JOB’S PATIENCE

If we name the second and longest section of the Book of Job by that “patience” for which he is famous, it is because Chapters 4 to 37 consist of a dialogue between Job and four of his friends in which they mean to console him but in effect do little more than rub salt in his wounds. As Job says, some friends!

In the third section, Chapters 38 to 42, God Himself will intervene to deliver the true solution, which He alone could deliver with such authority, and which we are certainly in need of, to frame correctly in our minds the Covid-nonsense, the Chastisement coming closer and closer, and the end of the world.

Job is patient with his friends because the first three all insist that he must have sinned in order to have deserved the appalling suffering of his complete loss of property and health, and the fourth is only a little closer to the true explanation. However, in pursuit of the solution Job’s three older friends, Eliphaz and Baldad and Sophar, do enounce many valuable truths on the connection between sin and suffering. It is only that they misapply their good principles to the particular case of Job, as he knows and tells them.

Heaven knows, the sin of worldwide apostasy is more then enough to deserve the punishment of worldwide Communism descending upon us from Covid criminals such as Schwab, Gates, Fauci, and their hidden handlers, but it is not totally responsible, insofar as there are also innocents suffering.

Usually of course, suffering is closely connected with sin because it only came into the world with sin. Prior to the Fall, Adam and Eve could not have suffered because they were shielded from suffering of any kind by their supernatural gift of Original Justice, but once they sinned that was replaced by Original Sin, through which their nature lost its perfect balance and poise and from then on became deeply flawed. Hence the human nature underlying the flaw is still from God and it is still good, but its flawed condition came from Adam and Eve, and that is so grave that it can only be wiped out by the grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And even then God leaves our nature with the consequences of the Fall so that we have to fight with our flawed nature until we die, and so deserve Heaven. Thus if the Covid fraud causes over the next few years all the suffering it was designed to cause, let us never blame God, but rather His human enemies, making war on Him to drive Him out of His own Creation.

So from Chapters 4 to 31 Job’s three friends attempt in turn to persuade him that he has sinned – by impatience, presumption, despair, contradicting God’s justice, refusing to repent, vainglory, arrogance and so on. However, Job patiently refutes each of them in turn, because he is a “blameless and upright” man who knows that he may not be sinless, but he is not guilty as accused by them. Answering Baldad in Chapter 19, he makes a famous declaration of faith in the Redemption and resurrection, all the more remarkable for Job’s being a pagan with no access (that we know of) to the Revelation of the Old Testament: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth, and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God.” With such faith in his mind and heart, no wonder he rejected the accusations of his “consolers.”

Such faith is neither a fairy tale nor self-deceit, but sheer truth, and it is this Catholic truth in our minds and hearts which can and will carry us serenely through a mass of trials and tribulations in the next few years. “Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief” (Mk.IX, 24) Lord, grant to us Catholic victims of today’s seeping apostasy so to profit by any time now of relative calm that our faith will be strong enough then to carry us through any degree of intervening turbulence which You may allow ahead on our way to Heaven.

Elihu, chapters 32 to 37, is the fourth friend of Job to speak, younger than the previous three and indignant at their inability to confute Job. He does say fine things about the justice of God, whom Job is wrong to be questioning, and he does say that God uses suffering to keep souls out of Hell, but he has no direct answer to the problem of innocents suffering, answer which must come from God Himself (38–42).

Kyrie eleison.