Life is Tough but Jesus is Tougher: How Job Suffered

Life is tough, but Jesus is tougher. This truth becomes strikingly evident when we examine Job’s sufferings, a man whose trials were so severe that James 5:11 holds them up as an example of patient endurance. While we explored previously why Job suffered, we must now confront the more visceral question: How did Job suffer?

Job’s sufferings were unique in their intensity and scope. Imagine the outcry if a bus carrying forty schoolchildren crashed, resulting in their deaths. The president would speak. Ministers would attend the funeral. A state funeral might be held. Yet Job lost ten children in a single day, along with countless servants, and virtually no one came to his aid. His sufferings unfolded in at least four devastating ways: loss of property, death in the family, sickness in his body, and relational fractures with those closest to him.

Job’s first wave of suffering came through the complete destruction of his resources. In 1:13–17, we read of a carefully orchestrated series of catastrophes. The Sabeans attacked, stealing his oxen and donkeys while murdering his servants. Before the messenger finished delivering this news, another arrived reporting that fire from heaven—likely lightning—had consumed seven thousand sheep and their shepherds. Then came news that Chaldean raiders had taken his camels and slaughtered more servants.

This was not the loss of average possessions. Job 1:3 tells us he was “the greatest of all the people of the east.” In modern terms, imagine the sheriff arriving to repossess all your vehicles, followed immediately by someone taking your house, then your phones, then everything else you own—all within minutes. Yet even that comparison falls short, because Job did not understand why this was happening.

What Job did not know was that God had stretched out his hand, allowing Satan to test him. Behind the human raiders, the natural disasters, and the seeming randomness, stood divine permission and demonic attack. As the book makes clear, Satan operated only within the boundaries set by a sovereign God who declared to him, “Behold, all that he has is in your hand. Only against him do not stretch out your hand” (1:12).

While Job was reeling from the loss of his property, the worst news arrived. In 1:18–19, a messenger reported that a great wind—similar to a tornado—had struck the house where all his children were feasting together, and they were dead. Seven sons and three daughters gone in an instant.

I lost my father in 2005 and my mother in 2013, eight years apart. That was painful, but I cannot compare it to this. Some of you know what it means to lose a child, to hold a stillborn baby, to suffer a miscarriage. But ten children? All at once? This was not merely tragedy; it was massacre.

What makes this even more harrowing is that the servants caring for the livestock were also killed. Only one messenger survived each attack to bring the news. This was meticulous cruelty from the devil: kill everyone, leave one to report, and send him running immediately so there is no respite between waves of grief.

For Job, this also meant the end of his legacy. At that time, a man without sons faced the prospect of his name vanishing from the earth, as if he had never existed at all.

As if property loss and the death of his children were insufficient, Satan returned for a second round. In 2:7–8, we read: “So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD and struck Job with loathsome sores from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. And he took a piece of broken pottery with which to scrape himself and sat in the ashes.”

This reminds us that Christians can and do get sick. We see this throughout the New Testament: Epaphroditus nearly died from illness (Philippians 2:27), Trophimus was left sick (2 Timothy 4:20), and Timothy struggled with frequent ailments (1 Timothy 5:23). A theology that denies this reality is not aligned with Scripture or with life as we experience it.

Job had lost everything, and now he was losing his health. He sat in ashes, scraping his sores with broken pottery, a picture of complete desolation.

Perhaps most painful of all was Job’s relational suffering. In 2:9, his wife—who had also lost all their children and possessions—said to him, “Do you still hold fast your integrity? Curse God and die.”

Remember who predicted Job would curse God? Satan himself. Augustine called Job’s wife “the devil’s advocate.” While we can show her some grace, recognising her own grief and loss, her words added another burden to her husband’s suffering. The one person from whom Job might have expected comfort and solidarity instead pushed him away from the only source of life.

Then came his friends—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. After sitting silently for seven days, they began to speak, and Job probably wished they had remained silent. They operated from the assumption that suffering always results from personal sin, and so they became investigators, hunting for Job’s hidden transgression. “Confess, Job,” they insisted. “No one is righteous before God. This is your fault.“

Imagine losing everything, sitting in ashes covered with sores, and having your closest friends tell you it is all your fault. This is suffering compounded by isolation and accusation.

Yet there is one who suffered even more than Job: Jesus Christ. Unlike Job, who suffered as a righteous sinner, Christ suffered as a perfectly righteous man. He was betrayed, denied, and abandoned by his disciples. His family initially did not believe in him. His hometown rejected him. Religious leaders crucified him.

But Christ’s suffering had a different purpose. Job suffered as a test of faith; Christ suffered so that those who come to him in faith need never suffer God’s wrath. Job’s suffering was temporal and limited; Christ’s suffering secured eternal salvation. Job’s livestock was restored, he had more children, and he lived another 140 years in peace. Christ’s suffering purchased something far greater: redemption from sin and rescue from hell.

For those who reject Christ, a suffering far worse than Job’s awaits—the eternal suffering of hell, where God’s wrath burns without limit or end, where there is no restoration, no relief, and no hope. But for those who turn to Christ in faith, his suffering becomes our salvation. Though we may suffer in this world, we suffer with hope, knowing that he has conquered, and that our present troubles are producing “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

Life is indeed tough, but Jesus is tougher—tough enough to endure the cross, and faithful enough to sustain us through every trial.