Alastair's Adversaria - Job on the Cross

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

This reflection was first published on the Anchored Argosy: https://argosy.substack.com/i/190318107/job-on-the-cross Follow my Substack, the Anchored Argosy at https://argosy.substack.com/. See my latest podcasts at https://adversariapodcast.com/. If you have enjoyed my videos and podcasts, please tell your friends. If you are interested in supporting my videos and podcasts and my research more generally, please consider supporting my work on Patreon (www.patreon.com/zugzwanged), using my PayPal account (https://www.paypal.com/donate/?business=4WX77P4F8S7WL), or by buying books for my research on Amazon (www.amazon.co.uk/hz/wishlist/ls/3…3O?ref_=wl_share). You can also listen to the audio of these episodes on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/alastairs-adversaria/id1416351035.

The following reflection is entitled Job on the Cross. It was first published on the Anchored Argosy. The Old Testament invites and rewards distinctively Christian reading, reading that goes beyond the narrowly literal or historical sense into openly Christological territory. There are several noteworthy themes that surface in Job, which naturally invite connection with the story of Christ and his passion. Questions of Theodicy are evidently central to the book.

of Job, terrible disasters before him, the loss of his servants and flocks, the loss of his children, and the loss of his health. Compounding this crisis, God seems to be behind it all. The farrow of God fell from heaven upon Job's sheep. Such a signal event would seem to have the hallmarks of a divine judgment, as if a huge finger were pointing down at Job from above. It certainly seems this way to Job's friends, who press him to confess his guilt. René Girard has argued that Job was not merely a random individual, but a ruler of his people. When Job describes his former condition in Chapter 29, he speaks of choosing his people's way, of sitting as a chief among them, and living like a king among them, in verse 25. This might affect the way that we read the

rest of the book. Job's crisis is a crisis for his whole people. The royal family is almost wiped out, along with their flocks and servants, and the king's own body is afflicted with sores, that the friends of Job so press him to confess his apparent fault makes more sense when we appreciate the political dimensions of the situation. Some sin of Job's would seem to be the cause of the crisis of his people. He ought to be the scapegoat to bring relief. While the reader of the book of Job knows from the opening scenes that Satan is behind the disasters that have struck Job,

Job himself does not know this. The book recounts few of Job's lamentations concerning the immediate losses he suffered. rather its focus is upon the social crisis that is precipitated by them, upon how Job is isolated from and unjustly accused by his people, with God himself seeming to support their charges. While Satan's express purpose at the outset might seem to be causing Job to curse God when he suffers loss, the actual testing Job experiences lies more in the accusations that are pressed against him than in the initial disasters themselves.

What really pushes Job to his limits is the combination of the mounting accusations of his friends and the deafening silence of God. The crisis of Theodicy in Job then is not merely the general question of why bad things happen to good people, but more focused questions concerning accusation and vindication. The book proceeds in a manner akin to a cosmic lawsuit, with opposing speeches for prosecution and defence, culminating in the delivery of a divine judgment. Within the book, Satan is chiefly the accuser, with Job's friends serving to advance aspects of his purpose,

and God's seeming silence exacerbating the situation. The friend's accusation against Job in the earthly drama, making him a scapegoat for his people, correspond with Satan's accusations against Job in the heavenly drama. While Satan does not directly appear in the book after its opening section, God's rebuking of the friends, at its conclusion, could be seen to answer Satan also. Job ends with a sort of apocalypse as God appears vindicating Job against the accusations of his friends and reversing his fortunes. As many commentators recognize, no real explanation for the disasters that befell Job is presented. Yet, as I have noted, the theological crisis of the book

is less one of suffering than of the apparent condemnation of the righteous. Consequently, the apocalypse does provide a more satisfying denouement than many have suspected. Job's vindication is an event that provides much more than merely private catharsis. Much as the outcome of a great court case could be, it is a public, indeed a political event, changing the standings of various parties to the dispute. The friends of Job are declared to be in the wrong and silenced, while Job is openly declared to be in the right and his circumstances dramatically reversed. If the story of Job is a drama with political dimensions, its resolution is also political.

The Book of Job presses the question of whether and how God will vindicate his faithful people, publicly demonstrating them to be in the right, when the radical reversals of fortune they have suffered, and the accusations their opponents level against them seem to indicate otherwise. Job, of course, is an extreme case. However, his story has many resonances with that of Christ, whose passion is also framed as a political drama of accusation, reversal, and vindication. Like Job, Christ is the very very important.

victim of his people. He accused king and scapegoat, seemingly rejected by God himself, yet later powerfully vindicated. For many Christian readers, justification is chiefly regarded as something won by Christ's righteous life and death for our sins, with minimal consideration of justification as a social drama. The passion is a narrative. Yet our accounts of the atonement can often treat the narrative dimensions, the reasons for the crucifixion, the parties involved, the temporal unfolding of the events and such things as the silence of Holy Saturday, etc., as incidental to a denaritivized theological transaction. Reflection upon the book of Job might help to bring the importance of the narrative dimensions of the cross into greater clarity. At various points in the biblical

narrative, God appears as an enemy. He tells Abraham to sacrifice his son. He wrestles with Jacob at the ford of the Jabok. He afflicts Job with terrible disasters. He gives the apostle point. He gives the Apostle Paul a thorn in his side. In such situations, the test is whether people are able to trust God and his goodness despite all appearances, persevering in faith, believing that frowning providences hide the smiling face of a gracious God. Job exemplifies such dogged confidence in God's just character. Though he slay me, I will hope in him, Job chapter 13, verse 15. Christ's death, resurrection and ascension are an apocalypse of God's righteousness. more than the apocalypse in the story of Job and the reversal of his fortunes, Christ's resurrection

and ascension are public acts of judgment with political consequences. They are an apocalypse of God's final judgment in the middle of history, in ways that change the public standing of various parties to the drama that preceded them, the Jewish and Roman authorities, the crowd, the disciples, and of course Christ himself. The preaching of the gospel that follows Pentecost is at heart a promulgation of the divine vindicating judgment upon Christ and the declaration that the rulers of the world were in the wrong, a message of marked public ramifications. As in the story of Job, the justice of God is in question in the story of Christ.

