These 2 weeks’ posts have aimed to supply a `pocket map` of the turbulent central section of the great book of Job, chs 3>31; I hope they’re helpful, either now or filed away for the future! If you’ve only got time to read one of them, skip this and read the first.
Today we’ll watch this amazing book zigzag towards its climax, with four exchanges and Job’s last great, dramatic speech. (If you read nothing else in Job, chapter 31 deserves your meditation.) Last week we watched the titanic struggle Job goes through, and the unblinking way God the Spirit records it. Now we’re heading up to the climax, when the Lord Himself steps in…
Things are getting tougher and tougher for Job, with God silent, and his insensitive friends piling on the pressure in response to his cries. Bildad in ch18 is brutal: `You who tear yourself to pieces in your anger, is the earth to be abandoned for your sake?… The lamp of a wicked man is snuffed out… He has no offspring or descendants among his people` [remember Job’s children have all just been killed]… `Surely such is the dwelling of an evil man; such is the place of one who does not know God!` Bildad’s attack leaves Job (perhaps because of that harsh reminder of his massive bereavement?) at breaking point: `How long will you torment me and crush me with words? Ten times now you have reproached me… If it is true that I have gone astray, my error remains my concern alone!… Have pity on me, my friends, have pity!- for the hand of God has struck me! Why do you pursue me as God does? Will you never get enough of my flesh?` (ch19).
It is of course the silence of God that hits him hardest; I’m reminded of Revelation 8, where the last and maybe worst of the seven seals of the book of human suffering is the silence of God: we can cope with so much unless God is silent. But, it’s also God’s apparent gross injustice: `Though I call for help, there is no justice. He has blocked my way so I cannot pass!… He has stripped me of my honour… He tears me down on every side till I am gone… His anger burns against me… He has alienated my family from me…`
What Job doesn’t realise, as we noted three posts back, is it’s actually Satan who has assaulted him; it’s a time like when Jesus said to the evil forces in Gethsemane, `This is your hour, when darkness reigns` (Lk 22:53) – a time however that God has strictly limited (as he does with the unequalled tribulation of Matthew 24:21-22). But it can be hard to cling on to faith in God’s love through such a time, when there seems to be no sign of it. And yet, as we noted last time, it’s exactly at Job’s darkest, most broken moment, 19:21, that somehow the faith he still has at rock-bottom glimpses, then shouts out, a certainty of vindication and redemption: `I know that my Redeemer lives!` And at that moment he knows it’s still God he wants to see – and not only that, actually will see (v26)! There WILL be an answer, God will not leave things like this…
But if there’s a hint of recovery there, his friends spoil it, and this vision of faith is only enough to enable Job to survive as the darkness returns. In ch20 we find his friend Zophar’s pride has been hurt – `I hear a rebuke that dishonours me, and my understanding inspires me to reply` – and this whole chapter is his attack on Job, a simplistic insistence that suffering (by implication, Job’s) is the 1-to-1 reward of wickedness. (Might this remind us of the insults heaped on Jesus at Calvary: `Let [God] deliver him, if He delights in him`?) So throughout ch21 Job cries out that this tidy point of view is just not what happens in the world: `When I think about this, I am terrified… Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power? They see their children established around them… Their homes are safe and free from fear; the rod of God is not upon them!` Job longs to see justice, but all he can see is the opposite, vv19-26. He sounds very like the start of Psalm 73: `Surely God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart… but – as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold. For I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked! They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong; they are free from common human burdens… Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure!` And surely we warm to Job when he finally rounds on Zophar, `How can you console me with your nonsense? Nothing is left of your answers [equating all suffering with punishment for sin] but falsehood!` (v34).
The one thing he can cling to at this moment (and many others will have found the same) is that only God Himself, not simple syllogisms, can resolve all this: `Can anyone teach knowledge to God?` (v22). But that still leaves a big problem; so in ch23 we come to a powerful section about God’s hiddenness, where Job cries out how desperately he wants to meet with God, now!, and how desperately hard it is that `When He is at work in the north, I do not see him; when He turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him!` We need to feel the experience of ch23 if we don’t want to be Zophars ourselves. And ch24 embodies again what is so terrible – vv2-12 are a powerful shout of outrage at how the wicked get away with injustice: `Men drive away the orphan’s donkey, and take the widow’s ox in pledge. They thrust the needy from the path… The fatherless child is snatched from the breast… The souls of the wounded cry out for help; but God charges no one with wrongdoing!`; although (like Asaph in Psalm 73), as the chapter ends, Job reaches out for a faith that God does judge, perhaps after death….
