If you read through the book of Job at one sitting, you will be struck by what fine poetry it is, even in translation. It is very readable and I recommend you try it.
But, as I pointed out earlier, it is almost entirely poetry. Therefore, we should not treat it as tightly-argued, philosophical debate. You can easily get the book to contradict itself: I have been tempted to quote 12:12 (‘“Is not wisdom found among the aged? Does not long life bring understanding?”’) to my children . . . but they could reply with 32:9 (‘“It is not only the old who are wise, not only the aged who understand what is right.”’)
I have suggested that Job’s three ‘comforters’ (Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar) in their long poetic debate with Job put forward Retribution as their explanation for his suffering, and then the young man, Elihu, in his six chapters, focuses on Correction and Instruction. But that is not very precise: I’ve noticed in my rereading of the book that Eliphaz does mention correction, and Elihu certainly also touches on retribution (as well as talking about a ‘redeemer’, which is an idea mainly found in Job’s own speeches, as we shall see). But, in covering a book of forty-two chapters in just three sermons, we have to risk over-simplification. However, it is not an over-simplification to say that neither that idea of retribution (i.e. Job is getting what he deserves), nor that idea of correction (i.e. Job is being made better by his suffering) is an adequate explanation for why Job suffers.
Let me remind you of the framework of the book. The book begins on two levels. There is a debate in heaven, where God is, outside time. And there is Job himself, an upright, wealthy, powerful man, on earth. And then, you will remember, God draws Satan’s attention to Job, and Satan is permitted by God to afflict Job with suffering, pain and grief. Satan attacks the relationship between God and Job.
The book has told us of
1. Job’s Trust in God
(a) in Affliction: in dreadful suffering, having lost his wealth, his family and his health, Job cried out, not for the restoration of those gifts, but for the restoration of his relationship with the Giver. He longed for friendship with God.
‘Then Job replied:
“Even today my complaint is bitter;
His hand is heavy in spite of my groaning.
If only I knew where to find Him;
if only I could go to His dwelling!
I would state my case before Him
and fill my mouth with arguments.”’ (23:1-4)
His lament rises and falls – at times bitterness wells up inside him afresh and he loses all hope again. There will be some here who will recognise this pattern of grieving. In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis wrote, ‘Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief, nothing ‘stays put’. One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?’
At times Job goes down, and at times up. But the focus of his lament is always his relationship with God. At his angriest moments he is angry with God, at his most hopeful moments his hope is in God, and at his most fearful moments he is terrified of God. Look at some of the other verses in chapter 23.
‘“But He stands alone, and who can oppose Him?
He does whatever He pleases;
He carries out His decree against me,
and many such plans He still has in store.
That is why I am terrified before Him;
when I think of all this, I fear Him.
God has made my heart faint;
the Almighty has terrified me.
Yet I am not silenced by the darkness,
by the thick darkness that covers my face.”’ (23:13-17)
His faith will not let him be silent, and every so often a gleam of light peeps through:
‘“But He knows the way that I take;
when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.”’ (23:10)
But faith for Job is not that calm assurance which appears in verse 10. His faith is holding on, clinging on, screaming at God, as he slips away even, but he keeps addressing himself to God – and for that he is commended in the final chapter, and, indeed, in the New Testament, where James writes: ‘As you know, we consider blessed those who have persevered. You have heard of Job’s perseverance and have seen what the Lord finally brought about. The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.’ (James 5:11) Job’s perseverance is that he holds God responsible and keeps holding God responsible, an idea we shall return to in a moment.
So one lesson we have learnt from Job is that we should be honest in our prayer. Christian prayer is not trying to be polite to God. That is how we speak to strangers. It is being open and honest and heartfelt with the One Person Who already knows all that is in our hearts. Tell Him everything. He can take it and, only when we are honest about it, can He help us with it.
(b) in Revelation – because eventually Job’s prayer is answered and he has a direct confrontation with God.
“Who is this that darkens My counsel
with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer Me.
Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell Me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone –
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?”’ (38:1-7)
Job is battered with over fifty questions in the next two chapters, a sort of Tripos exam set by God, but actually a very easy one as there are only three possible answers to the whole barrage of questions – the answer is either “No”; or “You, O Lord”, with the occasional “I don’t know” thrown in. But Job is wisely silent:
‘Then Job answered the Lord:
“I am unworthy – how can I reply to You?
I put my hand over my mouth.
