to damn some situation, some person, some object.  The most common curse word in the English language is:  "God" followed by the word "damn."  People say it not only in the face of great tragedy, but also when their cars won't start, when a favored sports team loses, when it rains on their picnic or when the computer won’t work.  That oath renders an instinctive judgment that life ought to be fair and that God should somehow "do a better job" of running this world.  We have all used this curse at some time.  Even the people with the most unbelievable control who would never let any questionable word fall across their lips have expressed the attitude of this curse even if they haven't used the words.     
           
One of the best pieces of literature anywhere is the Book of Job in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Book of Job is a watershed work on the issues of suffering and unfairness.  The character, Job, often is referred to as a man of great patience.  That is an erroneous conclusion.  Job is a person willing to say what he thinks and feels.  Job is willing to confront God with his hurt, anger, and bitterness.  Job stands his ground with his friends and his wife, resisting their accusations and advice. 
           
Unfairness is no easier for us to swallow today than it was for Job thousands of years ago.  There is no satisfactory explanation of suffering regardless of when it happens or who suffers. Job is the prototype sufferer who receives more unfair blows than could possibly happen to one person.  Job loses property.  His children die.  He is left with three self-righteous friends and an embittered wife.  The suffering gradually wears down Job's most cherished beliefs.  “How can God be on my side?”  Job wonders.  He is squatting in a heap of ashes, the ruins of his life.  He is a broken, despairing man.  Has he been betrayed by God?
           
A crisis of faith brews inside Job.  Is God unfair?  Such a notion calls into question everything Job believes, but how else can he explain what has happened?  He looks around for other examples of unfairness and sees that evil people sometimes do prosper--they don't get punished, as he'd like to believe--while some godly people suffer.  And many other people live happy, fruitful lives without ever giving a thought to God.  For Job, the facts simply do not add up. 
           
The reason the Book of Job seems so modern is that for us, too, the facts do not add up.  Job's strident message of life's unfairness seems peculiarly suited to our own pain-racked time.  Simply plug contemporary illustrations into his arguments: "innocent" but starving children in the Third World; people take courageous faith stands and are imprisoned; very good people die in the prime of life; people who break every rule in the book seem to be doing just fine; corporate executives being paid millions of dollars while millions of people are out of work; people in power using power to divide people against each other; drive by shootings; random killings.  Far from fading away, Job's questions about this world's unfairness have only grown louder and shriller.  We still expect a God of love and power to follow certain rules on earth.  Why doesn't God?
           
Many have taken the advice of Job's wife, "Curse God and die."  Some Jewish writers began with a strong faith in God but saw it vaporize in the gas furnaces of the Holocaust.  Face to face with history's grossest unfairness, they concluded that God must not exist. 
           
Others agree life is unfair but conclude God can't do anything about it.  Still others project unfairness into the future and conclude there will be a time when exacting justice will work itself out in the universe.  There also are those who insist that the world is fair.  This echoes Job's friends.  Many insist there are hidden reasons and explanations for the agony and suffering that is occurring.  Some even conclude that we aren't supposed to know the answers and therefore should not be asking the questions.  Here are some of the common, helpless, worthless advice that we are often given, usually by people who, for whatever reasons, haven't encountered the deep, destructive unfairness that we may be encountering.  "God is trying to teach you something."  Well, what is God trying to teach?  If God wants me to learn something, then God needs to be clearer what the message is.  "Just remember there are people a lot worse off than you."  This is a rather arrogant coping statement.  It is a bit like the Pharisee's prayer in Jesus' story who said, "God, I thank you that I am not like that person over there who has life so much worse than I.  I'm thankful I didn't have a stroke like he did."  Other advice says, "Count your blessings.  At least you are still alive."  But being grateful for life does not remove the pain, suffering, and struggle caused by unfairness.  Finally, there is one other way to explain the world's unfairness.  Job was driven to this conclusion which is a one-sentence summary of the entire book:  Life is unfair!
           
Once we are able to arrive at the conclusion that life is unfair, then, we are able to stop looking for a cause--why did this happen, and begin searching for a response--now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do?  Job's friends and his wife continued to be hung up in the causal mode.  They kept looking for and offering suggestions of what they thought were causes of his condition.  Obviously, they believed that if they could find the exact cause of Job's problems, his anger, bitterness, and questioning would cease.  But that isn't true.  A child gets leukemia.  The parents ask, "Why?" The medical team takes plenty of time explaining how the body works, what the situation was that led to the child developing the disease.  There you have it.  The doctors have thoroughly explained the cause of leukemia in language the parents clearly understand and the parents respond, "Why?"  They are angry at what is happening to their child and their anger is expressed in the one word question, “Why?” Their "whys" continue to be raised because of the unfairness.  And there is no answer to the "whys" other than to recognize what Job recognized, "Life is unfair."
           
Philip Yancey tells about a conversation he had with a friend who had had many unfair things happen to him and is a kind of modern day Job, at least in Yancey's opinion.   Yancey asked him what he had learned that might help someone else going through a difficult time. 
           
