Job is, as the book tells us, a righteous man, who God allows Satan to torment. Job is in a miserable state and can’t figure out why. Friends come to visit him and sit with him in commiseration for a few days.  

Then Job speaks to vent his frustration. His friends are convinced that, given Job’s misfortune, and given what God has said about how the wicked and the good, there is only one possible reason for job’s current condition: sin.

At first they commiserate, but as Job protests his innocence, they push harder.

Then the more Job resists, the more they are convinced that he must be in sin since they believe he is accusing God of wrongly bringing him down.

They do jump to conclusions, but it seems to me that an important lesson for us is that we need to be careful of thinking we have a full picture, even when we are convinced we have scriptural grounds.

The friends aren’t idiots, and they have biblical grounds for their reasoning (Deut 28-29 lists the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience, but as God’s answer shows us (Job 38-42), their picture is too small.

That’s a tough lesson, and in one sense, it can leave us aimless on an open sea. If Job’s friends had the word, but the lesson from all this is that they still didn’t have a full enough picture, then the lesson we take from them would leave us reluctant to ever form a judgment.  

The ending chapters of Job have God speaking and telling Job that he doesn’t have a full understanding of things. On one level, the lesson is that even in hardship, continue to trust God. But maybe on a secondary level, those of us on the outside looking in need a healthy dose of epistemic humility because we don’t have a full understanding.

That isn’t the same thing as assuming we can’t make any judgments about life, but it isn’t lost on me that the Pharisee’s themselves had plenty of reasons, at least in their minds, why Jesus couldn’t be the Messiah, that justified them in rejecting him. But of course they badly screwed up, and in such a way that they not only missed the Messiah, they actively rejected him and even killed him.

In all this, I want to have that epistemic humility that I’m only in one place. Even if I have an accurate view from where I am, I am still restricted in what I can see, and it’s never a full enough picture. Every one of us in the same boat: we are always limited in our perspective.