Why do bad things happen to good people? This is the question of theodicy, which humans have wrestled with for millennia. Job is an answer to that question in Jewish and Christian traditions, albeit a potentially unhelpful and confusing one. In order to dig into Job 38 when God responds, we must take the book as a whole, in particular Job’s original poetic expository in chapter 3.
The logic in much of the Hebrew scriptures is rooted in good things happening to good people, and bad things happening to bad people. Did your crops fail this year, and your community experience a famine? Someone must have angered God. Did you pray, fast, and keep all the commandments? Surely, you will receive blessings and rewards a hundredfold.
Yet, we know life often does not work out in such a simple cause-and-effect fashion. Accidents happen. People get sick. You’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and the consequences ripple out affecting your future. We find ourselves caught up in stratified systems that treat some of us with more grace and others with punishment based on the color of our skin, where we were born, who we love, and how much money we have.
The book of Job explores these questions by bringing us the story of a righteous, blameless man who experiences an abundance of seemingly inexplicable suffering. Job loses all earthly possessions, his family, and even endures chronic pain from his head to his toes. After everything, he cries out for answers in chapter 3, taking God to account for why he has endured so much suffering. He wishes to never be born, to even erase the day he was conceived.
I imagine this death wish poem may resonate with many of us, particularly queer and trans folks. Is this what we cry out during sleepless nights as we wonder: Will I find acceptance in my family when we share our new name, pronouns, and identity? Will God ever make the bullying stop? How can I live with this depression and anxiety? Where will I find my next fix to dull and escape the overwhelm? When will the pain and suffering end? Is my partner going to hurt me again because of our sexual and gender identity? What will I do if I don’t have access to life-saving medication? Can I live through that? What will happen the next time I have to show my ID? What if I can’t pay the bills this month? When will I have the family I long for?
After the three rounds of debate with Job’s friends, God finally enters the chat. How does God respond? God’s poetic answer to Job’s death wish is full of lofty words about the magnitude of creation. It covers the heights, depths, and breadth of all God has created across the eons. Like any good poetry, the fullness of meaning in both of these pieces of scripture cannot be contained in one literal reading. Still, it is not a satisfying answer that responds directly to Job’s cries and concerns.
What does this say to the queer Christian today? Some don’t believe that we exist. We may find ourselves too queer for Christian spaces, too Christian for queer spaces, and not the right kind of Christian or human for the White Christian Nationalist agenda. What is this message for the queer Christian afraid to come out, the trans person waiting anxiously for their passport documents to come back, hoping that they will have the correct gender marker?
I see good news in God’s response.
In the midst of acute crisis and suffering, God invites us to zoom out, to take a longer view in the course of God’s story. Job is focused on the self, the ego, his personal suffering, which is enormous and unbearable. However, God’s poem reminds us that while humans are important, they may not always be the center of God’s care for creation. When Job wanted to extinguish light, to die, God’s answer was to tell the story of birth, life, light, and creation. What can we learn from the beautiful imagery in nature, confirming that queerness, transgender existence, and gender-bending has always been part of God’s story of creation, in both nature and humanity?
As M Jade Kaiser tells us, God created night and day, light and dark, land and sea, but God also created dusk and dawn, marshes and swamps, those beautiful in-between spaces.[1] If we hold to God’s role in creation, then God created the clownfish, cardinal, bearded dragon, green sea turtle, butterflies, banana slugs, coral, cyad trees, and all the plants and animals that can change their sex. It is, in fact, humanity that imposed a rigid hierarchy of binaries onto all that God created and called good.
When humans are so focused on deciding who is in or out, trying to create order out of chaos, maybe God is busy running around with the lions and ravens. If the Genesis creation stories show how God brought good order to the chaotic cosmos, God’s speech in Job shows that there are parts of the wild creation that God does not choose to subdue.
In the depth of his suffering, Job saw only darkness. God responds, saying we need both darkness and light – not that there is only light (Job 38:19 NRSVUE). There is a place for both. God recognizes this enduring truth. As Frederick Buechner puts it, “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.”[2] There will never be only one story or one side. There is room for the fullness and complexity of our stories and lives.
Those Christians invested in rigid binaries, gender roles, and patriarchal understandings of God may be shocked to see how God embodies fathering as well as mothering aspects in this poem. God is the midwife of creation, present at the birth of all that we know, clothing the earth with clouds and giving darkness as a swaddling band (Job 38:9 NRSVUE). Later, God insinuates “father[ing] the drops of dew” and “given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven” (38:28-29 NRSVUE). There is no confusion for God in these gendered statements, and God is magnanimous enough to embody all of these roles.
We are all created in God’s image. Might we see the beauty of humans who embody these different roles by nature of circumstance and identity? Single parents who lovingly raise their children, as well as trans, nonbinary, and queer folks who transgress white cisheteropatriarchal understandings of the “natural” world follow in the ways of God.
In a time when a small group of people motivated by control and domination threatens anyone who does not fall into an impossibly narrow definition of “right,” many of us may feel like Job, ready to give up. We are experiencing real, enduring suffering: of unending wars, increased state-sanctioned violence, disappearings and separations, attacks on families, communities, and healthcare, climate destruction, decimation of structures and institutions, former “allies” no longer by our sides in the streets, fear and uncertainty about who and what will be targeted next. What in the world is happening?! Why is this happening to us?
No matter what, random acts of chaos and tragedy will continue. It does not mean that they are signs of divine retribution punishing us for our sins. It just means that bad things happen. We will never control our way out of that. So how do we live with these tensions, these unresolved questions, these unsatisfying answers?
Wherever you are in the personal, communal, professional, political, and global nature of this tumult, God encourages you to step back, zoom out, and take a longer view. Where is God in all of this? Maybe not where you want to see God or where you expect to find God at work. What can we learn from communities who have endured suffering across history? How do we make space for beauty, joy, and laughter without diminishing the real pain, suffering, heartbreak, and grief? Queer communities and communities throughout time and space living under oppression have created ways for joy to persist in the midst of pain.
Maybe that is when we need to look toward each other to find the divine. Connect more deeply with a hyper-local community. Are there acts of service you can do to love your neighbor right now? Are there others seeking connection in the midst of suffering? Where is the beauty around you persisting amid the horrors?
Through it all, Job 38 reminds us that God created birth, life, creation, and celebrates all of it, just as She celebrates you! There is a place for you here. Don’t leave. Stay with us. We need you through the beautiful and terrible parts of it all.
Watch the Queering Job Writer Interview with Rev. Angela Tyler-Williams here.
[1] Hartke, Austen. 2018. Transforming: The Bible and the Lives of Transgender Christians. Westminster John Knox Press, 51.
[2] Buechner, Frederick. “Hope through Grace,” Frederick Buechner, accessed June 6, 2025, https://www.frederickbuechner.com/hope-through-grace.
Rev. Angela Tyler-Williams (She/Her) is Co-Director for Movement Building at SACReD (Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity). SACReD is an alliance of religious leaders, organizers, academics, and congregations collaborating to advance reproductive justice through congregational education, designation, and community organizing. Angela is a queer pastor ordained by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) into her call to engage people of faith to speak publicly and politically in support of reproductive health, rights, and justice and LGBTQIA+ equality. In her free time, Angela volunteers as a clergy counselor with Faith Aloud Talkline. She lives with her family in Washington, DC.
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