God Or Destiny?

People have different interpretations of events based on their role in the story or the part of the story they know even if it’s false or incomplete. It’s much as when we hear a gossip about something and we decide we know enough to take a position and judge facts. Job had a different point of view of the fact than his friends who not only where ignorant about the connection between God and Job, but they probably lacked the complete information. To their denial and comments Job said “I also could speak as ye do: if your soul were in my soul's stead, I could heap up words against you, and shake mine head at you (Job, chapter 16).” These show how easy it is for people to talk about problems of others, but how hard it really is to get in their place. Due to this, we always see problems of other people easier to overcome than ours, because we don’t understand their position and our words of reflection end up being ignorant and counter-productive.

In the context of the bible, the friends who went to accompany Job in his mourning act as a voice of conscience of the protagonist. They are like his inner voice in the different positions he could take towards the problem. As always, our inner voice may lead us to mistakes if we listen to it under effects of anger or frustration. Job was desperate and his friends where no help at all with their argument contradicting Job´s own thinking. He in return responds to their accusations and false assumptions by making their arguments completely unsupported, “And if it be not so now, who will make me a liar, and make my speech nothing worth? (Job, chapter 24).” None of them had any evidence of their friend committing evil acts and therefore none of them where in the right to suggest that he was being punished for his sins.

Through his suffering his faith shall not hesitate for a second, because Job is able to separate his misery from his spiritual life. He doesn’t even consider God as the guilty for all that is happening to him. But he does wonder why it all happens to him, and hates the cause of his misery without connecting it to the LORD. “When I looked for good, then evil came unto me: and when I waited for light, there came darkness (Job, chapter 30).” This explains that the protagonist simply believes that the world or coincidence made him end up in a place that he didn’t seek for. Job “looked for God and evil came unto me” but he treats them as different matters, and not as if God was the one who had sent him the evil. In my interpretation of the facts, everything was destiny for Job and the fact that he was in misery didn’t mean that he had done something wrong or that God was evil, it simply meant that he saw himself involved in a series of unfortunate events that carried him into what he now was.