The Book of Job addresses the question, “Why do the righteous suffer?” in the form of a story. Job is clearly not a real person. Much of what I will say comes from an excellent summary by Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book When bad things happen to good people. Kushner believes that the book’s author took an old morality tale in which the good person suffers but ends up rewarded. The old fable is the prose sections in most Bibles. The poetry sections are the reinterpretation.
The set-up to the story
Job has the ancient world’s ideals of wealth and a large family. One day, Satan (who is an angel, not the Devil, as in later Christian thought) says to God, “It’s all very well, Job is a fine God-fearing man. But if he lost everything, he would curse you. Let me test him. I’ll show you.” God agrees, but on condition that Satan does not harm Job personally.
Job’s tribulations
Job learns that his flocks died in a fire, his servants perished in an ambush, and a tornado killed his children. Job does not curse God. 
He shaves his head, tears his clothes, and says, “Naked I was born, and naked shall I return. The Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”
God then allows Satan to have Job’s body covered by boils. 
Even Job’s wife now says that Job should curse God for what has happened, but he refuses. Instead, he curses the day that he was born. “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? For then I would be asleep and at rest.” At no point were Job or his friends told about the deals made between God and Satan.
Job’s friends conclude that it must have all been his own fault
Three friends then came to stay with Job. They did not say a word for seven days and seven nights (the basis of the seven days of silent mourning in Judaism).
Job’s friends tell him that bad things always happen for a reason.
God must be punishing him for some sin. Job insists that he did not sin. He remains convinced that God still cares about him, but he cannot understand why he has to suffer. His friends stick to their belief about sin and punishment – hence the expression “Job’s comforters.”
Job persists in saying that he did nothing wrong and pleads desperately for help. But God still seems to ignore him. “I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer,” says Job.
Harold Kushner puts Job’s problem this way. There are three statements that the characters in the book, and most of us, would like to believe.
A: God is all-powerful and is responsible for all that happens in the world
B: God is just. The good prosper and the wicked get punished.
C: Job is a good person.
Can all these statements be true simultaneously?
Th set-up of the fable describes Job as a good man who has earthly abundance. Like Job’s friends, it is easy for us to accept all three statements A, B, and C as true. But what about when Job suffers terrible misfortunes? His friends, like most of us, have been brought up to believe that God is both all powerful and just (A and B are true). They keep telling Job that he must have brought the evil on himself by sinning (C is not true). Job replies that he may not be perfect, but he is a good man nonetheless. The friends explain that the world would be a chaotic place and things would make no sense if God were not all powerful and just. Job must have sinned! They also shy away from the uncomfortable reality that if chance had caused Job’s misfortunes, then they could just as easily have been on the receiving end.
Job replies to his friends’ arguments
Job defends himself as a good man (C is true). His most fundamental issue is that God’s creation seems to be out of whack. It is a disorderly place that cannot be truly counted on. We all tend to feel that way when things go wrong for us – we would like the world to make sense, and to feel that we are in control.
It isn’t. We aren’t. That can make us think that God isn’t running the world properly. That is tantamount to saying that God is not all powerful (A is untrue). Kushner (and I) argue that God’s role is different. It is to stand with the poor, the oppressed, the sad, and the lonely in times of difficulty, just as in times when things go well for us. This is the God of Psalm 23.
Job seems to argue that God is not always fair-minded and good (B is not always true). He concludes that although God is all powerful (A is true), he need not always be fair. Otherwise, it would be tantamount to saying that God always rewards our virtues and punishes our misdeeds. Observation of the world tells us that this does not happen.
A few weeks ago, I said that God does not micro-manage the world. Kushner goes further. God cannot micro-manage the world. God does not do magic tricks like making a terminal cancer disappear. Cancers do sometimes go into permanent remission spontaneously. But if that were God’s doing (a miracle), we would immediately be back to asking why God does not intervene that way for everyone. Indeed the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded for research into exactly that question.
Ancient world vs modern thinking
Personally (and you may feel very differently), I think that we Christians often take away an unfortunate message from many of the Gospel stories about Jesus. Whenever Jesus meets someone who is ill, a miracle occurs. Their blindness, deafness, leprosy, or mental illness is cured. It makes us think (even if subconsciously), “if that happened then, why not now?”
Ancient people answered the question, “How could that amazing thing happen?” by saying, “Only God could have done that.” The Gospel writers presented their stories about Jesus accordingly. Unlike people in the ancient world, our culture looks for rational explanations of seemingly strange happenings rather than for miracles. For example, all Job’s misfortunes could have been more or less natural disasters. But the ancient Jewish fable attributed them to the agency of Satan.
God answers Job
As the Book of Job progresses, God answers Job directly, saying essentially, “What do you (Job) know about how to run the world?” God alone is the Creator, whose experiences lie beyond those of mere mortals. God is not answerable to any of his created beings, including we humans. This is presumably the view of the author of the Book of Job, since no participant’s voice could be more authoritative than God’s.
The ending of the story
At the very end of the story the poetry of Job’s and his friends’ arguments reverts to the prose of the original fable. It is very unsatisfactory to modern ears. God recognizes Job’s faithfulness, and restores his fortunes to twice as much as he had before.
This “happy ending” is just too far from real experience. We – or our friends or relatives – go through times of great distress. These include death, illness, marriage or family break-ups, job loss, unemployment … Sometimes things turn out all right, sometimes not. But it’s rare that everything turns out twice as good as it was before the disaster.
I think that it’s a mistake to read the Book of Job as a morality tale, in which the good person suffers but gets his just reward in the end. Instead, it reminds us that there is no causal relationship between sin and suffering. Just because people suffer trials or tragedies does not mean that God is punishing them. Bad things happen to good people because … well, bad things sometimes just do happen to good people. But it’s hard for us to grasp that God would let the world be so untidy!