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.