Job suffered but didn't lose faith in his Redeemer. Image created by ChatGPT.

Job, Jesus Christ, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants

When Job 1–2, Job 19, Job 38–42, John 9, Mosiah 24, and Doctrine and Covenants 121–122 are read together, a remarkably consistent picture emerges. The scriptures do not give one simple explanation for all suffering. Instead, they challenge the assumption that suffering proves wickedness and teach that adversity can become a setting for faith, revelation, spiritual growth, and ultimately redemption through Jesus Christ.

Scripture	The suffering	What it teaches
Job 1–2	Job loses his possessions, children, health, and security despite being described as righteous.	Righteousness does not protect a person from every tragedy. Suffering is not necessarily punishment for sin.
Job 19	Job feels abandoned by friends and even by God.	Faith can coexist with grief and unanswered questions. Job nevertheless declares hope in his living Redeemer.
Job 38–42	God finally answers Job, but does not give him a simple explanation for his suffering.	God’s knowledge and purposes exceed human understanding. Faith sometimes requires trusting God without knowing why.
John 9:1–3	A man has been blind from birth. The disciples assume someone’s sin must explain it.	Jesus explicitly rejects the idea that suffering necessarily results from personal sin. God’s works can be manifested through human adversity.
Mosiah 24:8–16	Alma’s righteous people are enslaved and persecuted.	God does not immediately remove their burdens. He first strengthens them so they can bear them; eventually He delivers them.
D&C 121	Joseph Smith suffers in Liberty Jail and asks, “O God, where art thou?”	God permits honest questioning. Adversity can be temporary in an eternal perspective. Joseph is explicitly compared with Job.
D&C 122	The Lord describes increasingly terrible possibilities Joseph might experience.	Adversity can “give thee experience” and ultimately work for one’s good. Christ has descended below all suffering.

1. Good people sometimes suffer precisely when they have done nothing to deserve it

This is perhaps the clearest lesson obtained by reading these passages together.

Job 1:1 deliberately establishes Job’s character before describing his catastrophes. He is “perfect and upright,” fears God, and avoids evil.

Yet almost everything is taken from him.

That fact is essential to the book’s theology. Job’s friends continually try to make suffering fit a simple formula:

Righteousness → blessings
Sin → suffering

Job’s experience demonstrates that mortal life is more complicated.

Jesus makes essentially the same correction in John 9. Seeing a man blind from birth, the disciples ask:

“Who did sin, this man, or his parents?”

Jesus answers:

“Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents.”

Christ therefore explicitly rejects the disciples’ attempt to identify someone’s moral guilt from his physical suffering.

Collective lesson: We should be extremely cautious about interpreting another person’s tragedy as evidence of God’s displeasure.

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2. Sometimes God does not tell us why

This may be one of the most profound aspects of Job.

Job repeatedly wants an explanation. When God finally speaks in Job 38–41, He gives Job something different.

Rather than explaining the chain of events in chapters 1–2, God reveals something about Himself.

He asks Job questions about creation, nature, life, and the universe—matters vastly beyond Job’s control or comprehension.

The message is not simply, “You aren’t intelligent enough to understand.”

It is closer to:

You cannot see everything I see.

That changes Job’s perspective. In Job 42:3, Job acknowledges that he had spoken about things “too wonderful” for him to understand.

This is important because scripture does not promise that faithful people will receive a satisfactory explanation for every tragedy during mortality.

Sometimes the answer to “Why?” becomes “Do you trust Me even when you cannot see what I see?”

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3. Faith does not require pretending that suffering doesn’t hurt

Job cries out. He mourns. He questions. He wishes he had never been born.

Joseph Smith does something remarkably similar from Liberty Jail:

“O God, where art thou?”
— D&C 121:1

That is significant.

The Lord does not condemn Joseph for asking the question.

Instead He answers:

“My son, peace be unto thy soul…”

The scriptures therefore distinguish questioning God in anguish from abandoning God.

A faithful person can simultaneously say:

“I believe in God”

and

“I don’t understand why God is allowing this.”

Job and Joseph Smith both demonstrate that those statements can coexist.

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4. God may strengthen us before He removes the burden

Mosiah 24 adds an especially important Restoration perspective.

Alma’s people pray for deliverance from oppression. God hears them—but He doesn’t immediately eliminate the problem.

