When assigned to write about theodicy, I did not have any clue about how I felt on this subject. Since Tuesday, I have talked to my grandmother, my mother, some of my sisters, and read the entire book of Job, trying to figure out what I thought about God's Justice. I am no closer to gaining any understanding of why God allows the innocent to die along with the wicked, at least in the spiritual sense. I have experienced as I am sure everyone else has personal tragedy that no can understand why it happened. My personal faith has allowed me to trust blindly that God had a plan for His actions. As I said before, I have no idea if God's justice is right or wrong and probably will never know.
In the literary sense, I understand the reasoning for having Job suffer to make a point in the Bible. Allowing one of his faithful servants to suffer as no other man had before made an example of him and tried not only his faith but the faith of others around him. I believe that this story was about being true to oneself, just as much as it was about loyalty to God. One verse that I found to be extraordinarily insightful "till I die I will not remove my integrity from me. My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as live." Throughout Job I did not find a satisfactory answer to the question of God's justice, but instead I found the answer to wisdom. To be wise it to stay true to oneself and to admit that we know nothing; that is the key to true wisdom. Thus to understand theodicy, one must say that I do not understand why God did as he did and then one would be truly wise in the theory of theodicy, as Job was.
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