Job's Suffering

Job suffers a lot, and for a very long time. As I understand it, the point of this story is that no matter what God does to you, as long as you keep your faith you will eventually be granted with some sort of salvation. There are many things morally wrong with this story, but I understand what the story is trying to make the reader understand.

First off, in the Jewish religion, life on earth is finite, while the afterlife is infinite (Isaiah 51:11 ...everlasting joy shall be upon their heads). To be a bit of a math nerd, that means the earthly life has no value...crazy right? Well my friends question my mind's mechanics, but here's how it works: any real number (for example 85 years) divided by an infinite amount of years yields 0 (or something with no value). It's a little bonkers, I know. However, it has some truth to it.

What I'm trying to say is that in any religion with an infinite afterlife, earthly life is utterly meaningless (except what you do to get into the afterlife perhaps). This means that Job's suffering is meaningless. Eventually he will enter heaven, and his time of suffering will viewed as though nothing ever really happened. What's any amount of earthly time compared to an eternity in heaven? Nothing.

I find this easy to believe, partly because I believe I've lead a fairly easy life. No one I know has gone through as much suffering as Job in the Bible. I've seen bad things happen to good people, bad people, Christians, Jews, whatever. On the reverse side, I've seen good things happen to everyone too. I've heard people ask why these bad things happen to them, why God would do this to them. I think I now have an answer that makes some sort of sense: it doesn't matter.