Instead:

“I will also ease the burdens which are put upon your shoulders…”

Then comes the remarkable description:

“The Lord did strengthen them that they could bear up their burdens with ease.”

Only afterward does God deliver them.

There is a progression:

Burden → Prayer → Strength → Endurance → Deliverance

We often pray for God to change the circumstance.

Mosiah 24 teaches that sometimes His first miracle is to change our capacity to endure the circumstance.

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5. Suffering can become experience rather than merely loss

The Doctrine and Covenants takes the principle another step.

The Lord tells Joseph:

“Know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.”
— D&C 122:7

Notice that the Lord does not call terrible things good.

Rather, He says they can be for thy good.

That distinction matters.

The scriptures do not require us to call disease, death, persecution, betrayal, or tragedy good. They teach that God can take experiences that are genuinely painful and bring something redemptive from them.

This is very different from saying, “Everything happens because God wanted it to happen.”

These passages do not support such a simple conclusion.

They support the stronger and more nuanced proposition:

Whatever happens, God can work through it.

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6. Job’s great answer ultimately points toward a Redeemer

In the middle of Job’s misery comes one of the Old Testament’s great declarations of hope:

“For I know that my redeemer liveth…”
— Job 19:25

Job’s circumstances have not yet changed.

His health isn’t restored. His losses haven’t been reversed. His questions haven’t been answered.

Yet he places his ultimate hope in a living Redeemer.

That becomes especially meaningful when read alongside the New Testament and Restoration scripture.

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7. Jesus Christ changes the question

Doctrine and Covenants 122 reaches its theological climax with Christ:

“The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?”
— D&C 122:8

This may be the most important answer of all.

Christianity does not present a God who merely watches human beings suffer from a distance.

God entered mortality and suffered Himself.

Jesus experienced rejection, betrayal, loneliness, injustice, physical agony, grief, temptation, and death.

Thus the Christian response to Job is ultimately not merely a philosophical explanation of suffering.

It is Jesus Christ.

Job says:

“I know that my redeemer liveth.”

The Doctrine and Covenants declares that this Redeemer has “descended below them all.”

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So why do good people suffer?

Taken together, these scriptures suggest several answers:

1. Not all suffering is punishment for sin. Job and John 9 make this particularly clear.
2. Mortality includes genuine adversity, even for the righteous. Covenant faithfulness does not guarantee an adversity-free life.
3. We do not always know God’s purposes. Job never receives the kind of detailed causal explanation he initially seeks.
4. God can manifest His works through suffering. Jesus teaches this in John 9.
5. God sometimes strengthens us rather than immediately removing our burdens. Mosiah 24 illustrates this beautifully.
6. Adversity can produce experience and spiritual growth. D&C 122:7 explicitly teaches this.
7. It is permissible to grieve and ask God difficult questions. Both Job and Joseph Smith do so.
8. Deliverance may not come immediately. Job, Alma’s people, and Joseph all endure before circumstances change.
9. Our perspective is incomplete. Job 38–42 emphasizes the enormous difference between God’s knowledge and ours.
10. The ultimate Christian answer to suffering is Christ. He does not merely explain suffering; He enters it, descends beneath it, and ultimately overcomes it.

A particularly powerful progression

Read sequentially, I think these passages form an unusually meaningful Restoration scripture study:

Job 1–2:
Why is this happening to a good person?

↓

Job 19:
Even though I don’t understand, “I know that my redeemer liveth.”

↓

Job 38–42:
God sees realities that I cannot see.

↓

John 9:
Do not assume suffering means someone has sinned.

↓

Mosiah 24:
Sometimes God strengthens us before He delivers us.

↓

D&C 121:
“O God, where art thou?” — It is permissible to ask.

↓

D&C 122:
“All these things shall give thee experience.”

↓

Jesus Christ:
“The Son of Man hath descended below them all.”

The central message

Taken together, I would summarize their teaching this way:

Good people do not suffer simply because they are good or bad. Mortality includes suffering whose purposes we may not presently understand. God does not promise that the faithful will avoid adversity, but He promises His presence, strength, perspective, and eventual redemption. We may not receive an answer to every “Why?” in this life, but Christianity gives an answer to “Who is with me in it?”—Jesus Christ, who descended below all things and lives as our Redeemer.

That, in many ways, is the Restoration’s answer to the question Job began asking thousands of years ago.

Labels: Adversity, endurance, faith, redemption, Suffering