Job 2:6 Commentary and Bible Study

Permission is granted, and we note that Satan can do nothing to harm us without the permission of the Lord. Satan is not sovereign; he knows that he cannot touch the saints unless God allows it. But now ‘the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand.’ Permission is granted because, in allowing this to take place, the Lord has a purpose greater and deeper than Satan can conceive. Good will come from this contest which will teach wonderful lessons for God’s people until the end of the world. There is something even more important at stake than Job’s comfort and well-being; the subject of the integrity of the believer, as represented in the person of Job, is at the heart of true religion. That integrity must involve trust in the hardest circumstances; even when the believer is ignorant of why the Lord allows him to suffer. There is no limit to the trust that we are to place in the Lord.No restrictions are placed of what the devil can do other than that he must take Job’s life, and so we can assume he took full advantage of this to bring the most painful trials possible on Job. These trials were going to affect not only his body, but also his soul. He could not take shelter in some inner refuge of faith away from bodily torments, but was hounded in the deepest recesses of his heart with attacks on what mattered to him most of all. Only one restriction is placed on what Satan can do: he must not take Job’s life. So Job is to be dangled over death, as it were, but not actually dropped. Satan does not actually want to take Job’s life until Job has clearly renounced his faith and rejected the Lord, so his purpose is to bring him to the very edge of life but without taking him over the edge.