Job is an extreme book, but suffering can come in waves. Recall again that Job knows nothing of the role of Satan in all this.
- The closer the suffering, the greater the hurt.
- 2:1-8. The issue in 1:10-11 extended in 2:4. ‘What hurts more – the war in Ukraine or a sore knee? See Hannah in 1 Sam.2:6.
- God was pleased with Job (2:3), yet He afflicts him again. Was it leprosy, elephantiasis, or even smallpox? It was terrible indeed – 2:8; 7:4-5, 13-14; 19:17, 20; 30:30.
- The humanist response to suffering.
- 2:9. Deut.28:35 may be behind this. Calvin calls her ‘an instrument of Satan’. This is the euthanasia mentality – mercy killing, killing with compassion.
- Faith is not the same as enjoying good circumstances.
- 2:10; see 13:15. Choose Thou my good or ill – Horatius Bonar
- John Gibson Paton after the death of his wife and infant son: ‘I do not pretend to see through the mystery of such visitations … but this I do know and feel, that in the light of such dispensations, it becomes us all to love and serve our blessed Lord Jesus so that we may be ready at His call for death and Eternity.’
- a glimmer of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane