Justifying Job

Job, is one of many Biblical books that I struggle to understand. But here is one take on it you don't often hear... it's a book about justification!

• The opening scene: the great accuser (trans. Satan) appears before God. God justifies his servant Job, declaring him righteous before Satan, but Satan declares God's verdict to be false (not for the first, or last time). Satan de-justifies God.
• The dialogue between the 3 friends and Job: The friends take on Satan's accusing role and reason like this:
  • God is just + Job is suffering => Job is unjust
  Job works with similar logic, but to his credit only toys with the conclusion and doesn't commit to it:
  • I am just + I am suffering => God is unjust
• Elihu: Elihu is a bit difficult to pin down. He recognises that Job is trying to justify himself by de-justifying God. He justifies God himself, but he doesn't justify Job. He anticipates God's speeches, but he only has some light to shed on Job's confusing darkness.
• God's speeches: God has two points in his two speeches:
  1. Give up on your logic-games. Job is just and I am just. How those are both true you will never be able to fathom by reason... so give up the quest.
  2. I control the accuser who brings suffering, so there is hope in me as the only one who can tame the leviathan of Satan.
• The epilogue: Job repents, God justifies Job before his friends and the whole world. He declares him righteous and justly gives the blessings of wealth and health which belong to the righteous.

I've blogged about this a little before, so I'll be bold and quote myself saying it quite well!

Elihu was angry with Job because he was 'justifying himself rather than God' (32:2) and YHWH isn't too happy about that either (40:8). But actually Elihu admits that he wants to justify Job (33:32) and YHWH does so in the end too (42:7). Job is justified through YHWH's own justification. Only when YHWH is allowed to be just in a way above human comprehension, can we too be justified.

Job's good comforters

We often focus on Job's miserable comforters, but right at the end of the book we see some exemplary comforters:

"Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and ate bread with him in his house. And they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him. And each of them gave him a piece of money and a ring of gold." (Job 42:11)

Job's relatives do the following:

• They are physically present. Notably this is in the important act of eating together with him.
• They show him sympathy (better translation from my limited knowledge: "they mourn expressively")
• They comfort him, presumably particularly with words
• They help him practically with money.

A few random thoughts on Job

• Job was "blameless and upright". Time and again, I hear evangelicals say, "we know Job can't be perfect, but nevertheless he was a faithful person". Seems a bit like lowering-the-bar theology to me. Why can't we say that he really was blameless and upright because Christ's blamelessness and uprightness was credited to him?
• Job is so conscientious that he is concerned that his sons have "cursed God in their hearts". Satan's objective is to get Job to curse God to his face (1:11; 2:5). Job's wife encourages him to do just that (2:9). Recalls the Fall, although Job doesn't sin. Also speaking truly about God seems to be a major theme, as God picks that up in 42:7-8.
• Job does not suffer despite being righteous, but because he is righteous.
• Job's faith in the early chapters of the book is often held up as a model. Should it be? He does fear God, and doesn't grasp onto false rights to good things from God, but there is no indication that he has hope or trust in God as his Father. Rather than lauding the initial reactions of Job, I think we should see Job's faith as only partial in the famous "the Lord gives and the Lord takes away". He concludes his final speech by saying, "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes." Before he knew something of God, but through his suffering and God's revelation he is brought to a much deeper and richer knowledge of God as the one who is in control but also has good purposes. The vision of God Job has at the end is the vision we should focus on.
• In the early chapters Satan is portrayed as the one bringing the suffering upon Job, with God only as the one permitting it. However both Job and the narrator attribute the suffering to God and never to Satan. Although that must bring certain problems for the believer, it is tremendously important. If suffering is purely by chance, fate or a wholly malevolent being then we can't ask for it to stop. If it is our Father who disciplines us because he loves us we can ask him to stop when the discipline is too much and have a certain hope he will answer.

Four responses to God's strange works

I recently read Romans 9 with a friend. Even accepting that the passage is more about redemptive history and God's purposes for Israel and the Gentiles than individual predestination it is still hard to swallow the God who freely chooses.

However, Romans 9-11 also shows us how Paul responded to this the difficulty of God's strange works of rejecting some. What he exemplifies for us applies to experiences of suffering as much as it does with the specific issue of predestination.

