Out of the storm

Questions And Consolations From The Book Of Job

Christopher Ash

• Publisher: IVP
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781844747894
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Cristianesimo

Why does a good God allow innocent suffering? Why does a just God act unfairly? Why does a sovereign God let disease and evil run rampant?
These are not questions asked from the onlooker's armchair, nor from the academic's desk, but from the anguish of the sickbed and the frustration of the wheelchair. The problem of pain is considered with the heart as well as the head.
Christopher Ash leads us through the biblical story of Job as we wrestle with these questions today. He honestly explores the lonely and cruel nature of suffering and whether God can be found in the midst of it. He exposes the shortcomings of Job's friends who deny the possibility of innocent suffering, and are unaware of the roles that Satan, the fall and the cross have to play. With compassion and clarity he takes the reader through Job's long debate with God - towards a humbling and hopeful resolution.

1. What is the book of Job about?

This book began as a sermon series on the book of Job. Twelve days before the first sermon, on 14 January 2003, Detective Constable Stephen Oake was stabbed and killed in Manchester. Why? He was an upright man, a faith­ful husband and a loving father. What is more, he was a Christian, a com­mit­ted member of his church, where he some­times used to preach. The news­papers reported the moving state­ment by his father, Robin Oake, a former chair­man of the Christian Police Association: how he said through his tears that he was praying for the man who had killed his son. They told of the quiet dignity of his widow, Lesley. They showed the happy family snap­shots with his teenage son Christopher and daugh­ters Rebecca and Corinne.

So why was he killed? Does this not make us angry? After all, if we are going to be honest, we have to admit that there were others who deserved to die more than him. Perhaps there was a corrupt police­man some­where, who had unjustly put inno­cent people in prison, or a crooked police­man who had taken bribes. Or perhaps there was another police­man who was car­ry­ing on an affair with his neighbour’s wife. If one of those had been killed, we might have said that, although we were sad, at least there would have appeared to be some moral logic to this death. But this family are, dare we say it, good people. Not sinless, of course, but believ­ers living upright lives. So why was this point­less and ter­rible loss inflicted on them?

We need to be honest and face the kind of world we live in. Why does God allow these things? Why does he do nothing to put these things right? And why, on the other hand, do people who could not care less about God and justice thrive? Here in con­tem­po­rary idiom is the angry voice of an honest man from long ago, who also strug­gled with these same injus­tices:

Why do the wicked have it so good,

live to a ripe old age and get rich?

They get to see their chil­dren succeed,

get to watch and enjoy their grand­chil­dren.

Their homes are peace­ful and free from fear;

they never expe­ri­ence God’s dis­ci­plin­ing rod.

Their bulls breed with great vigour

and their calves calve without fail.

They send out their chil­dren to play

and watch them frolic like spring lambs.

They make music with fiddles and flutes,

have good times singing and dancing.

They have a long life on easy street,

and die pain­lessly in their sleep!1

‘Let’s be honest,’ Job says. ‘Let’s have no more of this pious make-believe that it goes well for good people and badly for bad people. You look around the world and it’s simply not true. By and large people who could not care about God live happier, longer lives with less suffer­ing than do believ­ers. Why? What kind of God might it be who runs a world like this?’

We face hard ques­tions like this in the book of Job. But there are two ways to ask these ques­tions. We may ask them as ‘arm­chair questions’ or we may ask them as ‘wheel­chair questions’. We ask them as ‘arm­chair questions’ if we our­selves are remote from suffer­ing. As Shakespeare said, ‘He jests at scars that never felt a wound.’2 The trou­bled Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote elo­quently and almost bit­terly:

O the mind, mind has moun­tains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man fath­omed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there...3

We grapple with God with ‘wheel­chair questions’ when we do not hold this terror cheap, when we our­selves or those we love are suffer­ing. Job asks the ‘wheel­chair questions’.

