Exegesis on the book of Job

Exegesis on Job

SERMON/EXEGESIS ON JOB

"There's always someone playing Job." Archibald Macleish wrote back in the 1950s. "There must be thousands...millions and millions of mankind Burned, crushed, broken, mutilated, slaughtered, and for what?"

This is a sentiment we can all identify with today. This last month the world was rocked by a serious of disasters. There are almost 40,000 people dead from the killer tsunami, and many of these we can be sure were good, dedicated Christians who had put their faith in God. Missions work in those countries has led to a very strong converted church in many areas. Still, thousands were killed. People lost their children, their spouses, all their belongings... Killer mudslides in California, war and terrorism in the Middle East... we have to sit back and wonder: where is this God who controls the wind and the waves? It's easy to understand when humans cause us suffering -- it's the sin of the world -- but it's a little harder when the forces of nature, which the Bible tells us respond only to God's voice, rise up to harm us. Job is famous for his patience in suffering, for his refusal to curse God. In a time like ours, with thousands dead from killed weather, we may be tempted to be more like Job's wife, and lose faith.

Job's wife is probably the most under appreciated character in the book of Job. Everyone seems to just dismiss her as another one of Job's trials. An old joke says that Job's worst torment wasn't the loss of his property or children -- it was the nagging of his wife! It's easy to forget that she had also lost all her belongings, and her children. Job's wife is a lot like any of us. She had married a good and a godly man. She had given birth to ten children, and raised them well enough that their father only feared they might do evil, he didn't actually see them doing it! She was a good woman -- and she also lost everything. So we shouldn't judge her too harshly when, at the end, she watches her husband suffering from a painful dehabilitating disease, and tells him that it's pointless, and he should just give up. That's what the whole "right to die" movement in America is about -- the idea that sometimes it's better to give up. This doesn't make her an evil person, necessarily. It makes her someone that was hurting, like us.

Job's wife is best known, of course, for telling Job to "Curse God and die." What she said was not good. She probably even knew it wasn't good. She didn't care. She'd suffered too much, and she just wanted it to be over. Job's wife was depressed. We hear a lot in the news these days about depression, and about all the drugs that doctors prescribe to treat depression. When people are depressed, they are not themselves -- they may do things that they wouldn't usually do. We need to understand that, from her point-of-view, God had pushed her to this point. Everything that Job went through, she went through too. Carol Newsom wrote of what Job went through: "this is a violence calculated to destroy the humanity of the one who is subjected to it... such violence also destroys the meaningfulness of the categories of innocence and guilt... Job casts the violence he has experienced as the expression of God's loathing for human existence."

If it was like this for Job, who was the moral pillar and head of the home, how much worse it must have been for his wife, who had given birth to those children they lost. So while we must remember that she misspeaks here, she has suffered as much as anyone here has ever suffered. And yet... despite the fact that she has suffered so much, and despite the fact that she is speaking out of anger and out of character here, Job still calls her a foolish woman. He says that she speaks as "one of the Foolish Women." Why is this? Because no matter how much we go through, no matter what God does to us, it is inherently foolish to claim any excuse for not being faithful to God.

To Mrs. Job, it may have seemed very reasonable to ask, as she does, "Dost thou still retain thine integrity?" She thinks that Job had good reason to rebel against God, and to curse God. Many today might agree with her. God had removed his presence from Job -- he had given him to Satan to torture, and sent fire from heaven to kill his children. He had been rich, and now he had absolutely nothing but rags. He had a full house of children, and now they were all dead as well. Surely this had to be the hardest thing anyone can imagine-- losing ten children in a single day! Then, as if this was not enough, he has become terminally ill. He describes worms eating his skin, and his flesh melting from his bones as he scrapes bits of skin off with a piece of broken pottery. Yet Job claims that despite all the bad things that happened to him, he is still innocent. He tells his wife that he will praise God even when God does evil to him -- but of course in a few chapters we see Job questioning God. Then the Almighty himself proves the foolishness of questioning him. Newsom writes about how "Job describes the action of cleaning himself... such an action, which asserts agency, dignity, and innocence, provokes God to reverse these self-assertions, plunging Job into a pit of filth, thus not only ...associating Job with dirt, and so with guilt, but also demonstrating Job's inability to control his own body.... The violated one experiences himself or herself as loathsome... Job... [is] now disgusted with his filth." In recognizing his own worthlessness in the face of God's majesty, and in continuing to serve God after the Almighty has afflicted him in every way imaginable, Job proves that he does not serve God just for selfish gain.

We cannot just serve God in fair weather. If we are going to love God, we must love him as he loves us -- unconditionally. Father Richmond, who works with a San Francisco missions group, teaches that this is the true lesson of Job -- that God does not want to be worshipped because he does good things for his people, but simply because he IS. God loved us unconditionally, and he wants us to love him the same way. Reverend Vibert of St. Luke's near Wimbledon says "The key lesson of Job is surely that Job is a man who trusts God for who He is, and for that reason alone, even though he does not know God's ultimate plans... [God's] free love chose us in Christ whilst we were still sinners and undeserving. And now God wants us to love him in the same way - unconditionally, for no other reason than that he is God."

