What the Old Testament Means to Us. . . No.3

MAKING SENSE OF JOB

The book of Job has a way of intimidating those who venture to get a handle on it. A Scottish Old Testament scholar tells how after teaching the book for two decades to college students he supposed he would be able to get the meaning of the book down on paper once he wrote his commentary on it But he found himself constantly revising his conclusions and never quite ready to turn his work over to the publisher. He said what most must feel when they try to get inside this enigmatic book, “Try to pin this book down and it slips like sand between your fingers.”

The main problem in trying to find the meaning of the book of Job is that it never really answers the question it raises—Why do the righteous suffer? In wading through its 42 chapters one gets the impression that there are various questions asked and answers given, but it is not easy to determine which answer goes with which question. There is also a problem in that the book is both prose (prologue and epilogue) and poetry (the extended dialogue between Job and his friends and finally God himself), and one needs to remember that for the most part when he reads Job he is reading poetry.

What appears to be needless repetition is also a barrier. Job’s three friends, who are assigned the task by the author of trying to convince Job that he is suffering because he has sinned and thus needs to repent, say the same things over and over again, while Job keeps on denying their allegations and refuses to repent since he has nothing to repent of. This goes on page after page, chapter after chapter, to the point of being boring, even if it is supposed to be good poetry for poetry’s own sake. There are some 20 such speeches.

After 30 chapters of this a fourth friend of Job enters the dialogue, youthful Elihu, unexpectedly since he is not previously mentioned. This gives us six more chapters and even more repetition, for Elihu adds nothing new. Elihu’s speeches are generally considered to be a later addition and not a part of the original work. Some scribe along the way felt the urge to put his two-cents worth into the argument, and there is a question as to whether his speeches are worth any more than that.

All these speeches by Job’s friends, along with what Job himself had to say for that matter, raise a question as to what extent this part of the Bible is the inspired word of God. When God finally speaks he burns with anger toward Job’s three friends “for not speaking truthfully about me” and commands them to repent and offer sacrifices for themselves. Job admits that his words had been frivolous and “I had better lay my finger on my lips.”

And yet it is evident that all four men who shared in the extended dialogue said things that we may consider the word of God, some of them being among the most elegant lines in the Bible, such as Eliphaz’s words in Job 22:12, “Does not God live at the height of heaven, and see the zenith of the stars,” and goes on to speak of God as “he prowls on the rim of the heavens.” Great poetry, yes, but great truth as well.

Even though there is much in Job that does not speak truthfully about God, according to God himself, it is nevertheless inspired and it is holy Scripture. It is inspired because it is from God and is not simply a human book. It is holy Scripture because first the Jewish church and then the Christian church esteemed it to be such and made it a part of the canon. And we determine in what way it is the word of God by prayerful study. The book must be viewed in its wholeness. It has lessons to teach us and this is the word of God for us.

But the most baffling aspect of the book of Job is what happens when God at last speaks. No ordinary playwright ancient or modem would have written it the way it reads. Poor Job is bruised and battered all through the ordeal, and he continually begs God for an answer to his plight. His friends talk and talk and talk, but they only add to his misery. As Job’s life “trickles away” he at last calls out to God, “I cry to you, and you give me no answer; I stand before you, but you take no notice” (Job 30:20). The reader is moved to pity this good and pious man who has to suffer such agony for no apparent reason. Why? Ah, God at last speaks. Now Job will get his answer! But does he?

It strikes the reader as incredible that God does not so much as even allude to Job’s suffering. And that is supposed to be what the book is about. We would expect the Father of the prodigal son to say something like, “Son, I have seen your suffering and I have not been unmindful of your pain.” There is nothing at all like that. If J ob had even known that he was being put to the test because of an onset between Yahweh and Satan it would have given some meaning to his suffering, but even this was withheld from him.

