"Of course Job loves you, God, because he is rich and you have blessed him a ton," so says Satan the great accuser of the brethren about Job in the court of heaven.

In Keller’s book on suffering, no surprise he spends some time on this great book. Here is One of my favorite quots on that section:

He took the condemnation we deserve so God can accept us. For Jesus is the ultimate Job, the only truly innocent sufferer. Jesus “was willing to live the life of Job to its ultimate conclusion. He was willing to die while considered by friend and foe alike to be a fool, a blasphemer, even a criminal – powerless to save himself.”

As Job was “naked,” penniless, and in physical pain (Job 1:21), so Jesus was homeless, stripped naked, and tortured on the cross. While Job was relatively innocent, Jesus was absolutely, perfectly innocent, and while Job felt God abandoning him, Jesus actually experienced the real absence of God, as well as the betrayal of his foolish friends and the loss of family. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus saw that if he obeyed God fully, he’d be absolutely abandoned by God and, essentially, destroyed in hell. No one else has ever faced such a situation.

Only Jesus truly “served God for nothing.”

Note: Four surprises in the book of Job:

A. God shows up as Yahweh in the storm and Job is not annihilated.

B. God doesn’t say WHY Job suffers: God doesn’t tell why he suffers nor does he punish Job like his friends say will happen. God does say: look at the splendor of my creation.

C. He says Job is not smart enough or powerful enough to be THE judge.

D. He says Job was right and his friends were wrong.