We should be slow to accuse God of being unjust or not caring for justice because our life does not look the way we want it to at the moment. God does care, more than we ever could, about justice. We see that not only in the natural world, of course, but in what God has done for us in Jesus. 

We all care about justice. We innately want the world to be fair. What that usually means is that we want justice to work for us personally. We want things to work out well for us. While this is perfectly understandable, it is a very selfish and limited point of view. True justice is bigger than what happens to us personally.

That was a major concern that Job had about his suffering. He knew that he wasn’t a perfect man, but he didn’t think he had done anything that deserved the suffering he received. A major complaint he raised, and discussed with his friends, was that justice be done in his situation.

Job’s friends also thought that justice mattered, yet they took another position. Because God is just, they thought that whatever Job endured was perfectly just and fair. The only way they could resolve this was to tell Job that he was lying and was actually guilty of some great sin that he needed to repent of.

When God answered Job, he did not deal with the questions Job raised in a direct way. Yet God did answer the justice question in an unexpected way. Instead of discussing justice in an abstract way, God showed Job that he cared about justice in a much deeper and more practical way than Job or his friends had thought about.

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