Instead “from the heart of the tempest” Yahweh embarks upon a divine soliloquy the sublimity of which hardly occurs anywhere else in sacred literature, in which God is depicted as watching over a vast universe that no one else enters. Instead of being comforted Job is further humiliated as one who has been presumptuous before God. Yahweh says to him, “Who is this obscuring my designs with his empty-headed words? Brace yourself like a fighter; now it is my turn to ask questions and yours to inform me” (Job 38:2).

And what questions they were that Yahweh puts to Job, such as “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” He asked him if he has visited the place where the snow is kept, if rain has a father, and if he has grasped the celestial laws. And in this outburst of divine eloquence there is depicted both the magnanimity of God and the frailty of man:

Who laid the earth’s cornerstone

when all the stars of the morning were singing with joy,

and the Sons of God in chorus were chanting praise?

Who pent up the sea behind closed doors

when it leaped tumultuous out of the womb?

Tell me, since you are so well-informed!

Yahweh goes on with his “answer” in a way we would least expect, plying Job with a list of bewildering questions about numerous animals, some of which are themselves bewildering. Does Job know where the mountain goats give birth, is he the one that makes the warhorse so brave, and does the eagle soar at his command? He even questions him about primeval sea monsters of chaos, such as Leviathan (“Sword may strike him, but cannot pierce him”). Then there is the dreaded Behemoth, perhaps the hippopotamus, who is “the masterpiece of all God’s work.” He typifies the untameable brute force that only God can master. Can Job catch Behemoth by the eyes or drive a peg through his nostrils?

The reader again meets the unexpected when all this that Yahweh says leads to Job’s repentance. The dialogue ends with words seldom uttered by man in the Bible or elsewhere, “I repent.” But the reader must distinguish between Job’s repentance and what we find in Paul in such places as Romans. Job never accepts the thesis of his three friends, that his troubles were due to his sins, perhaps secret ones. And it is noteworthy that God does not call him a sinner or accuse him as a transgressor.

But still Job repents—of empty-headed thinking, of being presumptuous, and of talking too much; but this was not the kind of sinning his friends accused him of, not the kind to cause him such grief, and not the kind we see in Paul when he says “Sin dwells in me.” Job’s is not a sin-and-redemption kind of repentance. This is why his statement “I know that IT.)’ Redeemer lives, and at last he shall stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25), made famous by its use in Handel’s “Messiah,” has no reference to redemption from sin or to the Messiah as in Handel’s great hymn, but to the hope that God will one day avenge Job’s cause as an innocent man.

But still in Job’s repentance we have a case of man’s basic religious experience. Job at last realizes his own ignorance and his inadequacy before God and turns to Him with a deeper faith. Those are great lines in Job 42:5-6 where Job says that while he once knew about God he now knows Him.

I knew you then only by hearsay;

but now, having seen you with my own eyes.

I retract all I have said,

and in dust and ashes I repent.

Job docs not mean that he actually had a vision of God, but that he now has a deeper understanding of the nature of God. While his questions have not been answered, he now sees that he cannot call God to account He now accepts by faith what he cannot rationally explain in terms of suffering and death. He had not only talked too much but he had tried to take into his own hands that which must be left only in God’s hand.

So the book of Job has an answer to the problem of suffering after all, an answer of sorts. The answer is that there is no answer; the suffering of the righteous must remain a mystery. This is the book’s lesson: We are to accept by faith what we cannot understand by sight.

In teaching this lesson the book lays down principles that we can live by in our own time. One of the great passages is Job 1:21:

Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

naked shall I return.

The Lord gave, the Lord has taken back.

Blessed be the name of the Lord.

Note the elegance of the poetry in likening the earth to his mother’s womb. Job realizes what Paul later realized in 1 Tim. 6:7 that “we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world,” facts that we tend to forget. Whatever we have in this world we haven’t had it long, nor will we keep it long. Job was once a rich man and he does not disparage riches, but he is recognizing that “We can’t take it with us!” and that should influence the way we live.

