There was this guy named Job, a man who “was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). God and the Satan were in conversation about him. (We should note, by the way, that it is always “the Satan” here in the book of Job: it’s a title, rather than a proper name. We would probably get the picture better if we translated that title as “the Prosecutor Angel.”) As it turns out, then, God and the Prosecutor Angel made a bet about Job.

At first the bet was about whether Job would remain faithful to God if he lost his wealth and his family (1:6-12). Then, when he did remain faithful, the bet continued: would Job still be faithful if he also lost his health (2:1-6)? Job’s situation became quite miserable. Even so, he asked, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” The narrator rounds off this section with this summary: “in all this Job did not sin with his lips” (2:10).

But he did speak up to wish he had never been born (3:1-10); and he was ready to die (3:20-22), because God had shut him in all alone (3:23) – a hint of an intuition that God was the one who had allowed this to happen to him, though within the narrative he could not know the extent to which God had made the deliberate decision for his life to get wrecked.

And his friends – Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite – came to mourn with him. They cried aloud when they saw him from afar (2:12), and then sat with him in silence for a week, acknowledging the depth of his suffering (2:13).

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In the midst of all the pain of the world, O Lord, give us the courage and compassion to go to those who suffer, and to sit with them in their sorrow, though we may only be able to sit in silence for a long time because we know no words to say.