From https://bible.org/seriespage/24-ideal-submission-job
“The Puzzling Question
The question in the background of the Book of Job is, “Why do the righteous suffer?” The major part of this book is a description of man’s efforts to find an answer to this puzzling question.
The Popular Answer
The easiest answer from a human perspective is that God brings trouble in man’s life as a consequence of his sin. Trouble indicates some sin in man. If we believe that God is love and God is all-powerful, then the source of pain cannot be in God; it must be in man. Man brings pain on himself because of his sin. God is holy and so cannot tolerate sin in a man’s life, and He cannot let any sin go unpunished. There is a cause and effect relationship between pain and sin. Every effect has a cause behind it; every trouble and pain has a sin behind it. According to this law of cause and effect, there is no pain without sin.
[The] basic argument is that there is no pain without sin in a person’s life. God punishes sin, and the person is seemingly being punished by God, and so he must have sinned. Job must have committed some terrible sin; now finally God has caught up with his sin, and he is now suffering the full reward of his sin.
Support From the Scriptures
The Scriptures seem to support this argument, and it is true that God does bring affliction as a result of a particular sin in a person’s life.
In the Old Testament, God clearly warned the people of Israel of the consequences of their sins. “If you obey Me, you will be blessed” (Deuteronomy 28:1-14). “But if you disobey Me, you will be punished” (Deuteronomy 28:15-68). Leviticus 26 also spells out the rewards of obedience and punishment for disobedience. In both Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26, the list of punishments for disobedience is much longer than the list of rewards for obedience!
There are also many individual examples in the Bible in which a person received punishment for a particular sin in his life. For example, God punished David for his sin of adultery with Bathsheba, and the child born of this relationship died (2 Samuel 12:15-20). In another case, David took a census against the will of God, and 70,000 of the people died by the plague that the Lord had sent as a punishment for David’s sin (2 Samuel 24:1-17). Elisha’s servant Gehzi, because of his greed, took presents from Naaman the Syrian and was struck with leprosy (2 Kings 5:19-27). King Uzziah was one of the good kings in Judah. He reigned in Jerusalem for 52 years and, “he did what was right in the eyes of the Lord.” But after he became powerful, he became proud, and in his pride, he entered the temple of the Lord to burn incense on the altar. He did what only priests consecrated to burn incense could do. As a result, he had leprosy until the day of his death
(2 Chronicles 26:1-21).
In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul says, “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (Romans 1:18). And, “Men committed indecent acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for the perversion” (Romans 1:27). Ananias and Sapphira lied to God, and they both received instant punishment of death (Acts 5:1-11).
So, it is clear from the Scripture that God does sometimes bring calamity in a person’s or nation’s life as a result of some particular sin. However, obviously this does not apply in every situation where a person is suffering. Because God does punish sin and sometimes brings calamity as a result of a particular sin in a person’s life, this does not mean that whenever a person is in a difficulty or is suffering, it must be a result of his sin. Whenever we see suffering, we are tempted to apply the faulty logic of Job’s friends: God brings suffering as a punishment for sin. The person is suffering, so he must have sinned and is being punished for his sin.
This theory obviously does not answer Job’s situation. The question is not “why do the wicked suffer?” We have a seemingly logical and plausible answer to that question. Our question is: “Why do the righteous suffer?” In Job’s case, it is so plain that he was not suffering as a result of a particular sin in his life. His character was spotless – as much as a human being’s character can be. As we noted earlier, the book opens with a statement that gives an excellent commendation on his character: “This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil” (1:1), and God Himself uses exactly the same words for him in front of Satan.
So, our problem of pain is not solved by the popular argument represented by Job’s three friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. It is too simplistic and does not apply to Job’s and many other situations in our own experience. When a person, who has lived his whole life doing what is pleasing to God and has been a blessing to all the people around him, is overwhelmed by insurmountable suffering, we cannot help but wonder about God’s justice system and ask Him “Why?” Job’s friends do not have the answer. They are convinced that troubles inevitably indicate a presence of sin. Whereas Job’s question (and ours too) is: “He destroys both the blameless and the wicked” (9:22). Why?”