Job Speaks Out!

Job 23:1-9, 16-17
Because of this, Job said:“Even today my thought is defiant;
his hand is heavy despite my groaning.
If only I knew where I might find him;
if I could come to his dwelling!
I would set out before him justice
and my mouth I would fill with arguments.
I would learn what he would answer me,
and understand what he would say to me.
Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power?
No, but he would set himself with me.
There an upright person could present a case before him,
and I could escape forever from my judge.
If I go eastward, then he is not there;
if I go westward, then I do not find him.
To the north, he hides and I cannot see him;
when I turn to the south, I catch no glimpse of him…
God has mde my heart faint;
Shaddai has terrified me.
But I will not be extinguished in the face of darkness,
when my face is covered by thick darkness.

When we last saw Job he was sitting on an ash heap. His world had come crashing down around him, the result of forces that he could not control and that were actually actively working against him. We sometimes say, when a series of unfortunate events happen to a person, that God or the devil had it in for that one. When we say that, we don’t really mean it. It’s just a dramatic way of saying, “Wow! You really are bad off.” But this was true for Job. Somebody really did have it in for him. Satan was the agent but God was the accomplice. It may just be a fanciful story told as a test case in the persistence of faith in the face of suffering, but when we stop to consider Job’s condition, whether he’s fictional or real, we can’t help but be overwhelmed by what happens to him. Here’s a good man – a perfectly upright man! – who suffers unjustly. We’re supposed to be scandalized by that.

There he sits on a pile of ashes. His camels and sheep and donkeys lost to theft and fire. His servants and children dead or carried off into slavery. His wealth gone. His health reduced by running sores. And there he sits, scraping his skin with the remnants of his former life – broken pieces of pottery.

But he maintains his integrity. That’s what God knew would happen. When God was talking to Satan in the heavenly courts he boasted about Job’s integrity. It’s what Satan thought he could wrest from him with a series of plagues. It’s what Job’s wife told him to give up so that he could die and be done with it. “Just curse God and die,” she says. But Job refuses.
You might call this steadfastness patience. It’s what the New Testament book of James calls it. “You have heard of the patience of Job,” James says, and he urges us to endure suffering in the same way. But the patience of Job does not endure past the first two chapters of the book of Job. By the beginning of chapter 3, Job, who has really held back and not done what most of us have done, which is to rail and scream at the injustice of it all…at this point Job begins to rail and scream at the injustice of it all. He doesn’t curse God, but he curses the day that he was born. “Why didn’t I die at birth because then it would be over and I would be at rest and would not have to face this loss?”

Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, Job had someone close by to answer this question, which was probably just meant rhetorically. His friends had shown up. Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. You can see that it was a pretty diverse group of folks. A sampling of wisdom from the peoples of the region. If you’re going to have a philosophical or theological discussion about the nature of suffering it’s good to have a Shuhite or two in the mix. And nobody knows more about sanctimonious blabbering than the Naamathites. Job was well-stocked for the debates that follow over the next twenty-some chapters of the book.

What the friends tell him are variations on a theme. In an effort to protect God from any blame in this whole messy affair they offer every excuse they can come up. Job must have sinned. His children must have sinned. Somebody must have sinned. Or maybe you just think a little too much of yourself, Job. Who do you think you are to escape the pain that comes to every human being? These are the sorts of things they say.

But Job is having none of it. He sounds a little arrogant, but he knows that he has been upright. We know that, too, because God has told us, in the first chapter of the story, that Job is an upright kind of guy, fearing God and turning away from evil. That’s why he gets center stage. No, Job knows that it’s too easy to blame the victim in this case. There are times when suffering comes to the sinner, but there are also times when suffering comes for no discernable reason and this is one of those times.

By the time we get to chapter 23 Job has decided that what he wants is a trial. He wants to declare his case before God. He won’t accept the easy answers on offer from the likes of the Shuhites and Naamathites. He won’t accept that God has some purpose in sending evil. What he thinks is that, if he could find God, God would agree with him.

Here’s my loose translation of what he says: “I’ve still got it God. I may be sitting on an ash heap doing skin care with a potsherd but I’ve still got my integrity. Just let me find you and I’ll prove it to you. I can lay out the case. I can make the argument. I can take whatever you throw at me by way of explanation because I’m convinced that you will agree with me. Even you would agree that what has happened to me is unjust. Even you, holy and terrible as your name is, must take my side. So now all I have to do is find you. I’m weary. I’m terrified because of what has happened to me. But I will not be extinguished in the face of the darkness.”

There’s a lot of dispute about that last verse. The text is so old and corrupted that it’s hard to make out what the Hebrew means. Some translations say that Job is saying “If only I could vanish in the darkness.” But it seems to me that the tone of Job’s speech here is one of defiance. He is not trying to vanish. He is anguished because it seems that God has vanished and he wants to make his case. This Job will not “go gentle into that good night,” to coin a phrase from Dylan Thomas.

