How terribly difficult it must have been for Job to cope with his suffering. He cries out, “Where is God when I am hurting? He surely sees and knows. But does he care? Is he mad at me? Do I deserve all this? If I confess my sins to him, will the pain go away? What if it’s not clear to me how I have offended him?”
The existentialist would answer, “That’s a dead end.? Our lives are not determined by what happens to us, but by how we react to what happens; not by what life brings to us, but by the attitude we bring to life.”
But is that really? true? ?Is life no more than a video game, where the goal is to run through the maze as fast as you can while looking out for sudden, seemingly random dangers? The monster jumping out from behind a rock, for example, or the explosive coconuts falling from a tree?
No, as every computer game programmer can tell you, these seemingly random events are anything but random, resulting from thousands, even millions of lines of code. There is a grand method behind the madness; it’s just beyond the ability of the gamer to fully understand it.
As was revealed in the first chapter of Job, there is a grand scheme to life too. God is in the circumstances for his own purposes, and he also wants to influence our reactions to them.