I spoke once, but I have no answer –
twice, but I will say no more.”’ (40:3-5)
and then the Lord starts again with another eighteen questions, focussing this time on Job’s inability to control or understand two of God’s greatest creatures, Behemoth and Leviathan (probably the hippopotamus and the crocodile). Now, as an argument, this might seem to us to lack weight. When a man is screaming with the pain of innocent suffering, it seems strangely inadequate to say, “Why not consider the hippopotamus?” or to jeer at him because he can’t catch a crocodile. But Job does not find God’s answer inappropriate:
‘Then Job replied to the Lord:
“I know that You can do all things;
no plan of Yours can be thwarted.
You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures My counsel without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.
“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer Me.’
My ears had heard of You
but now my eyes have seen You.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”’
So what has emerged from these chapters for Job? What has God’s revelation provided?
(i) God has heard all that Job had said. He had been present all the time. Back in chapter 9, Job had said, ‘“Even if I summoned Him and He responded, I do not believe He would give me a hearing.”’ (9:16) But God had given him a hearing, every single word. Job’s feelings about whether God was close to him or far from him turn out to be utterly irrelevant. Your and my sense of God’s closeness to us when we read our Bibles and pray is quite unimportant: He is close. How do we know? Because we feel it? No! Because He has promised it. Never stop praying because you don’t feel like praying, or don’t feel God is listening. When God has spoken about a matter, human feelings about it cease to carry weight. He is a promise-making and promise-keeping God.
(ii) By this majestic parade of the wonders of creation in chapters 38-41, God has shown some of the inexplicable, unfathomable and fearful mysteries of the natural world to Job. If Job cannot understand them, how can he possibly exercise judgement in the moral realm? How can he possibly judge God’s treatment of him? The way God works is beyond human reason. Our thinking processes derive from Him. So He cannot be constrained within the limits of human logic. On the one hand, Job is right to hold God responsible, in the sense that he keeps taking his prayer and his complaint back to God insistently. But, on the other hand, he clearly recognises at the end that no-one can hold God responsible in the sense that God is accountable to anybody else: not to any absolute laws, not to any other being. There is a freedom of action within the living God which we cannot presume to understand. When He makes Himself known, it is not in terms of logical proof – otherwise all who are capable of following a logical argument would be bound to believe in Him. No, when God makes Himself known, it is in terms of a gracious, personal encounter, inviting individual personal response: an encounter which does not allow us to tidy every problem corner of our lives into a neat and logical packet.
So the important thing for Job is not the reason for his suffering (which God never gave him), but that God came to him in his suffering. Joni Eareckson wrote about her own paralysis that nothing by ‘unhappy frustration’ came from trying ‘to double-guess God’s purpose’ in it.
Job had asked God to show him his faults; and no doubt God could have done so. But He didn’t. Instead God showed Job a glimpse of God’s own glory; and, in the light of that, Job saw his own faults.
but now my eyes have seen You.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”’ (42:5-6)
Not all of us may have a deep sense of our own sinfulness; and those of us who do not will be those who do not have much sense of the glory and majesty of God either. These two things always go together. There is no room in the universe of a big me and a big God. If I am going to be big, then God will end up small. But if God is going to be His true size, then He will fill this universe from one end to the other, and I will find contentment in being very small indeed, with a deep sense of my own sin.
but now my eyes have seen You.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”’
That was how Job found peace. A psychologist would say that was a morbid state to be in, but Job found peace in knowing that he was very small and very sinful in the eyes of God.
So Job is brought to the end of his quest by the conviction that he must hand the whole matter over to God in humble self-surrender. Previously he had resorted to self-pity, while is three ‘comforters’ had pointed him in the direction of self-accusation, and Elihu in the direction of self-discipline. But it is in self-surrender that he found peace, and the blessing of God.
Let’s look as some of the final verses of the book.
‘After the Lord had said these things to Job, He said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has.”’ (42:7)
‘After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before.’ (42:10)
‘The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first.’ (42:12a)
‘After this Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. And so he died, old and full of years.’ (42:16-17)
And frankly that fairy-tale ending is somewhat unsatisfying – it seems glib and superficial, trite, like the end of a trashy novelette. In real life it is rare that ‘they all live happily ever after’. Moreover, this end appears to duck the key theological issue of why Job had suffered? After the magnificent pathos of the book’s poetry, what are we to make of this banal and unsatisfying end?
Well, we need to remember that this epilogue is not the last word. Every book of the Bible is a detail in a wider canvas and, as an Old Testament book, Job is inevitably an unfinished symphony. The dissatisfaction we feel with its conclusion is actually engineered by God’s Holy Spirit to encourage us to look further, beyond the pages of the Book of Job itself.
