Job 1:6 Commentary and Bible Study

Early in the Book of Job it is made clear that Job’s afflictions were not punishments for sin. Clearly the Lord used the afflictions for purifying, sanctifying purposes, but they were not actually punishments. (Here is just one example demonstrating that this book does not discuss all aspects of suffering, for Scripture elsewhere teaches that God sometimes does punish people for sin, and especially, in 1 Corinthians 11.30, his own people.)Job’s trials were the result of ‘transactions in Heaven’ (Thomas Robinson). God permitted Satan to press Job to vindicate his real, living, well-motivated faith, love and service. And in this respect the trials were a victory for God and for evangelical conversion, for while Job yielded to self-pity and complaining, he never renounced his God. While he was brought so low as to foolishly believe that God was dealing with him unreasonably, yet he never denied God’s power, right and lordship.Did early believers hold primitive ideas? No, we learn much here about Satan and his wiles in this earliest of Bible books than we do anywhere else in Scripture. The devil is an intelligent being, having personality, having great knowledge, but ruined by a fatal flaw. His knowledge is greater than all created knowledge put together and yet it has a fatal flaw, because he has no faith. He has no trust in the truthfulness of what God says and all his knowledge is twisted by his lack of faith. We too are in a hopeless position if we can’t trust God’s warnings or his promises. Satan is cynical and puts all he has against God. He is consumed by jealousy of God’s people. The believer has an adversary who is all out to prove that he is a hypocrite not genuine, and he is a slanderer and restless with it.These first two chapters, which explain Satan’s attack on godly Job, prepare the way for all that follows. It would be hard to understand the book without this. At the time, though, Job could not see that there was a gracious purpose in his trials. God’s motives were to bring Job spiritually closer to himself and to train and instruct him more. To come through trial without sin is the highest honour we can bring to God and the greatest blow we can strike at the devil. The reader is given this insight which Job himself was not given until later. He had to struggle with all that was happening to him without this explanation, hence his great difficulty. By giving the reader this insight, he is placed in a privileged position to understand the book. He is given to know more than Job and his ‘friends’ in all the interactions that follow.