One of Gary Larson's The Far Side cartoons is called "God at his computer." It shows God with long white hair and beard watching a computer screen where an unlucky-looking fellow is walking down a sidewalk with a piano suspended by a cable over his head. God's hand is on the computer keyboard, and his finger is hovering over a key labeled "SMITE."3

The cartoon suggests two things about God's way of determining a person's fate: first, that God is impersonal and inaccessible. God with his finger on the smite key is no more personally involved with the man whose fate he's deciding than a child playing video games is with the Super Mario Brothers. Second, God appears arbitrary and capricious: "Shall I smite this guy or spare him? What kind of a mood am I in today?"

Our first look at Job may have…