1. Be humble and recognise who you are. "who are you, O man, to answer back to God?" Paul asks (Romans 9:20). "Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" God asks Job (Job 38:2).
2. Be comforted that Christ experienced the worst. It is not in Romans 9-11 but "we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses" (Heb 4:15), we have Christ who suffered physically, emotionally and spiritually on the tree. And he has not left us alone but is present with us by his Spirit.
3. Be hopeful because God has good purposes. In Romans 9 he rejected the Jews "in order to" bring in the Gentiles. He brought Job to the end of himself, but then "blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning" (Job 42:12). He saw his Son crucified to raise him again to the highest place. It may be difficult to see, but he works all things together for good (Rom 8:28).
4. Be prayerful and cry out to him. God doesn't want passive stoicism in the face of his strange ways, but he wants us to wrestle with him, continually holding him to his promises. So Paul says that his "heart's desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved" (Rom 10:1).

Taming Leviathan

Christopher Ash's Out of the Storm is a great straight-forward companion to reading Job. In explaining God's speeches at the end of the book he challenges an interpretation of chapters 40-41 which sees Leviathan and Behemoth as just powerful creatures that God created, i.e. an extension of 38:1-40:2 where God shows himself as the Almighty Creator.

There are a number of problems with seeing Leviathan and Behemoth as just plain vanilla creatures like the ox, hawk, ostrich, horse and donkey of chapter 39:

1. The description doesn't seem to fit any animal we know of. Not hippos, crocodiles or even dinosaurs!
2. The second speech from God (40:6-42:6) provokes a "stronger reaction of worship and penitence in Job than the first"
3. While Job never provides a complete answer to the 'problem of evil', a reminder that God is our Almighty Creator is a very partial answer indeed. As Ash quotes George Bernard Shaw:

God really has to do better in explaining the problem of evil than to say, "You can't make a hippopotamus, can you?"

Instead there is a promise contained in this second speech of God, if you really understand who Leviathan and Behemoth are:

Leviathan in biblical imagery is the arch-enemy of God, the prince of the power of evil, Satan, the god of this world (as Jesus calls him). Here is the embodiment of beastliness, of terror, of undiluted evil [...]

The Lord has sung the praise of Leviathan's terrifying strength. But why has he done so? Why has he filled Job's mind with the awesome terrors of evil? Answer: so that Job may understand that he, the Lord, is stronger still [...]

Even Satan, the Leviathan, is God's Satan, God's pet - dare we put it like this. And that means that as we suffer, and as we sit with others who suffer, we may with absolute confidence bow down to this sovereign God, knowing that the evil that comes may be terrible, but it cannot and will not ever go one tiny fraction beyond the leash on which God has put it. And it will not go on forever. For the One to whom we belong is God.

(pp. 95-97)

Thoughts on Job 33

Job believes two things:

1. He is 'pure', he has 'done no wrong', he is 'clean and free from sin' (33:9); and
2. Despite that God unjustly considers him 'his enemy' (33:10; cf 34:5)

Elihu contends that Job is not right. This is his human reasoning, and God is greater than human imagining.

God does speak and reveal himself and he does this 'now one way, now another' (33:14):

1. To those who are slumbering soundly in bed God speaks 'in their ears and terrif[ies] them with warnings' (33:16)
2. To those with 'constant distress in their bones' (33:19) he sends a angel who 'is gracious to them and says to God':

"Spare them from going down to the pit;
I have found a ransom for them—
let their flesh be renewed like a child's;
let them be restored as in the days of their youth'—
then they can pray to God and find favour with him,
they will see God's face and shout for joy;
he will restore them to full well-being." (33:24-26)

What will those who hear these two words say:

1. 'We have sinned, we have perverted what is right'
2. 'we did not get what we deserved. God has delivered us from going down to the pit, and we shall live to enjoy the light of life'

It seems cruel or irrational that God would say these two contradictory words to people. Why does God say both these things to human beings? The answer is that both are to bring them us to life (33:18,28-30), and the chances are that God will have to speak these words repeatedly to us over our lives in order to save us (33:29).

Elihu was angry with Job because he was 'justifying himself rather than God' (32:2) and YHWH isn't too happy about that either (40:8). But actually Elihu admits that he wants to justify Job (33:32) and YHWH does so in the end too (42:7). Job is justified through YHWH's own justification. Only when YHWH is allowed to be just in a way above human comprehension, can we too be justified. If we seek YHWH to be just according to our own standards we will be righteous and God will seem unjust and our enemy.