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!
‘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.’ 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...
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’. 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.
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. 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...