The fundamental lesson of the book of Job, like that of the Bible as a whole, is quite simple: our sole hope and only anchor in the midst of suffering or prosperity is knowing God and God alone in his sovereignty and grace. Moreover, Job teaches that our suffering itself is the matrix within which we learn this all-important lesson, since suffering, like no other experience on earth, brings us "face to face" with God himself. The primary purpose of suffering is to make God known to us.

This is not an easy "answer" to the problem of evil. To say that suffering ultimately exists so that God can glorify himself by making himself known in all his majesty and mercy is of little comfort for most people. Only those who recognize that their deepest joy is knowing God will take solace from such a conclusion. But as the book of Job also illustrates, this is a hard lesson to learn.

A poignant modern-day example is C. S. Lewis's experience of meeting God through the severe suffering he encountered in the loss of his wife, Joy Gresham. More than 20 years earlier, in writing The Problem of Pain, Lewis had testified that suffering serves a good purpose, since it drives us to God: "It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that he is our only good. Rather, God is the only good of all creatures…The kind and degree may vary with the creature's nature; but that there ever could be any other good is an atheistic dream."

In his subsequent novel, Till We Have Faces, the Job-like figure, Queen Orual, therefore declares at the end of her pilgrimage, "I know now, Lord, why you utter no answers. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answers would suffice?"

However, when Lewis's wife, with whom he had fallen in love and married late in life, died, Lewis confessed that his ideas about who God is and how he acts were called into question. Nevertheless, through his suffering, Lewis eventually came to know more profoundly than ever before the God he had written about. In Lewis's own words:

He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down…My idea of God was not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. God shatters it himself. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence?…And only suffering could do it.