Job 1:13 Commentary and Bible Study

The extent of Satan’s power revealed in launching this assault on Job is surprising. He apparently has a vast ability to coordinate events in Job’s life. So precisely can he direct events that in each case he arranges for one messenger to escape from what destroys all others, and for that messenger to come to Job as the sole survivor. This of course is essential to Satan’s plan, for Job must know about all these events. Furthermore, the timing of the arrival of news of these calamities is orchestrated to have the maximum effect on Job. He might console himself after one tragedy that he still had other possessions intact, but these messengers arrive like repeated hammer blows, calculated to crush all hope. ‘The fire of God is fallen from heaven’ – why put it like this? The overwhelming suggestion is that God has done this to Job; God too is against Job. Satan saves the worst news to last. Job would have known that all his children were met together in the oldest son’s house, but now they are all dead, killed by a wind that has struck the house and brought about what appears to be a judgment on them all. What is worse they died at the very time when he had in the past most feared that they might have sinned against God, and cursed God in their hearts. Everyone seems to have died. The sons are mentioned, because they were the most important in the culture of those days. All these things amounted to the shattering of Job’s power. He was to lose all: his reputation and his standing among men was all gone.But does Satan really have such supernatural power that he can arrange the events of this world and take hold of the course of history? Surely not! He does not have this power natively. The account is highly truncated. What is being described is what God does for his own reasons under the provocation of Satan. The Lord says as much to Satan when he returns from this first onslaught against Job: ‘And still he [Job] holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause’ (Job 2:3). This too is how Job interprets these events. It would have been apparent to Job (and to all around him) that this series of blows against him came from the hand of God, although the reason was hidden from him: ‘the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away’ (Job 1:21), and he is not wrong. There is something so obviously divinely planned in the orchestration of them. At first he is entirely submissive to God in this matter.All this of course is done by Satan with the intention of destroying Job’s faith. The reader has been allowed, as it were, into the presence of God so that he knows what Job does not know, and he knows also that the reason for these events was hidden from Job for the time being. The reader is watching to see what Job does under the burden of this ignorance. How will he react? What will he say to the Lord who has permitted all this? Satan, of course, keeps well out of sight. It would spoil his plan entirely if his malice against Job came into view.