"To tell you the truth," Douglas said, "I didn't feel any disappointment with God."
           
"The reason is this.  I learned, first through my wife's illness and then especially through the accident, not to confuse God with life.  I'm no stoic.  I am as upset about what happened to me as anyone could be.  I feel free to curse the unfairness of life and to vent all my grief and anger.  But I believe God feels the same way about the accident--grieved and angry.  I don't blame God for what happened.
           
"I have learned to see beyond the physical reality in this world to the spiritual reality.  We tend to think, `Life should be fair because God is fair.'  But God is not life.  And if I confuse God with the physical reality of life--expecting constant good health, for example--then I set myself up for a crashing disappointment.
           
"God's existence, even God’s love for me, does not depend on my good health.  Frankly, I've had more time and opportunity to work on my relationship with God during my impairment than before."
           
Douglas concluded, "If we develop a relationship with God apart from our life circumstances, then we may be able to hang on when the physical reality breaks down.  We can learn to trust God despite all the unfairness of life.  Isn't this really the main point of Job?"
           
In the Sinai wilderness, God's guarantees of physical success--health, prosperity, and military victory--did nothing to help the Israelites' spiritual performance.  And most heroes of the Hebrew Scriptures (Abraham, Joseph, David, Elijah, Jeremiah, Daniel) went through trials much like Job's.  For each of them, at times, the physical reality surely seemed to present God as the enemy.  But each managed to hold on to a trust in God despite the hardships.  They did not equate God with life. In doing so, their faith moved from a "contract faith"--I'll follow God if God treats me well--to a relationship that could transcend any hardship and to the understanding that whatever the hardship was it was not of God’s making.
           
Life certainly was not fair for Jesus.  The cross demolished the basic assumption that life will be fair.
           
Life is not fair, but God is.  God is not life.  Job's faith in God remained and that sustained him through the awareness, discovery, and acknowledgement that life is not fair.
           
Philip Yancey notes,

. . . Despite the fact that all but a few pages of Job deal with the problem of pain, I am coming to the conclusion that Job is not really about the problem of pain.  Suffering contributes the ingredients of the story, not its central theme.  Just as a cake is not about eggs, flour, milk, and shortening, but uses those ingredients in the process of creating a cake, Job is not "about" suffering; it merely uses such ingredients in its larger story, which concerns even more important questions, cosmic questions.  Seen as a whole, Job is primarily about faith in its starkest form.  
          
  A flash of light from a beacon on shore and then a long, dreadful time of silence and darkness--that is the pattern I find not only in the book of Job, but throughout the Bible.  Recall tottery old Abraham as he neared the century mark, holding feebly to the lustrous vision that he would father a great nation.  For twenty-five years that vision had seemed a desert mirage until one son, just one, was born.  And the next time Abraham thought he heard from God he mistakenly thought God expected him to offer his son as a sacrifice.   
           
Then there was Joseph, who heard from God in his dreams but landed at the bottom of a well and later in an Egyptian dungeon for trying to follow that guidance.  And Moses, hand-picked liberator of the Hebrew people, who hid in a desert for 40 years, hunted by a pharaoh's security guards.  And the fugitive David, anointed king on God's command, who spent the next decade dodging spears and sleeping in caves.
           
The baffling, Morse-code pattern of divine guidance--a clear message followed by a long, silent gap--is spelled out bluntly in 2 Chronicles.  There we read of a rare good king, Hezekiah, who so pleased God that he was granted an unprecedented fifteen year extension to his life.  What happened next? He spent all kinds of time experiencing the unfairness of life and learning about God’s care for him
           
Most of these Hebrew Scripture characters show up in the honor roll of Hebrews 11, a chapter some have labeled, "The Faith Hall of Fame."  I prefer to call that chapter, "Survivors of the Fog," for many of the heroes listed have one common experience: a dread time of struggle, suffering, and difficulty like Job's, a time when the fog descends and everything goes blank.  Torture, jeers, floggings, chains, stoning, sawing in two; Hebrews records in grim detail the trials that may befall faith-full people.            Saints become saints by somehow hanging on to the stubborn conviction that things are not as they appear, and that the unseen world is as solid and trustworthy as the visible world around them.  God deserves trust, even when it looks like the world is caving in.  
           
There is no explanation for suffering in life.  Some suffering may be the result of the logical consequences of someone’s action but that does not make the suffering any easier.  There is plenty of suffering that has no cause and effect relationship.  Simply stated life is unfair.  God is fair.  If we can cling to both of these convictions, life is unfair, God is fair, we can make it through any suffering which is its own kind of wilderness.  And it is important to make it through because the way out really is the way through.  Job concluded that life is not fair. But his conviction that God is fair gave him the courage, the hope, the faith to journey through the wilderness of unfair life and to discover for himself and all of us who have lived after Job that life is unfair, God is fair, and the way out of the unfairness is the way through the unfairness with faith in a God who is fair and just. 
Notes