Every pastor knows that behind most front doors lies pain, often hidden, some­times long-drawn-out, some­times very deep. I was dis­cuss­ing how to preach a passage from Job with four fellow min­is­ters, when I looked around at the others. For a moment I lost my con­cen­tra­tion on the text as I real­ized that one of them, some years before, had lost his wife in a car acci­dent in their first year of mar­riage. The second was bring­ing up a seri­ously hand­i­capped daugh­ter. The third had broken his neck and come within 2mm of total par­al­y­sis or death six years pre­vi­ously. And the fourth had under­gone repeated radical surgery, which had changed his life. As my con­cen­tra­tion returned to the text of Job, I thought, ‘This book is not merely aca­demic: it is both about and for people who know suffer­ing.’

Job is a fire­ball book. It is a stag­ger­ingly honest book. It is a book that knows what people actu­ally say and think – and not just what they say pub­licly in church. It knows what people say behind closed doors and in whis­pers; and it knows what we say in our tears. It is not merely an aca­demic book. If we listen to it with any care, it will touch, trouble and unset­tle us at a deep level.

Before we launch into the book, let me make two intro­duc­tory points.

Job is a very long book

Job is 42 chap­ters long. We may con­sider that rather an obvious obser­va­tion, but the point is this: in his wisdom God has given us a very long book. He has done so for a reason. It is easy just to preach the begin­ning and the end, and to skip rather quickly over the endless argu­ments in between as if it would not much matter if they were not there. But God has put them there.

Why? Well, just maybe because when the suffer­ing ques­tion and the ‘Where is God?’ ques­tion and the ‘What kind of God?’ ques­tion are asked from the wheel­chair, they cannot be answered on a post­card. If we ask, ‘What kind of God allows this kind of world?’, God gives us a 42-chapter book. Far from saying, ‘Well, the message of Job may be sum­mar­ized on a post­card and here it is,’ he says, ‘Come with me on a journey, a journey that will take time. There is no instant answer – take a spoon­ful of Job, add boiling water and you’ll know the answer.’ Job cannot be dis­tilled. It is a nar­ra­tive with a slow pace (after the fre­netic begin­ning) and long delays. Why? Because there is no instant working through grief, no quick fix to pain, no message of Job in a nut­shell. God has given us a 42-chapter journey with no satis­fac­tory bypass.

Indeed, if this short study is treated as an alternative to reading the text of Job, it will be like reading a guide book to a foreign country as a sub­sti­tute for actu­ally vis­it­ing it, rather than as a prep­ar­a­tion and accom­pa­ni­ment. This study is to help us read the book of Job itself. For we must read it, and read it at length and at leisure.

This is just a short intro­duc­tory study. But it may be better by a short intro­duc­tion to tempt you into the book and open up the book to a life­time of study, than by a for­bid­dingly long tome to slam the door in your faces. When I was sent to Rome some years ago on busi­ness, I managed during one weekend to scrape together just 24 hours to visit Florence. It seemed in some ways almost insult­ing to the riches of the Uffizi Gallery alone to give just one day to it. But it was better than nothing, and it gave me the desire to go back and explore further. If this book achieves that, it will have been worth­while.

Most of Job is poetry

About 95% of the book of Job is poetry. Chapters 1 and 2, the start of chapter 32, and part of chapter 42 are prose. All the rest is poetry. But so what? Well, so quite a lot. For poetry does not speak to us in the same way as prose. For poems, says J. I. Packer, ‘are always a per­sonal “take” on some­thing, com­mu­ni­cat­ing not just from head to head but from heart to heart’.4 A poem can often touch, move and unset­tle us in ways that prose cannot. Job is a blend of the affec­tive (touch­ing our feel­ings) and the cog­ni­tive (address­ing our minds). And poetry is par­tic­u­larly suited to this bal­anced address to the whole person. But poetry does not lend itself to summing up in tidy prop­o­si­tions, bullet points, neat systems and well-swept answers. Poetry grap­ples with our emo­tions, wills and sen­si­tiv­ities. We cannot just sum up a poem in a bald state­ment; we need to let a poem get to work on us, to immerse our­selves in it.

