AN INCOMPREHENSIBLE GOD
I have a problem with the account of Job and Yahweh's testing of human beings in general, other than his manipulation of individual's lives to generate questionable illustrations for hundreds of future generations. I do have a problem with such manipulation, but I think Job presents a more significant dilemma for the Christian than whether their God's behavior is just. That is the Atheist's objection.
For the Christian, the more pertinent and potentially devastating challenge is in knowing if their God's love is comprehensible. In order to have a vibrant "personal relationship" with their God, the Christian must be confident that God loves her and that his love can be experienced. The lessons from Job make this task very difficult, in my opinion impossible. If God loves me, what does his love look like? How am I to know that he loves me? Was Yahweh loving Job when he allowed Satan to take everything from him except his life? If so, how was Job to know, given that the events were just as indicative of his God's wrath as of his favor?
Posterity has the benefit of knowing Yahweh's intentions, having been outlined in chapters 40-42, so we know what to make of Job's ordeal. I for one, however, cannot remember the last time a god intervened in my life in order to delineate the course of events in my recent past and their place in his plan. Not that the type of god who replied to Job has any obligation to do so on my behalf, but how am I to love a god when I do not have the capacity to distinguish his love from his rage or the myriad happenstance that fills up my life? Similarly, if both my good and bad fortune fall within the realm of a god's love, I no longer have any meaningful measuring device with which to determine what this god's love even is - much less trust that he has my best interests in mind.
I have come to believe that God's love, as presented in Christian theology, is an empty, meaningless expression encompassing all possible interpretations of every subjective experience one ever has, and Job is the perfect illustration of this truth. One cannot know anything about God through the subjectivity of experience and inconsistency of intention, so one could never learn to love him. It is only when one begins with the assumption of God that one might project his love into given life experiences in such a way as to quell the mind's questions, but were one to start from scratch, nothing of God's love could ever be known. This is why the Christian may see God's love working in Job, but the Atheist never will.