But first, let’s look back at
2. God’s Trust in Job. And we need to go right back to the heavenly throne room where the whole story began.
(a) The Heavenly Drama.
‘Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job? There is no-one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.” “Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied. “Have You not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has? You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out Your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face.” The Lord said to Satan, “Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.”’ (1:8-12)
Why did Job suffer? We have seen that it was not punitive or retributive. (He did not deserve it.) We have seen that it was not corrective or instructive. (He was not the better for it.)
No. He suffered for the honour of God – to prove, in the heavenly courtroom, that God’s assessment of him was right, and Satan’s slander wrong. In a sense Job suffered for the sake of another. Job never knew that God had put His trust in him, had staked His honour on him.
In that sense, his suffering was vicarious. It was for God’s sake, for God’s honour he suffered.
It was innocent. There is never any question that he deserved it.
It was voluntary – not in the sense that he chose it, because he never knew anything about this debate in heaven. But the fact that he never did curse God to His face showed that, had he known God’s honour was vested in him, he would have willingly undergone it for God’s sake (because he endured anyway, even in painful ignorance of that cause).
Innocent, voluntary, vicarious – all pointing to something, Someone else, at another time and in another place, when the innocent suffering of a righteous man would fulfil the secret purposes of God.
(b) Job and Jesus
There are, of course, many pointers to Jesus in the book of Job:
There is his longing for a mediator –
‘“If only there were someone to arbitrate between us,
to lay His hand upon us both,
someone to remove God’s rod from me,
so that His terror would frighten me no more.”’ (9:33-34);
and his sense that there was just such a person:
‘“Even now my Witness is in heaven;
my Advocate is on high.
My Intercessor is my friend
as my eyes pour out tears to God;
on behalf of a man He pleads with God
as a man pleads for his friend.” (16:19-21)
“I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that in the end He will stand upon the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see Him
with my own eyes - I, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!”’ (19:25-27)
They are extraordinary premonitions of Jesus Christ. But it is in this mystery - that innocent suffering may serve a hidden purpose of God - that the book of Job most powerfully prefigures our salvation.
William Temple wrote these two significant comments about the problem of pain:
For all the anguish of the world there are three consolations. The Epicurean says, “It is but for a time; ’ere long we shall fall asleep in the unending slumber”; which is comfort of a sort. The Stoic says, “Rise above it all; to the wise these things are nugatory” [which means ‘nothing at all’]; which is no comfort at all if we are not wise. Christianity says, “Christ also suffered”; and that, with the Christian interpretation of “Christ”, is real consolation, a human answer to our humanity.
(Mens Creatrix)
And in another book:
“There cannot be a God of love,” men say, “Because, if there were, and He looked upon this world, His heart would break.”
The Church points to the Cross and says, “His heart does break.”
“It is God Who has made the world,” men say. “It is He Who is responsible, and it is He Who should bear the load.”
The Church points to the Cross, and says, “He does bear it.”
(The Preacher’s Theme Today)
And it is to that suffering God that this book of Job calls out to you and me to surrender in our suffering. Job never overcame his suffering. We are not meant to overcome suffering in the sense that we are to overcome evil or temptation. Whatever your suffering may be tonight – illness, redundancy, depression, bereavement, disappointment, unwilling singleness – don’t battle to overcome it by seeking a reason for it. Surrender to God in it. You and I do not have a mind that can understand the mind of God. But, if we know Him as a friend, we trust Him.
Twenty years ago, I slipped a disk at the bottom of my spine, and one of the treatments I received was being manipulated. I don’t know if you have ever had manipulation, by a physiotherapist, or a chiropractor or an orthopaedic surgeon, but, if you have, you’ll know what I mean. They get hold of you and do something extraordinary, unexpected, sudden and often quite painful to your body. But, if it works, it provides relief. And you have to trust them – that they are not actually going to wrench you in half, or dislocate both your hips with one, sudden, violent movement. You and I are in the hands of a God who knows us, who loves us and who suffered and died for us. We can trust Him.
Trusting ourselves in glad surrender to the God Who suffers.
‘“But He knows the way that I take;
when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.”’ (23:10)
‘“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked shall I return;
The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;
Blessed be the name of the Lord.”’ (1:21, RSV)
‘“I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that in the end He will stand upon the earth.”’ (19:25)
Take those verses with you, if nothing else, from this wonderful Old Testament book.