Friday, March 11, 2022

13. Suffering Wisely and Well


Suffering Wisely and Well: The Grief of Job and the Grace of God. Eric Ortlund. 2022. 193 pages. [Source: Review copy]

First sentence: This book is about suffering both wisely and well as a Christian. 

Suffering Wisely and Well is mostly a commentary on the book of Job. Ortlund works through the book of Job. His approach is mainly to look at what each person (and God) has to say. (There are also chapters on the introduction and conclusion to the book of Job.) I believe his lens of reading is a practical one. What can you--the reader--learn from the book of Job. Even the super-messy wrong-ness of Job's friends is spun as a lesson of how not to interact with modern-day sufferers. At times the present is stressed so much that the focus is never on the past context. 

One thing that I definitely appreciated was how each chapter ended in a very straight-forward, no-nonsense summary; it was even numbered. It was as if the author was saying: here are the important points I was making in this chapter.

This one definitely has some insights. Like, "Job's friends are actually his tormentors, and no matter how much stage time they are given, they cannot manage to say a single helpful thing to him."

Suffering Wisely and Well isn't your traditional commentary on Job. It opens almost by pretending to be something it's not. The opening chapter makes it sound like it's going to be about ALL types of suffering and how you can use these principles of suffering to discern in what ways you (and others) are suffering and learn how to do it wisely and well. But literally every other chapter in the book is a commentary from the book of Job. 

© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible

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