Tag Archives: Book of Job

Religion

How Does God Treat His Friends?

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Many months ago, I wrote a few blog posts about the book of Job because I had studied it while leaning on Christopher Ash’s excellent commentary in the Preaching the Word commentary series from Crossway. He has revisited that content for a new book no doubt aimed at a general readership.

The new book is called Trusting God in the Darkness. He answers a few questions about Job on the Crossway blog.

The central character, Job himself, is not just everyman, a human being in general. No, he is most emphatically a man who is “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). The narrator tells us this in the first verse and God says it twice more (Job 1:8; 2:3). That is to say, Job is a believer walking through life with a clear conscience. The book of Job is—to quote the title of a book that first helped me get into studying Job—about how God treats his friends. It is about the struggles of a suffering and yet innocent believer.

How should we understand Job’s comforters? “Much of what they say seems to make a lot of sense,” but God rejects their words in the end.

When we read their speeches we need to think carefully. Sometimes they say things that are true but that don’t fit Job. They accuse him of being an unforgiven sinner, and he isn’t. Most seriously, there is no place in their thinking for innocent suffering (e.g., Job 4:7), which means that, in the end, there is no place in their theology for the cross of Christ.

Religion

Not Safe But Good: Ancient Edition

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Ooh!” said Susan, “I’d thought he was a man. Is he — quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”

“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs. Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”

“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”

Who hasn’t heard this quote from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in a sermon or chapel talk? It’s a good-to illustration for the scary side of God’s omnipotence. God can do things we don’t understand, but remember, like Aslan, he is good.

Did you know God gave us illustrations for this very thing in the book of Job? The picture gets a bit lost on us, because we don’t recognize how wild the world is or has been, but in Job 38-39 God not only says he can handle the wild things, but he owns them also.

Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
    or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
 when they crouch in their dens
    or lie in wait in their thicket?
Who provides for the raven its prey,
    when its young ones cry to God for help,
    and wander about for lack of food? (Job 38:38-40)

Lions watch for the slow, young, or straggling members of a herd to attack. They lie in wait for the opportunity to kill; I’m told they usually watch their prey in the evening and strike after dark. They aren’t trying to face-off with a worthy opponent. They want to eat. Ravens come along after the kill to pick off what they can.

In this passage and also in Ps. 147:9 God describes ravens and young lions as asking for a kill from the herd from their master, their daily bread. This is the raw horror of nature, not a pastoral you want to hang in your nursery.

The Lord offers several illustrations like this, drawing our attention to wild, troublesome animals that are nonetheless under his care. Wild mountain goats are untamable, potentially dangerous, and can cause a good bit of trouble. Triple that for wild donkeys: “to whom I have given the arid plain for his home and the salt land for his dwelling place?” (39:6). You couldn’t stumble upon a wild donkey and have it carry your luggage to the next town. And if you were able to lead a wild ox to your stable, you would not have that stable the next day. He would take what he wanted from you and no one could stop him.

Read Job 39 for more, but you get the point. God doesn’t simply keep an eye on these wildly unsafe things; he shepherds and cares for them. That can make him look as wild as they are. But if we can know anything, we can know God is good. Not safe by our definition. Not anywhere near domesticated as we might wish. He can be rather scary.

But he’s good. He’s the King.

Photo by Keyur Nandaniya on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Religion

Evil Is Bound by the Shore

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There’s a marvelous biblical metaphor I’ve only known about for a few years, that the sea is a picture of evil and chaos. When Jesus performed any miracle, he did so with Messianic implications, never as a mere demonstration of his power. So when he walked on the water, he did so as a metaphor of his authority over all the earth, including this ancient picture of evil. (If you need more to support this idea, note that the beasts of Daniel and John’s prophecies rise from the sea and that in the new heaven and earth “the sea [is] no more” (Rev. 21:1).)

I wrote earlier this week about the uneasy idea presented in the book of Job about evil having a place in the created order, and when God answers Job at the end of the book, that’s largely what he talks about.

Or who shut in the sea with doors
when it burst out from the womb,
when I made clouds its garment
and thick darkness its swaddling band,
and prescribed limits for it
and set bars and doors,
and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther,
and here shall your proud waves be stayed’? (Job 38:8–11)

The Lord’s first speech can read like a list of creation areas. Look at the sea. Look at the sky. How about the depths of the earth? Do you have any control over these things? But this is a grand and majestic poem from thousands of years ago. It has many beautiful lines and pictures to provoke our attention. Here the Lord says he has “shut in the sea” and bound it, even like an infant, and he’s talking about evil. The Lord is describing all of the wickedness and natural horror in the world in terms of that dark, mysterious, alien world off the coast. It may eat away at our shores and flood our river valleys, but the Lord has said, “Thus far shall you come, and no farther.”

