Chapter 2

Another day of accounting comes around in heaven.  We don't know how long after the above events it takes place. This verse:

...He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason."

Job 2:3 ESV

Incited...  A difficult concept.  With Jesus as our advocate, can this even happen now?  Even with reason?  Hmm... There is always reason now.  Job was  pre-law, free to do according to his own will.  Yet... God was not wrong  to allow this.

Having failed to "break" Job by taking everything he had, even his children, Satan now suggests that it is Job's own health that keeps him faithful.  So God puts that in Satan's hands.  Job is covered with sores, from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.  He scraped himself with a piece of broken pottery - to relieve pain or remove scabs we don't know.  But this was a horrible thing.  There would have been no position where he was not in pain.

But he said to her, "You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.

Job 2:10 ESV

We don't like to think of this part.  Is it fair to receive good from God that we do not deserve but unfair to receive evil...that we also do not deserve?

2021 - Evil we always deserve.  If sin makes us infinitely deserving of eternal punishment in hell - just one sin - then what can happen to us on earth in a human lifetime that would be "worse than we deserve".  The perspective here is the key.

Possible FB post.

Job has only one wife.  We are well back in history - patriarchal times most likely - and monogamy is the choice a good man makes.

The three friends arrive, and commiserate in silence for seven days.