NOTES for Job 31:1-40
For Job, sacred awe before the Most High is the substance of everyday life; he strives with all his strength to keep God's commandments. In the concluding part of his speech, Job lists the good things he has done, not in order to demand a reward—here the book's author departs from the commonly accepted views of his age. Job says that the destruction of the lawless frightens him, but that he would accept such a fate if he knew himself to have broken the law. What, then, has he done for God to punish him so severely?
Once again Job demands that someone explain the reason for his calamities and show him precisely how he has sinned against God's will. Again and again he repeats thoughts he has already expressed; again and again he cries out to God to answer him. The reader hears these many repetitions while knowing the story the author revealed in the prologue. The contradiction between the real cause of Job's suffering, according to the story, and Job's own experience of what has happened ultimately raises the question of whether there is any connection at all between human suffering and a person's sins. In the Old Testament this connection would seem obvious, yet the author nevertheless considers it necessary to think it through in relation to an individual person.
The prosperity of the lawless, of which Job has spoken more than once during the discussion, casts no less doubt than Job's own suffering upon the idea that sin leads a person to destruction. This burning perplexity on the author's part shows, first of all, that things are not as simple as people thought. Above all, the impossibility of rationally explaining why the righteous suffer while the lawless prosper—and sometimes the reverse happens!—points, for the author, to the mystery of suffering, as unfathomable as the mystery of divine love. The Book of Job speaks of this mystery within the framework of its own story, and so its message does not entirely coincide with what is partly revealed to the prophets and will be fully revealed in the sacrificial death of the Son of God on the Cross. Yet it was crucial for humanity's spiritual history that the tangible, visible earthly fruits of righteousness and lawlessness should cease to be axiomatic for the book's reader. In this, the Book of Job anticipates God's revelation in Jesus Christ.
But the book's significance does not end there. In Job's speeches, the author brings another, unseen dimension of suffering to the fore. What torments Job is not only—and perhaps not even so much—the abundance of misfortunes that have befallen him, but above all the impossibility of a clear and direct relationship with God. The gulf between God and Job, which Job cannot cross, makes his situation so desperate. And it is entirely clear that anyone could find themselves in Job's place, cut off from God and buried in darkness and silence. It is here that the book's great turn in the story, its central revelation, is to unfold.