The Job Question

Not the question facing the Obama administration and the Romney candidacy. Not "Jahb" but "Jobe". The good guy that has bad things happen to him. The question goes, "Why would a good and all powerful God allow evil to prevail and the innocent to suffer?"
Never mind the oddness of the story. If I were not a believer, this piece of scripture would be altogether easy to ridicule. Satan makes a bet with God that he (Satan) could get his most righteous servant to denounce the almighty God. God agrees to the bet (oh good Lord--are you kidding me? Who wrote this, Aaron Sorkin?).
God takes everything away from his righteous servant Job (not Steve). The list of what Job loses is almost endless. And then he and his buddy Satan sits back to see what happens. What they are waiting for, of course, is for Job to curse God. He doesn't of course, but along the way, he makes some serious accusations, Job 10:8-10:

“Your hands shaped me and made me.
    Will you now turn and destroy me? 

Remember that you molded me like clay. 
    Will you now turn me to dust again? 

Did you not pour me out like milk
    and curdle me like cheese,

I'm a Wisconsin guy, so the idea of God curdling me is interesting if not out-right affectionate.
 Aren't you "in charge" Holy God?" If so, why must we put up with this contradictory nonsense about the good suffering and the evil getting all the good stuff?
So, God responds to Job's temerity with a juggernaut of a response out of the whirlwind. "who is this that darkens counsel without knowledge?

Forgive me, but this sounds too much like "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" from the Wizard of Oz"
Brace  yourself like an man and I will answer you.
Wow!
Well, what is the answer to this bedeviling question about God's responsibility for evil?

Tom Are Jr. has this quiet and moving resolution from his own experience

I took my four-year-old daughter to the emergency room. Sarah had fallen and needed three little stitches in her bottom lip. The nurses strapped her into a velcro blanket they called a "papoose." it wraps around a child so that she cannot move. Sarah cried. they placed the sterile filed over her face with the hole over her bleeding lower lip. I searched for her hands to hold. They were plastered to h er side, unable to move. She looked through a little hole in the sterile sheet while the instruments darted in and out. She cried, "Daddy make them stop. Make them stop Daddy, please. Daddy it hurts!" "Be still sweet heart. It will be alright," I said, feeling anything but alright myself. "Hold on. Daddy's right here. Daddy's right here." "But Daddy it hurts. Make them stop!" It was accusation. It was plea. it was prayer.

Eventually the process was over and the medical staff took off the papoose. Then Sarah jumped into her father's arms. Her petitions to "make them stop" went unanswered. Her father hadn't stopped them. But now she just "clung to me with an unwavering trust." She didn't cast her father aside as one who was not capable of fulfilling the most simple of promises. She didn't walk or run away. She clung tightly to him because she believes that he is the one who will be there for her beyond the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Suffering is a reality and God's place in it is just trustworthy if we are stubborn enough to believe that.

While I sit drinking my Wittenberg Beer with Philip and Amsdorf, the Gospel runs its course and overthrows empires. -- Martin Luther

Karl Barth connects this Martin Luther quote to the Gospel lesson for tomorrow, Mark 4:26ff Unlike Jesus Kingdom parables about building houses, this parable makes clear that the Kingdom of God will come whether we work at it or not. Building buildings needs stone masons, carpenters, joiners, roofers and on and on. The growth of the Kingdom of God as progress from seed to plant will happen whether one "sets hands to work or folds them or even lays them in [our] lap [we] can only be a spectator and affirm that it takes place "He knoweth not how" (Mark 4:28)--in a process which continues both when he works and also when he does not, but is perhaps, in the words of Luther, while, "Drinking beer with Philip and Amsdorf" (Philip Melanchthon and Nicolaus von Amsdorf)
Barth goes on (Book IV, vol 2 pp632 ff) to contrast these two parables of building and sowing

It is a matter of their [Christians] spiritual growth, and not therefore of a growth which they themselves can direct. It will continually have for them the greatest of surprises, sometimes glad and sometime bitter. In moments when [the church] is resolved to offer "reasonable service," the plans and efforts of Christians will have to be ruled by it, and not the reverse. To their own astonishment it will continually exalt the lowly, enrich the poor, give joy to the sad and make heroes of the feeble.... And as it grows spiritually, there is no compulsion but it may grow in the first way, extensively and numerically. (p. 650.)

 What are the marks of such growth? Barth lists them nicely:

• growth in faith (2Cor 10:15)
• increase in love (2 Thess 1:3)
• increase in the knowledge of God (Col 1:10ff) with strengthening endurance and joyful patience.
• growth in the fruits of righteousness (2Cor 9:10)
• growth in grace (2 Pet 3:18)
• Incrase of comfort (2 Cor 1:5)
• Thanksgiving (2 Cor 4:15)
• the grace for every good work (2 Cor 9:8)
• Hope (Rom 15:13)
• enrichment of love in knowledge and understanding (Phil 1:9)

And then he summarizes by saying that the increase of growth for the Christian Community is "both horizontal and vertical" and is the spiritual progress of the sancti in their relationship to the sancta.