Considering Job

I visited Job again this past month.

I've only visited him three times in my life, yet I've known about him since I was a girl. My understanding of his experience was beyond shallow - is there a word shallower than shallow? That was me. My girlish understanding went something like this: "Job had everything taken away from him, and it was pretty awful, and then everything was restored."

My first reading of the book of Job left a bit more profound impression - my girl version somehow missed the "friends" who came to mourn. Oh, that they had simply sat with him as they did those first seven days - silently!

My second reading was the year I came back from the dead, so that was an interesting experience. While everything had yet to be restored to me, the fact that I was alive to read it at all felt like a huge blessing of restoration. I was alive; I had been spared.

Now, last month, another girl - not so girlish anymore, someone who has found herself in even more holes to climb out of - read about Job with yet a different set of eyes.

Maybe Job looks different every time you visit him.

Here are my two favorite takeaways this time, still not quite out of the most recent hole to be climbed out of:

Part of Job's witness to his friends is that God didn't do these horrible things to him, but was still his Friend and his Father - Someone to be trusted. This passage was particularly tender to me:

"For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease.

"Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground;

"Yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant." (Job 14:7-9)

I had a thrill of new recognition at an old image - a tree and the water that feeds it so that it produces fruit. Job's beautiful witness is that there is such a Water that will revive even a withering and dying tree, and it can produce fruit again.

This took me straight to Alma's sermon on planting such a tree with faith - not a tree OF faith; I really must niggle over this point. We plant the word of God's plan with our faith and desire, and Alma concludes with a promise that hearkens to Job's testimony:

"And now, my brethren, I desire that ye shall plant this word in your hearts, and as it beginneth to swell even so nourish it by your faith. And behold it will become a tree, springing up in you unto everlasting life. And then may God grant unto you that your burdens may be light, through the joy of his Son. And even all this can ye do if ye will. Amen." (Alma 33:23, emphasis added)

Another part of Job's witness of God's goodness was another evocative image for me - and I love when God teaches us with patterns! Once you start to see the patterns, you can never unsee them, and suddenly, it feels like maybe you've started to crack His code in the scriptures.

Job witnesses of his trials:

"God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked.

"I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder; he hath also taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark." (Job 16:11-12, emphasis added)

My mind flew to another place where God's mark was mentioned:

"And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God: and he cried with a loud voice to the four angels, to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea.

"Saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads."

"And one of the elders answered, saying unto me, What are these which are arrayed in white robes? and whence came they?

"And I said unto him, Sir thou knowest. And he said to me, These are they which came out of great tribulation, and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb." (Revelation 7:2-3; 13-14, emphasis added)

Camille Johnson said in March of this year: “I know that life is hard. You can do hard with Jesus, or you can do hard alone. That is your choice. But when you do hard with Jesus Christ, the hard becomes holy. YOU BECOME holy.” (https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/broadcasts/miscellaneous-events/2026/03/14johnson?lang=eng)

It would seem that holiness can only be achieved through becoming clean first, and then becoming holy through practicing hard things with the enabling and transforming power of Jesus Christ, because of His atoning sacrifice. For Job to witness that God has set him up for His mark suggests that Job knew this, and though spending a fair amount of time in this treatise poetically saying "ouch," this beautiful soul cleaved unto God in all of the hard - in a pile on of hard.

As I consider Job again after and in my own piles of hard, I feel grateful of a frank account of someone who absolutely had a horrible time through his piles of hard, and wasn't afraid to take that to His Father God, telling Him, "Hope ya know, [I'm having] a hard time!" (see https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2008/10/hope-ya-know-we-had-a-hard-time?lang=eng) Job's conversation with God was raw and real, but His love for his Father God never wavered in his firm witness to His friends:

"Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.

"He also shall be my salvation: for an hypocrite shall not come before him." (Job 13:15-16)

"For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:

And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God:

"Whom I shall see for myself..." (Job 19:25-27)

"...till I did I will not remove mine integrity from me.

"My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go." (Job 27:5-6)

Job knew what he knew, and he knew God knew.

When that's where you are, you can live life in all the holes and underneath all the piles with the utmost confidence nothing can shake - our Father God does not forsake those whom He has marked. It's completely antithetical to His nature and character to do so. You get to tell Him you're not having a great time throughout - I know I have. He can take it. But I also know this - He. Will. Not. Let. Go.

Ever.

When that's where you are, that's when it's your job to hold on tight right back. Help is right there.