It is just so with Job. We shall be immersed in the poetry of Job. As we enter it we must not expect tidy system­atic points to note down and then think we’ve ‘done’ Job, as a one-day tourist might ‘do’ Florence. Job is to be lived in and not just studied. So during this study let us read the book of Job itself, read it out loud, mull it over, absorb it, wonder, be unset­tled and med­i­tate. And let God get to work on us through this great Bible book.

Notes

1. From The Message par­a­phrase of Job 21 (Eugene H. Patterson, NavPress 1996).
2. Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2.
3. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Sonnet 41.
4. Quoted from Gaius Davies, Genius, Grief and Grace (Christian Focus, 2001), p. 8.

2. Do we live in a well-run world? (Job 1:1 – 2:10)

The scene is set (1:1–5)

There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was blame­less and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil. (1:1)

Job was ‘healthy, wealthy and wise’. This is what we would expect in a well-run world: that one who is wise will as a con­se­quence be healthy and wealthy. After all, to be wise – in the Bible sense – means to fear and honour the living God (as human beings ought in their relig­ion) and to turn away from wrong­do­ing (as human beings ought in their moral­ity). And any self-respect­ing god who claims to be both fair and in control is surely bound to reward such a person with wealth and health. To do oth­er­wise would be either unfair or evi­dence of weak­ness. Likewise we may expect to meet others who are ‘sick, poor and wicked’, their wick­ed­ness leading inev­i­ta­bly to illness and des­ti­tu­tion.

We do not know where Job lived. (No-one knows where Uz was, except that it does not seem to have been any­where in Israel.) We do not know when he lived (except that it feels like a very long time ago). He could be almost anybody, were it not for what the sto­ry­teller tells us in the first verse: that Job is a real believer in the living God. He fears God, bowing down before him in wonder, love and awe, rec­og­niz­ing that God alone is the Creator to whom he and his world owe their entire exis­tence. And as a mark of true worship, he turns away from evil; his life from day to day being marked by repen­t­ance and faith. In Job 28 there is a poem about wisdom. The con­clu­sion (28:28) is that wisdom is to fear God and turn away from evil; which is pre­cisely what we are told about Job in the first verse of the book. Job is, in the deepest bib­li­cal sense, a wise man. That is to say, he is a believer, a true wor­ship­per. He is blameless, which does not mean he is perfect, but rather that he has per­sonal integ­rity; his life is of a piece; what he says with his lips in spoken worship he lives with his life in whole-body worship. ‘Blameless’ is the word trans­lated ‘sincerity’ in Joshua 24:14 (Now there­fore fear the LORD and serve him in sin­cer­ity...). And he is upright, which means both loyal to God and straight in his deal­ings with others. It seems from the passing allu­sions to him in Ezekiel 14:14, 20 that Job’s right­eous­ness was ­legen­dary. Here before us at the start of the story is the true believer par excel­lence, a man who walks before God with a clear con­science, his sins con­fessed and for­given, his life showing all the marks of a wor­ship­per.

And if we believe that this world is ordered by a fair God, we are not at all sur­prised by the bless­ing that follows:

There were born to him seven sons and three daugh­ters. He pos­sessed 7,000 sheep, 3,000 camels, 500 yoke of oxen, and 500 female donkeys, and very many ser­vants, so that this man was the great­est of all the people of the east. His sons used to go and hold a feast in the house of each one on his day, and they would send and invite their three sisters to eat and drink with them. And when the days of the feast had run their course, Job would send and con­se­crate them, and he would rise early in the morning and offer burnt offer­ings accord­ing to the number of them all. For Job said, ‘It may be that my chil­dren have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.’ Thus Job did con­tin­u­ally. (Job 1:2–5)

We meet here a large, har­mo­ni­ous family filled with godly cel­e­bra­tion and joy, and ­material wealth beyond the wildest dreams of the wicked. And yet (verse 5) amid this won­der­ful bless­ing Job main­tains his god­li­ness; he is watch­ful in prayer, ever con­cerned as his highest pri­or­ity in life to keep himself and his family in right rela­tion­ship with God. So here he is, a paragon of virtue and show­ered with bless­ings. What a feel-good start to a happy story!

