Friday, March 29, AD 2024 2:26am

Lent With Job and Saint Thomas Aquinas: Chapter Ten

 

In this chapter Job asks the obvious Why question.  Why is he going through all this sudden misfortune?  At the end of the Chapter he has no answer to this core question:

Therefore, Job shows in the investigation of the causal explanation for his trial that this is not caused by some unjust person into whose hands the earth has been given (9:24 ff.), nor by God persecuting him on a false charge, (v.3) nor God looking for a fault (v.4), nor by God punishing sins (v.14), nor by God enjoying the punishments. (v.18) As a result, the cause of his pains still remains in doubt. Job pursues all these things to lead the friends to conclude that there must of necessity be another life in which the just are rewarded and the wicked punished. It this position is not posited no cause can be given for the suffering of the just who certainly sometimes are troubled in this world.

Go here to read the rest.  Of course in asking such a question Job engages in a category error:  assuming that God reasons as we do.  I have often heard in this life the phrase Surely God cannot allow uttered by very good people, often when some calamity seems to be approaching an innocent person.  Whenever I hear it I silently recall the the most profound statement ever uttered by Abraham Lincoln:  The Almighty has his own purposes.

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