Stage Play — A Bible Study

May 23, 2025

While holding to the fact that the Bible is an accurate historical, meat and potatoes, warts and all presentation, it still could be likened to a morality play. It has been being acted out for everyone’s benefit. Yet, the people involved are not actors in costumes. They are very real people living out their real lives with real tragedies and real successes, real suffering amidst real happiness…

Reading the Book of Job again — as if for the very first time — my inkling that the whole Bible story is playing to a larger audience than Mankind was bolstered.

You see, suffering under a loving and all-powerful God is a hard, hard, extremely hard topic to transfigure from the temporal plane of our existence to the perspective of God who exists in the eternal realm. Simply, it is like a raging river I am attempting to navigate in my small rowboat of an essay…

When someone near and dear dies, perhaps in their prime, to friends and family, it is an unbearable and senseless tragedy.

The Bible seems to interject a radically different reaction.

Although God knows we will weep — Jesus wept — there is a real hope that is eternal — that the person has a soul which lives on in the eternal realm, places that God made for us — waiting rooms of sorts — then Paradise or other.

Look at these two Bible excerpts with the one backing up the other:

• Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind who have no hope. — 1 Thessalonians 4:13, NIV.
• Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.- Matthew 10:28–31, (NIV).

Now, Job suffered the loss of everything material he had gained, absolutely everything, and, worst of all, his loss was followed by losing all his adult children.

Yet, while suffering all of these calamities, this is how he reacted:

In all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing. — Job 1:22. (BSB)

Apparent to me is that Job lived very successfully in the temporal, earthly realm, gaining much wealth, but also had his eyes fixed on the eternal realm of the living God.

The book doesn’t tell us much about Job’s personality — only this:

There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. And this man was blameless and upright, fearing God and shunning evil. — Job 1:1, BSB.

So, now comes the question, “Why did God allow evil to overwhelm Job?” For that matter, why does God allow evil to overcome anyone?

My thought is that it is a matter of perspective.

God is eternal and therefore, He sees everything through the eyes of Eternity.

People, on the other hand, generally see everything through the temporal, the immediate situation. We have little to no foresight whatsoever.

We seem to quite naturally take the short view, while God — also quite naturally — takes the long view. Or should I say “He supernaturally takes the long view?” (I am not saying that this means God does not pay attention to the everyday details of our lives.)

Here is an excerpt from the Bible that expresses what I am trying to convey:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. — Isaiah 55:8–9, NIV.

Here’s the view from the Apostle Paul:

Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for common use? — Romans 9:21, NIV.

If you are following my logic so far, maybe it will add significance to the request in the Lord’s Prayer:

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. — Matthew 6:13, NIV.

It’s something to consider, anyways, and it dovetails into the story of Job…

Finally, if we can work all that into our thinking, maybe we can respond to this:

Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey — whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? — Romans 6:16, NIV.

There is so much in the Bible that we need to learn for our own good, our own true hope and true prosperity, regarding Eternity. Also, there is so much enlightenment for the life we now are living…

I am just an ordinary old man, still learning as I go, but as a 50 year long Born Again Bible Believing Christian, I do continue to have this responsibility to share what I have come to know to be true — the essential part is that God truly exists and rewards whoever truly and earnestly seeks Him out.

Please seek Him out.

After Jesus came into my life, there have been so many blessings in my life — from deliverance from nicotine and alcohol addictions to receiving a loving, capable, and dedicated wife and family…

Oh, there have been so many times I’ve been a disappointment to myself, my family, my friends and to God… But He remains faithful. So, be encouraged with this Bible excerpt which I have found to be oh so true:

…He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus. — Philippians 1:6, NIV.

P.S. — I strongly recommend reading all of Job, chapter Two, that demonstrates a person going through the legions of pain and agony of tragedy — just like you or I would — which — shows that God, Jesus, and the Bible never try to hide any facts of life from us.