"My anger burns against you and your two friends,because, unlike my servant Job, you have not told the truth about God." (Job Chapter 42 verse 1)
The book of Job is thought to be the oldest story in the bible predating Genesis. A google search of the book of Job will produce pages and pages of theologians attempting to explain a God who uses Job to prove a point to Satan. Job loses everything except his life. He loses his children, his servants, his animals, his wealth, and his health. By all accounts, modern believers are completely absorbed by this very ancient story and believe it tells the truth about God. If modern man were able to excavate an ancient manuscript and decipher it, would we ascribe to the ancient and primitive text infallibility and inerrancy and accept it as telling the truth about God? No. We would put it in a museum and not think twice about applying it to modern beliefs, but the book of Job is accepted as the gospel truth about an ancient god that controls calamity and "blessings". Modern believers even go a step further and use the ancient text as proof that god is intimately involved in every good thing that happens to them and every bad thing that happens to them. Job 1:21 The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord. The ancient man Job ascribed that the Lord gave him everything and that the Lord could take everything away. This puts god as the source of everything good and everything bad all at once. I simply fail to see why modern man with knowledge of science and medicine finds this comforting. When bad things happen we can either blame god or satan (who permits satan), and when believers are experiencing "blessings"...god gets the credit as well. I simply have come to see Job as a very ancient man with a very ancient view of deity. Job does not have the goods on god and neither do all the theologians who have written reams about the ascribed diety in this ancient book. No one alive today knows any more about God than Job claimed to. Preoccupation with deity seems to me to be preventing a needed preoccupation with science, technology and preservation of humanity and the planet.