So the turbulence inside and outside Job progresses towards climax. ch25 and 26 make clear that God’s sheer greatness and sovereignty are, if that’s all we have, not a comfort but a crushing negation for the suffering individual. Finally in 27:5-6 he takes his stand in defiant conclusion: `Till I die, I will not deny my integrity. I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it!`
Unfortunately, at this point there are textual problems (though maybe God the Spirit has deliberately left them unclear to stimulate our minds?) Ch27, from v11 (or maybe v7) proclaims that suffering is indeed the fate God allots to the wicked (`Terrors overtake him like a flood`); and this is so unlike most of what Job has been saying that Ellison for instance thinks these verses are probably part of a third speech by Zophar, who otherwise only has two. Then ch28 seems a beautiful standalone poem – by the book’s editor??- asking where wisdom, real explanation of life’s issues, can be found, and responding, reasonably in view of all that’s been said, `It cannot be found in the land of the living… It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing` (vv12,21). `God alone knows where it dwells!` (v23). The chapter’s conclusion, that being so, is: `And God said to the human race, “The fear of the Lord— that is wisdom, and to shun evil is understanding.”` Job’s upright fear (awe) of God was just what was flagged up in 1:8 and 2:3; and if this is the only book to come to us from the primeval past, it’s striking that this is also the message with which Ecclesiastes concludes (`Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man`); and indeed that Revelation 14:6-7 defines the `eternal gospel` for `every nation` as `Fear God and give Him glory!` I even wonder whether this, grounded as it is on God’s `eternal power and divine nature` that all humans can see (Rom 1:20, cf Acts 14:17), is God’s permanent call to those (eg the “unevangelized”???) outside the main stream of His revelation (people like Melchizedek, Jethro, Balaam)?
Maybe, maybe, maybe. But I’m reminded too of the deeply humbling, awesome vision of God’s greatness with which He equips Isaiah to be the greatest of the OT prophets (Isa 6). `The search for wisdom as an object in itself is doomed`, summarizes Ash (his short book on Job Out of the Storm is well worth reading): `The seeking required of us is an [awe-struck] seeking for God Himself…` And this, the true awe, `fear of the Lord`, is the wisdom that this book is starting to teach us…
We do find something of this `seeking` as we come into the powerful last three chapters of the section, chs29 to 31, where Job stands up proudly at the last to speak out what he really feels. (Like the heroine at the climax of C S Lewis’ brilliant and not dissimilar fiction Till We Have Faces.) And as we noted above, ch31 deserves our personal meditation more perhaps than any other part of the book. So 29:1-4: Job longs so very much for God’s friendship again. And yet he feels (30:20-21), `I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer; I stand up, but you merely look at me. You turn on me ruthlessly; with the might of your hand you attack me…` – again not realising that what he thinks is God’s doing might be Satan’s.
Maybe, too, as Crabb suggests in Inside Out, just as Job’s faith rises sometimes to amazing heights of vision, so it slips at times (if understandably) into a `demanding spirit` towards God? It certainly seems that way to Elihu, that Job is `justifying himself rather than God` (32:2); indeed the Lord says something similar in 38:2. Crabb warns us that the result of our slipping into such a spirit, where we demand what God must do for us, can lead into a mentality that `whatever eases our pain – NOW – is justified`; and maybe even result in `blatant moral compromise and a ruined life`. At any rate Job’s whole point in ch31 seems to be (if not unjustifiably) `I’ve done the best I can`, with no sense of repentance. (Cf 27:6: `Till I die, I will not deny my integrity. I will maintain my righteousness and never let go of it`.)
And so here is how he closes: `I sign now my defence—let the Almighty answer me! Let my accuser put his indictment in writing! Surely I would wear it on my shoulder, I would put it on like a crown, I would give him an account of my every step; like a prince I would approach Him…` Isn’t there something not quite right here?- Job has suffered colossally and is under huge stress, and yet (cf 38:2, 40:2,5,8, 42:6) something is wrong, and it does matter. (What a great and complex book: it proclaims clearly that all suffering is not the result of sin, yet it sees too – this bit is hard – that the fact that Job is suffering so greatly doesn’t make everything he does right either…)
What he longs for is indeed God’s friendship again: `Oh, that I were as in the months of old… when God’s lamp shone upon my head… when the friendship of God was upon my tent, when the Almighty was yet with me` (29:1-5). `What Job really wanted was not explanations but God’s immediate presence`, says Marc Papai of InterVarsity USA; and so `At the end of the book, after God speaks to him Job says, “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you.”`
But we’ve not got to that stage yet. At the end of this last great speech, Job’s desire is not for God’s friendship to be restored in forgiving grace, but for personal vindication: again, `Let the Almighty answer me!- let my accuser put his indictment in writing!… I would give him an account of my every step; like a prince I would approach Him…` (I’m wondering whether that `like a prince` is crucial for what’s going on here; but more of that when we get to ch42.) `What faith in God!`, says Atkinson’s Bible Speaks Today commentary, `to risk challenging God like this… Even if he is going to have to learn that he is speaking out of ignorance of the ways of God… he knows that God can take it… Always, throughout, Job’s face is turned towards God… For though Job himself does not yet know this, God himself is present… God has never let go of his hand.`
So much for us to experience and grasp, both right and wrong, as this episode ends! `Let the Almighty answer me!`, says Job; and in stark contrast to all he has said, that’s just what will finally happen – the Lord will and DOES indeed `answer Job – out of the storm` (38:1)…!
And yet, before He does that – for five whole chapters the book is suddenly taken over by a completely new character, the young, passionate, articulate, hot-headed Elihu. Commentators struggle with Elihu. Whatever’s going on? Next week…