That’s not to say evil is actually good; it’s only to say God sees a place for it that we will not understand.

Why won’t the Lord drain the sea complete? Why must we live in a world where monsters swim the deeps and storms born over the ocean crash into our cities? That question isn’t answered, but if we worry over God’s ability or intent to control the seas in our lives, he asks, “Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep?” (Job 38:16). In short, do you have a handle on creation’s extremities? Could you unlock the gates of death? Of course not; only the Almighty has. His knowledge extends to every corner of existence. That’s not academic knowledge; that’s intimate control. By the wise Lord’s all-powerful hand, evil keeps to its place. Though it may overflow it’s banks from time to time, that’s not because it has gotten away from God’s control. The Lord can stop the springs of the deep whenever he wants. Wickedness will not flood us because the Lord holds it back. Anything that afflicts us has been given limited permission to do so.

So what do we do when, like Job, our suffering overwhelms us?

Read and pray the Psalms. Cry out to the Almighty God in faith, remembering his character, wisdom, and faithfulness. In all things, seek to love him with all of our heart and love our neighbors in response to that love. Recognize we do not need to defend God from every charge, because God’s own defense does not explain the place of evil.

“God thunders wondrously with his voice;
he does great things that we cannot comprehend” (Job 37:5).

(More posts on Job: Agency of the Adversary, The Innocent Suffering of Job)

Non-fiction, Religion

The Agency of the Adversary

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In Job 1–2, we see a couple scenes of a heavenly council. “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them” (Job 1:6). I think a common view of these scenes is to see Satan, the Adversary, barging into heaven to bring his accusations uninvited. I’m told, however, the language does not support this idea. The sentence above could just as easily describe a day when the angels came before the Lord and Michael was among them. The point of the scene is what Satan has to say. In short, the Adversary was one of the heavenly council at this time. (And if he was not, how could he have barged in anyway? No one gains an audience with God on his own terms.)

Why was he there? What purpose could this being serve in the council of God? That’s the most disturbing message in the book of Job. It’s much easier to view God as the conqueror of evil, someone who hates evil will a pure hatred, and he is that, but evil persists like weeds in my yard. (In that sense, my yard is the epitome of evil.) God does hate wickedness and all the rebellion that has brought evil into our world, and he is the Almighty, able to snuff it all out. A new dawn is coming that will overtake the night forever and “take hold of the skirts of the earth” in order to shake the wicked out of it (Job 38:13), but that dawn has yet to come. Today, evil still has a place in creation.

I may be getting ahead of myself here. Continue reading The Agency of the Adversary →

Non-fiction, Religion

The Innocent Suffering of Job

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Since last August, I’ve been leading our Sunday School class in a discussion of Job. I didn’t think we’d take it chapter by chapter, almost verse by verse, but we have. My expectations were set by my casual reading of a difficult book. Reading this ancient poem on my own is almost fruitless and fairly boring. It’s much more rewarding to go through it with a reliable guide. Everything I’ve learned has been through Christopher Ash’s commentary, which is just as readable as I had heard (recommending with two links).

Perhaps the difficulty of reading through this long, dialogic poem is the reason so many of us don’t get its central message. We bog down in the long-winded complaints and accusations, coming away only with the idea that God can run over anyone he wants and make it all right again in the end. But the tension point of Job’s argument is one we still miss when trying to apply God’s Word to our own or other people’s lives—that Job is completely innocent.

The first couple chapters present to us a man who is “blameless and upright, who fear[s] God and turn[s] away from evil.” That’s how his character is summarized for us upfront, and God repeats that description (2:3). Job is brought to the point of death “without reason.”

No matter what other questions we have about that, we have one truth to apply to our lives—innocent suffering exists.

Many people naturally believe that just about all suffering has a cause that can be avoided. The pain in our lives can be avoided by the proper regimen of diet, respectable living, and sound thinking. If you find yourself in pain or hardship, you’ve either caused it yourself or God is judging you for something. Seek the Lord, these people will say, so that you can learn what you need to learn in order to get out of this trial. Because the trial is unnatural. The trial is not how God intends your normal life. Suffering doesn’t just happen.

But Job tells us it does. 

Continue reading The Innocent Suffering of Job →