"God is SO awful, wah wah WAH!'

Flipping through the local library’s June issue of Christianity Today, I was struck by an article’s title: “When God is Strange and Awful.” The sub-title read, “Victor Lee Austin was living a Song of Songs life. Then he learned what it’s like to become Job.” The first paragraph: “God is strange. At times, he is awful.”

I thought, “What could have possibly gone so horribly wrong for this guy (a “pastor-theologian” in New York City) that he’s decided God can be awful and he personally has got it as bad as Job, of all people?”

What you learn is Austin’s written a “theo-memoir” about his late wife, Susan, who had a brain tumor at 38 and then suffered with a debilitating disease that resulted from cancer treatments.

When times were good for the young married couple, they shared a “mutual delight through reflecting on the Song of Songs—what Austin calls ‘the second-best book in the Bible.’ ” But after the wife’s illness and eventual descent into death, Austin’s “best book of the Bible” ultimately became Job.

Using Job 42:11, Austin actually laments that, while Job’s brothers and sisters were able to sympathize with him and comfort him in the face of the “evil he had suffered,” Susan wasn’t even able to talk to him in the months before she died.

Reading this, I thought, “Can this guy really be that immature?! Does he really think his problems in any way compared to Job’s?!”

Of course, the CT article feeds right into his God-blaspheming pity-party mentality, observing, “Many of us begin doubting God’s goodness in the face of nightmarish loss. Sometimes we accuse him of evil. But this perspective is quite at home in Scripture. Between Job’s anguished cries, the prophets’ lamentations, and Christ’s screams at Golgotha, there is no retreating into a theological comfort zone where ‘God would never’ allow atrocity.”

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What theologian Austin probably never informs his reader is that his favorite Bible book gives a picture (a type, a parallel) of the tribulation saint. Just like Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon, the Book of Job has a specific role to play with Israel and the Believing Remnant of Israel and securing their heart in the last days.

“Job explains the plight and why the things that are happening to Israel are happening to them and how in the end, if they just endure and be patient and see to the end, God’s going to restore them and turn their captivity,” explains my pastor, Richard Jordan.

“Job 42:11 says, [11] Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold.’

“By the way, there’s one thing in this passage Job doesn’t get back. He doesn’t get his wife back. She’s never listed there. But he does get the sons and daughters back. Well, if his sons and daughters were killed, and now he’s got them back but he doesn’t have a wife, how’d he get ‘em back?!

“You remember what Job believed in? He said, ‘Though worms eat my body yet I know one thing. My Redeemer lives, and in my flesh I’ll stand on the earth and see Him.’ That’s the resurrection!

“Just like the Lord blesses his latter end, at the latter end when Job gets that ‘twice as many’ back, he gets back his boys. There’s a resurrection at the end of Job.

“Verse 14 says, [14] And he called the name of the first, Jemima; and the name of the second, Kezia; and the name of the third, Keren-happuch.

“Now if he lived 140 years after that and he got back double, well half of 140 is 70, so he would have been 70 years old when the things that hit him in the book hit him, and that fits with him having 10 grown kids in chapter 1. So Job lived a total of 210 years, or three times 70.

“Notice in verses 13-14 he renames these girls. Each one of them is given a name. Jemima means ‘fair as day, or there’s a day coming; the Second Advent when the Son of righteousness ‘arises with healing in His wings.’

“Kezia is one of the perfumes used in Psalm 45 for the coronation of the Messiah. The last one, Keren-happuch, means ‘a horn of paint.’ You say, ‘Well, what in the world does that mean?!’ That means she’s all prepared. And so these are things that are descriptions of what the Believing Remnant is going to be transformed into when Christ comes.

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“Job also receives a new name. The reason Job gave those new names to his girls is identified in Rev. 2:17 and Isaiah 62:6.

“Just like God turned the captivity of Job and restored him back double, and just like his latter end was better than his former, and just like he got blessings from all of his friends, and just like he had a resurrection of his lost people, and just like he renamed his kids, God gave Job a new name.

“What was Job’s last name? Gen 46:13. Now look at I Chronicles (the Book of Genealogy) 7:1. By the way, the name Job means ‘persecuted one.’ In Genesis, it’s Job ‘the persecuted one.’ In I Chronicles it’s Jashub. That name means ‘the returned one; he returns.’ God turned the captivity of Job.

“That name is only found one other time in the Bible. Only one other person carries this name and it’s one of Isaiah’s children. You recall in chapter 8 of Isaiah, God gave Isaiah a kid and said, ‘Name the kid to indicate what’s going to happen to Israel in the future.’ God had Isaiah name his children just like He did Hosea in order to demonstrate and educate to Israel what was going to happen to them.

“Isaiah 7:3 says, ‘Then said the LORD unto Isaiah, Go forth now to meet Ahaz, thou, and Shear-Jashub thy son, at the end of the conduit of the upper pool in the highway of the fuller's field.’ Isaiah’s boy has the word ‘Shear’ put in front of it. Now, Shear is the Hebrew word for ‘a remnant.’ Shear-jashub means ‘a remnant returns.’

"You see, Job has a new name given to him for he transformed from ‘the persecuted one,’ and at the end of Job, Job becomes a picture, or a type of the remnant who returns.

“The Lord turns again the captivity of Job, and the significance of the Book of Job is he’s in exactly the same situation the Little Flock will be in the day of wrath, when Israel’s name will be Job, ‘the persecuted one,’ but will be changed to Jashub. In fact, Shear-jashub, means ‘the remnant that returns.’ "