This is not to say that God hasn't earned our love. Even if God does terrible things to us -- drowns us with many a tsunami, dropping mudslides on homes, creating plagues and allowing evil men to blow up countless innocents-- even then, he is worthy of being loved because he is also... In the words of the Almighty... The creator of elephants and oceans. One must not forget that there is nothing which we might suffer which Christ himself did not already suffer to satisfy the just anger of God. We have a greater responsibility to serve the Lord in view of Christ's suffering, which dwarfs the suffering of mere mortals to such an extent that it is described in the same terms as that of Job's suffering.

In Isaiah 53, the Bible speaks of the suffering servant, whose description will remind even a casual reader of Job. Turn, if you will, to Isaiah 53, beginning on verse three, which reads: "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted..." Does this not remind one of the state of Job, when his friends came to find him, and mocked him as one whom God was punishing? The conclusion of this chapter, which speaks of Our Lord Jesus, also seems reminiscent of Job. In Isaiah 53:10, the text reads: "Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand." Christ, like Job, was tortured for the pleasure of the Lord and so put to grief -- and like Job, he lived to see his seed, his children, come to fruit and he became more prosperous after his torment than before.

We see a similar pattern of similarity in Psalm 22, which also speaks of Christ. This is the Psalm which Jesus was quoting on the cross when he said, "My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?" In verses seven and eight, the psalmist (prophesying about the crucifixion) says "All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the head, saying, He trusted on the LORD that he would deliver him: let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him." This is both a clear reference to the mocking behavior of the audience at the crucifixion, and also seems very similar to what happened to Job. In Job sixteen, verses nine through seventeen, Job gives a heartbreaking account of his many sufferings which echo both the laughter of that audience and the physical suffering of crucifixion. The words are brutally vivid:

"He teareth me in his wrath, who hateth me: he gnasheth upon me with his teeth; mine enemy sharpeneth his eyes upon me. They have gaped upon me with their mouth; they have smitten me upon the cheek reproachfully; they have gathered themselves together against me. God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked. I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground. He breaketh me with breach upon breach, he runneth upon me like a giant. I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin, and defiled my horn in the dust. My face is foul with weeping, and on my eyelids is the shadow of death..."

In Matthew where the crucifixion is described in detail, we have verses such as this in Matthew 26:67 "Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him; and others smote him with the palms of their hands." A little later the reader is told about a crown of thorns that is forced onto Jesus' brow. Even the wording of these lines is similar to lines from Job, such as Job 19:19 which reads, "they stripped me of my honor and removed the crown from my head" or Job 17:6, which calls Job "a man in whose face people spit." In short, it is quite possible to compare Job's sufferings with those of Christ -- because he suffered righteously, as did Christ. In suffering, Job glorified God by serving as an image of the crucified savior, yet he could never be as pure and as tormented as Christ himself was. He remained only a foul worm before the power of God, while Christ was God himself.

So we see that our own humble sacrifices for God -- our righteousness and our pain, like Job's, can only mirror Christ. As long as we are alive, we can never say that we have been persecuted to the degree that Christ was. As long as we are alive, none of us can say that we died for the sake of God, and once we're dead that will no longer matter. God has permanently and forever overshot our humble strivings. He has, as it were, "one-upped" we mortals by sending his own son to die in our places. We can never sacrifice that much... And it is foolish to think that God expects or allows us to do so. All that is expected of us is to live humbly, and to thank God that he has allowed us to live and to glorify him with our joy and with our suffering.

Some may think, at this point, that this is a defeatist message. We cannot be righteous or sacrificial compared to God. We cannot deserve good treatment, we cannot earn it from God. We must serve God whether he strike us dead or give us great wealth... And there is nothing for us, but to suffer and rejoice in suffering. We serve God not by being healthy and happy, but by accepting the world precisely as he made it. There's an old Nick Cave song, of which the lyrics read "When will you ever learn / That what happens there beyond the glass Is simply none of your concern?... / And God does not care for your benevolence / Anymore than he cares for the lack of it in others / Nor does he care for you to sit / At windows in judgment of the world He created / While sorrows pile up around you / Ugly, useless and over-inflated"

More biblically, we recall that Christ said in Matthew 5:45, "[God] maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." So are we justified in thinking that God has no use for us to be just, and that when we are tormented or tortured that God has no further use for us at all -- that we are meant to die away? Absolutely not. This was the message of Job's wife, which was called foolish in the holy scriptures.

