Because Job is an Old Testament book, it is very likely that God's answer to Job was the one that the people of the Old Testament era could understand.

42Oolon, you do have a beginning of the concept of Eternal Moment when you are able to reply to me in one box, and reply to Kevin in another box. While some may see this as a simple line of events, there is, in using your memory, a loop back to the earlier thought which allows you to create a new line of thought without ending the line of thought which began before Kevin's reply.

To continue the visual image, you may imagine your life spread along a traditional time-line, such as may be used in history classes to chart changes across years. Add to this a loop from your present moment back to the point on the line which represents a memory. Reading the word "and" represents many memory loops connected to the alphabet, learning to read, print, write, type, accommodate different fonts, connotations, denotations, etc. until that loop becomes pretty fuzzy looking.

Sometimes these memory loops are severed, and the memory is lost. Sometimes, these memory loops carry the full and complete event to the 'present', which we may refer to as 'deja vu' or 'flashback'.

Jump from learning theory to physics. Thought = energy = (matter x speed of light) squared, which can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered. At this point, all those memory loops take on the delicate traceries of sub-atomic particles in fractals, curves, spirals and arcs.

It all exists, all the time, but we can only perceive small portions at a time. Japan exists, although I have never been there. I don't need to see it to believe that it is real elsewhere on a curve of the spheroid called Earth.

Does this make sense yet? I could continue the explanation, but this box is filling up pretty quickly. To connect the loop, suffering now may be relevant to another time and place which we can't measure, or even perceive, at this time. In a strictly linear model, suffering can only be perceived as a consequence. But we suffer in the present, in anticipation of something better (childbirth, tattoos, exercise programs...). Hope doesn't fit in a linear model of cause and effect. Neither does sacrifice.

Primarily, a personal insight culled from working with a dozen or so psychologists as colleagues over the years; a keen interest in science, including physics; 30 years of working with children and observing their development; lots of prayer; informal studies of traditional cosmologies and medicines from other cultures; a habit of reading a variety of Bibles to compare interpretations, translations and resources have all lead to my acceptance of the concept of the Eternal Moment.

Hints of this do occur in the Old and New Testaments, primarily in Exodus 3: 14, Matthew 11: 27, Luke 10: 18, 22. And it makes sense to me from what I can understand as a lay person of the Big Bang theory which has been proposed, in part, by a Belgian priest named Georges Lemaître. I blend this with what I have learned of learning theories, learning disabilities, and Autism Spectrum Disorders.

I am willing to explain this in more detail, if you wish.

Bishops and priests (who share in the ministry of the bishop) do perform the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick all the time and it does sometimes result in physical healing. Christ could not have been talking about guaranteed healings, since then nobody would ever die! Bishops and priests do exorcisms.

The gift of tongues the Apostles enjoyed at Pentecost seems to have been a one-time thing. Now they have to learn the languages the hard way.

Well, certainly the Catholic Church (and almost every Christian denomination) believes that God intervenes. Just to take one minor example, there could be no requirement for a miracle for beatification and a miracle for canonization if the Church did not believe that God intervenes. (The miracles are not attributed to the saints but to God due to the intercession of the saints.)

The Church "certifies" miraculous cures at Lourdes. And of course the Christian practice of prayers of petition goes back to Jesus himself (the Lord's prayer, and his own prayer in Gethsemane).

I am listening to an audiobook at the moment that quotes at great length from the Gospels (I am not sure why the complete text of all four were not included), and hearing it this way I am struck by how much healing of the sick (and casting out of demons) Jesus does, how he grants the authority to do the same to his disciples, and how absent the healing of the sick is from the Church today. We have Mark 16:14-20 (the so-called Great Commission):

14 (But) later, as the eleven were at table, he appeared to them and rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw him after he had been raised.
15 (He said to them, "Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.
16 (Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned.
17 (These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages.
18 (They will pick up serpents (with their hands), and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover."
19 (So then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God.
20 (But they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.)

As direct successors to the apostles, bishops do not drive out demons (thought there may be a few bishops who practice exorcism), speak in tongues, handle serpents, drink poison to no ill effect, and cure the sick. I think we would be startled (and perhaps appalled) if a bishop spoke in tongues. It is not the kind of thing Catholic bishops do. I think it would be fascinating if bishops started practicing faith healings in which people actually got well, but I don't expect it to happen. But the question is why all of the "powers" bishops possess today must be taken on faith, whereas the powers listed in the Great Commission could be empirically verified.

Job's a character in a story. Characters in stories don't need to understand the meaning of their story; usually they don't get to. That is for us, those who hear the story to try to figure out.

I think this is true whether the story is imagined or real. We are all living in our own story. How can we fully understand it while we are still living it?

I agree, being generous and actually eating after starving would be what is joyful. But it is not the suffering and starvation did not cause the joy, obviously. And this isn't the story we are discussing.

What possible joy was available to Job? We cannot even say that at the end of the day he was better off. He was put in the same place he was before the torment and was never told of why he had to go through it.

Hey Schmenz - Have you seen "No County For Old Men (4 Oscar wins, including Best Picture)? A modern classic. "True Grit," "Miller's Crossing," and "O Brother Where Art Thou" are masterpieces too, and "Fargo," hailed by Roger Ebert, is listed by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 greatest films of all time, ahead of John Ford's "The Searchers" and the first "talkie," "The Jazz Singer." Yes, lots of people are turned off by the Coens' brutal concoction of humor, violence, and anxiety - and besides, they have "Intolerable Cruelty" to answer for - but maybe the instinct to call it "crap" betrays the dread intuition that they're reflecting postmodern man all too well. The canon of classical beauty is as necessary to film as to music and painting - "The Bicycle Thief," Billy Wilder's charm, Capra-esque sentimentality, all of it - but we run the risk of closing our eyes to our own experience in our own age if we fail to heed the meaning and beauty of art created here and now. Deeming any and all departures from tradition (or "the classics") wrongheaded is wrongheaded. Barron is a shining example of the need to dialogue with the living, breathing culture, and to understand the eternal truths about man and the world being expressed there.

(I have to add that you've charged Catholics for being too "with it" and not traditional enough in this department. This might strike atheists here as ironic, who are used to launching or hearing launched the opposite attack, but in fact the Church has always been charged with both, with equal vigor. A "teachable moment," as they say.)