Day 147: Job 19, 20 and 21

Why do the wicked live on? (Job 21:7)

There’s the crux of the matter. I know bad things happen to good people, but if it at least seemed like the scales were balanced and that the wicked suffered as much as the righteous, then I could say, Well, trouble comes to us all in equal measure.

But that’s not how it seems. While I’m struggling to pay my bills; while I’m suffering through illness and injury; while my kids are making bad choices causing me to lose sleep, my neighbor just bought another boat. Why does he need two boats? How is that fair, God?

It’s not so much that good people suffer, but that bad people so often seem to get a pass. Why do they have the advantage?

Near the end of the 1989 movie Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s character Ray Kinsella confronts baseball right fielder Shoeless Joe Jackson. Kinsella complains how he did all the work and went to all the expense to build a baseball field in the middle of his struggling farm, and he’s about to go under.

Kinsella: Never once have I asked, “What’s in it for me?”

Jackson: What are you saying, Ray?

Kinsella: I’m saying, What’s in it for me?

Looking at the seeming disparity between the lifestyles of the rich and famous and the lifestyle of the average believer, can you understand why Job thought life seemed unfair?

Have you ever asked, “What’s in it for me?”