It is always foolish to think that God has no further use for us, and that the time has come to merely end it all. Should we curse God and die? On the contrary. The story of Job is not about rebelling against God, or becoming nihilistic. It is not even about becoming maltheistic. The story of Job specifically addresses the fact that we must accept the world as it is given to us, and praise God for all that comes our way simply because it is his will. The book of Job is about joyful acceptance. Newsom speaks about an "acceptance [that] bears no trace of masochism, fatalism, or mere submission. It is a stance that recognized the unavoidability of certain suffering and chooses not to flee from it. Acceptance of suffering is the correlate of acceptance of reality."

Here she continues to quote Dorothee Soelle on Job, "It is impossible to remove oneself totally from suffering, unless one removes oneself from life itself, no longer enters in relationships, makes oneself invulnerable. . . The more strongly we affirm reality, the more we are immersed in [suffering.]" Such acceptance is the alternative to nihilistic despair, the condition 'of wishing that the world did not exist, of believing that non-being is better than being.'"

In short, in embracing the fact that God gives us suffering along with joy, we are embracing life.

Depression and despair in the face of suffering are, as we see throughout the book of Job, the tools of Satan. If we are pure in Christ, and if we are truly innocent, then we will not be overcome with despair when facing tragedy. In the days after the tsunami devastated Sri Lanka, heartbreaking stories came in of the thousands of children who were orphaned. What really struck me, however, was the news footage that accompanied many of these words -- images of entire camps filled with refugee orphans. Like Job, this children had lost everything -- their families, all their belongings, their homes -- they even (the newscaster warned us) faced a grim future in which they might be sold as sex slaves and contract AIDS or other terrible physical illnesses that come with such sins and abuses. Yet despite all this suffering, these children were running around the camp playing tag and laughing. They were drawing pictures with crayons. They had hope, because --even if they had never heard the name of Jesus-- they had faith in the divine power. They saw what Paul calls God's testimony of himself in the world around them, and before they reached the age of true accountability they understood that God is there, and that the world he created is in many ways good and trustworthy. One might say that these children were somehow ignorant and blind, and didn't realize that any minute another disaster could snuff out their lives. However, it may be just the opposite. Perhaps they knew what we all need to learn: that evil is part of the plan of God, but that the world is good and goes on. As Vibert says, "Though we rest uncomfortably with that thought, and it jars us when we consider it, the alternative is to say that Satan is autonomous. Do we want to say that Satan is at liberty to do whatever he wants to people, without God being able to do anything about it?"

The idea that Satan is at liberty to cause endless harm, like the idea that suffering can be avoided through some action of ours, is a lie told by Satan himself, to cause us to despair.

This is the truth, that God wants to use you for His glory. Sometimes the glory of God is brought about through our suffering. Job's suffering brought God glory. Christ's suffering brought God glory. As Father Richmond writes, "When a Christian suffers, it doesn't matter whether the suffering is the consequence of sin or not. All that matters is that all suffering be accepted and carried as one's cross. Let it be a testament to God's glory and a penance for all the sins that nailed Christ to the cross."

Do you think that you are somehow too tired to glorify God? God is glorified by lifting you up on the wings of eagles, and he is glorified when you sit there on the ash pile. Do you think you are somehow too shy to glorify God? You can glorify God in your silences. Do you think you are too old? Your age can glorify God. God does not need anything from you to be glorified, except that your soul accepts what he gives to you, and rejoices and praises him it. God will be glorified regardless of what you choose to do, but you have a choice as to whether or not you will be a part of glorifying him by having joy in the world that he has created.

Even if we can do nothing more than lie in a hospital bed and watch a heart monitor beeping on, we can still teach the world about Christian patience and Christian faith. When Job was at his lowest, crouching on a garbage heap and unable to move, he was an example to all of us of patience. Even at his lowest, Job glorified God. His faith today still challenges people. At the moment when he was tempted, Job remembered the goodness of God along with the cruelties of life.

The ultimate foolishness, that foolishness with which Job charges his wife, is that of nihilism in the face of suffering -- it is the ultimate foolishness to forget the goodness of God when trouble comes. As Job says, "shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" Job himself progresses over the course of the book, he does go through the whole gamut of emotions, and yet his three answers to God consistently serve to highlight the foolishness of rejecting ill from God. At the beginning, Job is the one who says that evil must be accepted coming from God. In the middle of the book, Job suggests that he would like the right to trial before God, as if God did not have the right to inflict pain. Yet in the final chapter, Job gives his final answer, repenting and saying "I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." This is the only response we can give when we consider forgetting that God has given us everything. Why, one might ask, does God not answer Job's question? Instead of explaining human suffering to Job, God merely displays his power in all its glory. As Sloan writes, "The Lord squashes Job with a battery of rhetorical questions designed to underscore the infinite gulf between divine and human power. Can Job lay the foundations of the earth? Fashion the ocean or the sun? Create snow and rain? Send forth lightning? Make an ostrich or a wild ass? Design the Behemoth or the Leviathan? Vanquish death?... [until] awed by the divine power, Job truckles."