21:7-30 The Heart of the Matter The heart of Job’s intellectual and emotional struggle was the age-old problem of the incongruity between his expectations about God and how God deals with the world—the wicked suffer, the righteous prosper—on the one hand, and the evidence to the contrary that Job saw all around him. These realities can be difficult to reconcile. In order to have a compassionate response to people who are suffering, we must take this into account.