Hi, I’m Wayne Jones, and welcome to re:Christian, a critical and satirical reconsideration of Christianity, the Bible, and God. This is episode 16: “God and Satan Do a Job Together.”
You’ve probably heard the expression, the patience of Job, but if it’s been a while since you’ve read the Old Testament, or if you’ve never read the Bible at all, then you might not know the origin of the phrase. It might be like the virgin chastity of Mary, Jesus’s mother, something that always was and always continues. Or like the bravery and marksmanship of David, using a simple slingshot to bring down the beast of Goliath.
And in a way, Job’s story is like that. He was a good man. The Bible says of him:
In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. 2 He had seven sons and three daughters, 3 ... He was the greatest man among all the people of the East. 4 His sons used to hold feasts in their homes on their birthdays, and they would invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. 5 When a period of feasting had run its course, Job would make arrangements for them to be purified. Early in the morning he would sacrifice a burnt offering for each of them, thinking, “Perhaps my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This was Job’s regular custom. (Job 1:1–5)
All this changes when God, paranoid and narcissistic as usual, and Satan, evil as usual, in effect agree to fuck Job over just to see how good he really is. I’ll provide the details in a moment, but just stop a while and think about that, my dear Christians. In that book, the Bible, that some of you thump and some of you know only snippets from, and that some of you claim to read like that bestseller that everyone is talking about but that you’re too tired to pick up after a hard week and so you just put on a rom-com instead and add the book to the pile by your bedside table—yes, in that book, in the Bible, the one chockfull of bullshit and lies but that you consider to be, as you say, “the word of God,” that same God sees a good man on earth and after about thirty seconds of prodding from fucking Satan, decides to torture the poor bastard just to test him.
My first question of course is, What part of the word Satan didn’t you understand? Here is the proposition that Satan, the fallen (read: thrown-out) former angel, offers to God:
6 One day the angels came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came with them. 7 The Lord said to Satan, “Where have you come from?”
Satan answered the Lord, “From roaming throughout the earth, going back and forth on it.”
8 Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”
9 “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied. 10 “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. 11 But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.” 12 The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your power, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.” Then Satan went out from the presence of the Lord. (Job 1:6–12)
I have so many questions, even before we get to the godly pathology. What are the angels doing hanging around with Satan? Is he like the cool kid, the bad boy, because he was expelled from heaven, and the others are bored with lounging on clouds all day? And doesn’t God have any fucking common sense? We’ve already seen from Adam and Eve and numerous other situations that Satan thrives on deception. That snake tattoo on his chest doesn’t mean nothing. Shouldn’t there have been a point where God clued in and maybe started to question Satan’s motives? The short answer appears to be no, and Job is thrown under the bus/donkey cart lightly and cavalierly.
If you imagine God as the almighty and benevolently omnipotent creator of the entire universe, you might then imagine that Satan, a mere reject from the kingdom—the equivalent of a kind of disgruntled fired employee—might have to be extraordinarily cunning and devious, using all his wiles to try to take down a mark as powerful, an enemy as forbidding, as God. But it turns out that if Satan is the fired employee then God is the CEO who knows and cares fuck all about what’s really going on in his company, and spends his days at long smarmy lunches with clients, or socking back a little too much vodka from the discreet fridge in his office, or wasting away time online either Googling himself or watching TikTok videos.
Let’s remind ourselves of Satan’s ploy, translated into even more modern English:
Satan: You’ve given Job everything he has but if you take it all away he will call you an asshole.
God: Okay, then, I’ll transfer ownership of his property to you, but just don’t hurt the guy.
Pretty easy pickin’s.
So, Satan takes control and the shitstorm starts for Job. All his oxen and donkeys are stolen, and all his servants are killed except for one to serve as a messenger. Then God’s own fire from heaven burns to death all his sheep and all his servants, too, except for one to be the messenger. Then his camels are all stolen and (you may begin to see a pattern here) all servants are killed except one to be a messenger. And then the topper: a wind blows down the house where Job’s seven sons and three daughters are having a feast, and they are all killed, except for, well, you know who. And just a reminder: this is not over the course of weeks or months. This is all in one day and the four surviving messengers are tripping over themselves to bring each piece of horrible news.
Job’s reaction is a little odd: he takes off all his clothes, shaves his head, and falls to the ground to worship God (Job 1:20–22). And so Satan, realizing he’s been foiled in his attempt to make Job curse God, has another meeting with God, and this time God gives Satan permission to harm Job but not to kill him. (A side note here: just how fucking dumb is God anyway? Doesn’t he have a strategic plan for the universe and the creatures that inhabit it, or does he just act on whatever crazy whim someone suggests to him. Yeah, sure, that sounds like a good idea. I hope there are other universes that have been created by omnipotent beings who haven’t fallen off a fucking swing at some point in their youth and obviously sustained some permanent mental damage.)
So, again, Satan has at it. Or at him, Job. This is from Job 2:7: “So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.” Again the reaction by Job, who may have fallen from the swing next to God’s at some point, is odd: he scrapes himself with broken pottery (Job 2:8). But he doesn’t curse God.
There then follows a long period where Job wishes he had never been born and says he hates his life. These wailings are punctuated by “friends” who come by to chastise him. “Miserable comforters,” Job calls them (Job 16:2). No kidding. It’s actually creepy and perverse, the long back-and-forth dialogue between Job and these friends. They make a speech, he makes one; they make one, he makes one. And on and on it goes until at the end God chimes in. The whole thing lasts over 15,000 words, which is about one-quarter of a medium-length novel.
And in the end? God restores everything and more to Job. Twice as much actually. Everyone comes to visit him. “They comforted and consoled him over all the trouble the Lord had brought on him, and each one gave him a piece of silver and a gold ring” (Job 42:11). And then, as it is wont to do, God and the Bible get strange. God even gives Job back seven sons and three daughters. And no, his dead ones don’t come back to life: he got replacement ones, and was happy with that (Job 42:13–15).
Frankly I can’t understand how Job can be happy and celebratory. And it’s hard to figure out what the lesson is in all of this. I suppose something like: if you live under the power of supreme dictator, he can summarily take everything from you that you value, but it kind of sort of all works out in the end. I keep thinking of the great Christopher Hitchens’s description of heaven as a sort of “celestial North Korea,” God as Kim Jong Un. Even the Bible itself seems to have trouble making the ordeal into something other than: you’re alive, God takes everything, you suffer, God gives you back twice as much (don’t forget the replacement children), and then you die. “And so Job died, an old man and full of years” (Job 42:17)—that’s how the Book of Job ends. Well, he’s full of something, anyway.
And that’s all for this episode. Thanks for listening. Please check the show notes for a transcript, a list of sources, and for how to contact me. And please join me again on Thursday.