And now the hor­rify­ing sur­prise. Four sharp, quick, alter­nat­ing scenes, the first three sig­nalled by Now there was a day... We may picture them dra­ma­tized on a stage. Stage left, the Lord’s council chamber; stage right, Job’s land. As we walk through this stac­cato drama, let us watch for the four salient fea­tures or markers our sto­ry­teller wants to fix in our minds at the outset of our journey. It is vital for us to be abso­lutely clear about these; oth­er­wise we shall be hope­lessly con­fused when we get into the body of the book. And the sto­ry­teller also poses a big ques­tion.

• Marker 1: Job really is blame­less
• Marker 2: Satan has real influ­ence
• Marker 3: The Lord is abso­lutely supreme
• Marker 4: The Lord gives ter­rible per­mis­sions
• Question: Will Job prove to be a real believer?

Scene 1: The Lord’s council chamber (1:6–12)

Lights up, stage left. We are in the hea­venly council chamber. This is a way of pic­tur­ing the spir­i­tual govern­ment of the world that we find, for example, in Psalm 82:1. We find some­thing similar in 1 Kings 22:19–22. The Lord is in the chair. (When our English trans­la­tions print ‘Lord’, this trans­lates the Hebrew word ‘Yahweh’, the God of Israel, of the Bible and of the whole world.) The sons of God (or ‘angels’, NIV) are the spir­i­tual beings entrusted with power under the Lord in the uni­verse. They are taking their seats for a Cabinet meeting. This Bible imagery helps us to rec­og­nize that we live in a world in which all manner of spir­i­tual and very real powers and author­ities are at work, and yet all of them are subject to the sov­ereign God.

Among the spir­i­tual beings is Satan, or, more lit­er­ally, ‘the Satan’; for this is a title rather than a per­sonal name. He is the enemy, the adver­sary, the accuser, a kind of public pros­e­cu­tor. It seems to be his job to patrol the earth looking for sin. It is not clear at this stage whose enemy he is. The Lord asks Satan where he has come from (verse 7). This may be a hostile ques­tion, imply­ing that Satan is gate­crash­ing the meeting or that his doings are the subject of the Lord’s sus­pi­cion. Or it may be a routine enquiry: ‘Now, Mr Satan, time for your report.’

‘Oh,’ he says, ‘just doing stuff, here and there, the usual...’

‘And what did you find?’ For the Lord is always on the lookout for real believ­ers, men and women with integ­rity who will love and worship him as they ought. Maybe Satan shrugs as if to imply he has not found any real wor­ship­pers, with the further impli­ca­tion that perhaps the Chairman of the Council is not the best person to be in charge, since he has no real adher­ents on earth.

And so the Lord picks up this implicit chal­lenge: Have you noticed my servant Job? The title my servant is a mark of honour and special close­ness to God, used in the Bible of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and the proph­ets. It is used supremely of the ‘servant’ of the Lord in Isaiah 42:1 and the other so-called ‘Servant Songs’ in Isaiah, an utterly blame­less figure who also suffers ter­ribly in spite of – or because of? – his right­eous­ness.

‘Job seems pretty special to me,’ says the Lord: ‘Blameless, upright, fearing God and turning away from evil. So what do you make of him?’ (verse 8, echoing verse 1). This chal­lenge in 1:8 is the main­spring from which unwinds the whole ter­rible drama of the book. ‘Here, it seems to me’, says God, ‘is a true wor­ship­per. Now what are you going to do about that?’

Well, Satan is not impressed. ‘What, him a true wor­ship­per?! Well, hardly, Your Majesty. Anyone would have the outward show of being a believer if he’d been given what Job has been given. You’ve put a pro­tec­tive hedge around him. He’s never suffered any loss. He’s a fair-weather believer, if you ask me. But if you want pub­licly, before all these other spir­i­tual beings, to prove this believer is a real one, then you’ll have to show them the gen­u­ine­ness of his faith.1 And you can only do that when he suffers loss. Then I think we’ll all see that his is not real worship. Take away what he has and he’ll...