God's righteousness would seem to be placed in doubt by the immense injustice of Christ's condemnation and crucifixion, the darkened heavens complicit by their silence. The stillness of Holy Saturday only seems to confirm the finality of the injustice. Job's refusal to consent to this apparent finality and persevering insistence that God would reveal his righteousness gives his book much of its theological force. Likewise, the theological force of the resurrection and ascension lie in no small measure in their apocalyptic disclosure of final justice in the middle of the drama of history.

Besides the apocalyptic vindication of the accused sufferer, the climax of the book of Job also presents the hero with the figures of Levi. and Bohemoth. Robert Fyle, among others, has persuasively argued that these beasts, which come into clearest focus in the concluding divine speech, need to be understood as images of cosmic evil and death. Leviathan and behemoth are figures that represent monstrous powers variously used to depict mighty empires and untamable cosmic forces. They draw upon pagan portrayals of the chaos monsters, of cosmogonic myths. The effect of the images of Leviathan and behemoth is to reframe Job's sufferings as arising from an encounter with these fell adversaries.

The lengthy descriptions of these monsters serves to explore their character as the most formidable of foes, wielding great powers and accompanied by their own entourage. The depiction of Leviathan and Behemoth and Job comport with the depiction of opposing forces like Egypt in such monstrous terms elsewhere in the Old Testament, Psalm 74 v. 12 to 17, 104, verse 26. Isaiah chapter 27 verse 1 and 51 verse 9 and following, or the depiction of Satan as the dragon in Revelation chapter 12, with the various powers under his sway being presented as monstrous beasts of sea and land.

Leviathan, the monstrous representation of cosmic evil, and behemoth, the figure of death, are ultimately revealed, not to be straightforward expressions of divine providence and judgment, nor to be autonomous forces let loose in an anarchic universe, but to be created powers operating only within divine control and limits. While Satan does not directly appear after the opening section of Job, the divine speech concerning Leviathan and behemoth depict his constrained and merely creaturely agency as the great dragon and cosmic adversary.

These figures, death, sin and the adversary, are most clearly seen in the story of the gospel. The book of Job is a vindication of the righteous sufferer and a defeat of the accuser and his associated personified powers of death and evil. The great and climactic defeat of these powers occurs in the resurrection and ascension of Christ. Satan depicted as the accuser of the brethren, Revelation chapter 12 verse 10, is defeated and cast down through a cosmic legal drama, through the vindication of Christ and his people. With this vindication, the hostile powers of death and sin,

which formerly held men in their thrall, are reduced in their power and dominion. Toby Sumter, in his commentary on the book, in the Through New Eyes series, remarks upon the sacrificial themes of the opening chapters. Like a sacrificial animal, Job is represented as being without blemish. The farre of God descended upon Job's sheep and servants and consumed them. A great wind struck the four corners of the house in which his children were feasting. The four corners are elsewhere associated with the four corners of the altar, and the farer of God is that which comes down upon sacrifices. The tragedies that struck Job had a sort of sacrificial character,

preparing Job and his possessions as a pleasing offering to the Lord. Through being offered as a sacrifice through suffering, Job was raised up to a higher level of fellowship with God. At the end, he was like a prophetic intercessor for his friends, and the possessions he lost were restored to him doubled. Like Christ, he learned obedience through suffering, as we see in Hebrews chapter 5, verse 8, experiencing God as if an enemy Job had to mature into higher levels of trust and perseverance.

Satan's challenge may seemingly have occasioned the trial of Job, but the testing was divinely designed to bring Job forth as gold, Job chapter 23 verse 10, to exalt him to a level of glory and fellowship with God that exceeded that which he had enjoyed earlier. Christ's cross is like Job's suffering as a form of elevation in sunship. As followers of Christ, we participate in His sufferings and are raised up as sons and daughters in Him. Christ's sufferings are not merely for us. We are conformed to the Suffering Son, in order that we might enjoy the glories of sonship in Him.

Job's sufferings served His glorification and our participation in Christ's suffering serves ours, verse Peter chapter 4 verse 13. This is an important dimension of New Testament teaching, which can often be obscured by our preoccupation with the vicarious. character of Christ's atonement. The story of Job, the victorious victim of the dragon, sacrificial son, and vindicated scapegoat of his people, is one that anticipates the narrative of the gospel, and Job is a Christ figure. In the book of Job, something of God's apocalyptic justice, of the relationship between suffering and glorification, and the exposure of the injustice of the rulers of this age, through the witness of the righteous victim, comes into clearer focus.

All of these themes prepare us to read the New Testament in ways that will be rewarded by greater insight. If you would like to read this and other reflections like it, you can do so on the anchored argosy, the substack that I share with my wife Susanna. If you would like to support my work, you can do so using my Patreon or PayPal accounts. These, along with the links to the substack, will be in the show notes below. All the work that I do here, and so much of what I do elsewhere, is supported by generous donations. Thank you very much for listening. God bless.