He thinks of his dear children more than his money when he praises God for both giving and taking back what he gives. He recognizes that everything belongs to God in the first place, and that He has the right to take back what is His, even before Job is through with it. He praises God anyway!

At this point in the story Job can be esteemed for his patience, and the New Testament extols “the perseverance of Job” (Jas. 5:11). James must be drawing upon the early part of the story, as in Job 2:10: “And in all this misfortune Job uttered no sinful word.” But Job is sometimes less than exemplary in the dialogue with his friends, and even comes close to blasphemy in accusing God of being unjust, such as “Will you never take your eyes off me long enough for me to swallow my spittle? Suppose I have sinned, what have I done to you, you tireless watcher of mankind?” (Job 7:19-20)

In this same passage we find the kind of troubled faith that is depicted by Topol in “Fiddler on the Roof.” When Job says, “Why do you choose me as your target? Why should I be a burden to you?,” it is like Topol saying, “Would it spoil some vast, eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?” Are we not all tempted to feel singled out when tragedy strikes? But we do not respond in the same way to good fortune, as if we in some way deserve the good things.

It is here that the book teaches us a profound lesson, that good and evil are concomitant to each other, that one would have no meaning without the other. Indeed, life is made up of both good and evil. Job puts it this way when his wife gets on his case: “Shall we accept good from God and not accept evil” (Job 2:10). Can we expect life to be all happiness with no sorrow? But the book goes beyond this, for it implies that suffering is necessary in order for us to find our way to God. Is this not what the Cross of Christ teaches us in even a profounder way?

The book of Job corrects a misconception that pervades the modem church as well as the old Jewish church, that righteousness will be rewarded (in this world) and wickedness will be punished (in this world). It is one of the themes of the old Wisdom literature, as in Ps. 37:25: “I have been young and I am now old; yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his descendants begging bread.”

We can say that this is the way it should be, as we see it, and that it often is this way, but by no means always. The righteous do sometimes have to beg bread, and they are sometimes forsaken, as Job was, and they sometimes face bankruptcy, contract cancer, and die in war and traffic accidents. Moreover, the wicked often get off Scot free, growing old in health and wealth. The preacher complained of this in Ecc. 8:14: “The good receive the treatment the wicked deserve; and the wicked the treatment the good deserve.” The most righteous often have to suffer the most.

Why is this? We do not know; it is a mystery. The book of Job teaches us that the question is not why but when. When bad things happen to good people they are not to wallow in the labyrinth of why?, why?, why?, but to respond in such a way as to avoid the greater tragedy of not allowing good to come from their suffering. This is the role of simple, trusting, faith. Job could say, “Even though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” We may not understand why the Lord would choose to slay us, but still we are to trust Him for the very good reason that He is God and He loves us and He promises us the victory, if not now then later.

This is why the epilogue, where God restores Job’s fortunes, giving him double of all that he had, is not necessary. It in fact creates a problem, for Job’s friends could say that their thesis is proved after all, that righteousness is always rewarded. It is all right for the curtain to fall on the drama with Job saying “I repent,” leaving him poor and destitute, for it is often that way with the righteous in this world, some having to die agonizing deaths. The lesson is that Job found his way from despair to faith, and that is enough.

I’ve searched for an illustration that would put all this together. The best I’ve found is the story of the little boy whose father is a surgeon. When told that his father cuts on people causing them to hurt and bleed, he could not believe it. When allowed to look into the operating room, he saw his father cutting a person open, the blood and all. He was terribly shaken and bewildered by what he saw. But while he could not explain it he was confident that it was all right since it was his father doing it.

That is what the book of Job says to me. Our faith is to have a place for the paradoxes of God, the One who both hides and reveals Himself, the One who creates both good and evil, the One who brings peace and makes wars. It reaches its glorious extravagance in the suffering of Christ on the Cross, the greatest of all mysteries, where the Son of God himself cries out to a God that seems not to hear, “My God, my God. . . Why? . .”

We reach the heart of the message of Job when we can say, “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy Cross I cling.”—the Editor