So if we are looking to this story for a model for dealing with hard times then there is a lot more here than the patience of Job. Part of what Job’s integrity means is that he holds on to a belief in a universe where there is justice at work, where there is a moral center and God is in control and Job trusts that, were he able to explain his situation before God, God would side with him. The darkness will not reduce him to silence.

That’s why it really is inadequate and an error to say, in the face of evil, that God must have a plan and a purpose in sending the evil. Job, in his fiery stage, wouldn’t accept that argument. It’s not that God doesn’t have plan and purpose. There is purpose written through the whole of creation. And it’s not that God can’t and doesn’t bring good in the face of evil. You know from your own life how often good has come from the worst of situations. But the important point is that the evil doesn’t serve the purposes of God. One of the things that characterizes evil is that it is something that sets itself against God, resisting all efforts to tame it or to bring it under the umbrella of providence.

I remember one of the hardest times in my ministry was right before I left my last church in Unionville. I was in the midst of the grief of leaving a ministry I enjoyed and saying goodbye to people who had become very important to me. It would have been a hard time anyway. But I had two very difficult funerals that really tested my faith and trust in God.

The first was for a youth who was killed in a car accident as he went to his senior prom. He was driving into the sun, going a little too fast, making a turn on a small country road. His parents were away at the time in another state and I went to the family home to find his younger brother there all alone in a dark and empty house. We sat together and waited for his parents. I don’t remember much of what we said, but it wasn’t much.

Then a month later there was another accident. Another teenager - this one a young girl who had been adopted by the whole community. She had been diagnosed with a kidney ailment as a baby and had spent most of her life on dialysis. When she got to be a teenager we celebrated when we found out that she could live a more normal life with a kidney transplant and the person who had a kidney that would work was her mother. The surgery was successful and the girl was just starting to enjoy what this new gift would mean for her. Then there was the accident.

At the funeral service the funeral home was packed. Cars were lined up in Fredericksburg for over a half-mile. All of her friends were there. All of the community was there. And what could I say to this group? That God’s purpose for the world included this girl’s death? No. I did not believe that. Job would not have believed that either.

The most faithful response to suffering is not to try to protect God and God’s sovereignty over all creation by attributing evil to God. A properly formed moral conscience is properly outraged by the injustice of suffering. It rightfully demands a trial. It forcefully argues the case of the sufferer and refuses to be silenced by the dark. In doing this it bears witness to God’s intentions for good and looks forward to a day of vindication that may yet be hidden from natural sight.

What I offered that day was an angry sermon because it felt that anger was the most faithful thing any of us had to offer. Not that God could not redeem even that situation, because God does overcome even death. But someone had to say, “No more. One day there will be no more funerals like this. One day we will all see tombs emptied of the dead and the defeat of the forces that would bring death upon us.

I think that what we are doing when we try to claim that bad things are part of God’s purpose, even when it is done innocently and sincerely, is that we are trying to cover over the madness. When hard times come it is always senseless and it threatens to make a mockery of our beliefs about how the world works. When we try to establish a reason for tsunamis or murders or illnesses like AIDS we are desperately seeking to assure ourselves that, even though the world seems unhinged, someone, somewhere is still in control and can master evil even if this puppeteer god is somehow the source of evil. But we shouldn’t seek to tame the evil by making it a subcontractors working for God. We shouldn’t downgrade its darkness by making it something we can comprehend.

The evil thing about evil is that it doesn’t make sense, shouldn’t make sense, refuses to make sense. And our response to it shouldn’t be to domesticate it but to spit in its face, to defy its pretenses to ultimate power, to laugh at its absurdity and to recognize the stakes because they are high. If God is not the opponent and vanquisher of evil then the universe as the realm of God’s glory and reconciliation falls apart. If God doesn’t reject evil as alien to God’s nature and purposes then there is no point to the struggle and the language laced throughout the scriptures that urges believers to take up the armor of God and to stand firm in the face of the tempter’s snares. If God is not unalterably set against hard times, then what is Jesus doing in this world?

Yes, what about Jesus? We’ve talked about Job as a model, but what more do we learn from Christ? The theologian David Bentley Hart says that “if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.”[i]

But doesn’t this make God less powerful than we want to believe? If God is strong enough to bring the universe into being and loving enough to claim us as children of God, what explains the persistence of bad things happening to good and bad people? Don’t we have to believe, for the sake of God’s love and power, that all this evil must be serving a greater good?

All things ultimately will serve this God. God is reconciling all things in Christ Jesus. But God’s reconciling work takes place in a broken world fragmented in so many ways and operating in ruptured time.

There’s a new movie coming out this month about the battle of Iwo Jima and the famous picture that was taken of American soldiers raising a flag in the midst of that fierce fighting. It was clear in the spring of 1945 that the war was going to be decided in favor of the Allies. Germany had fallen. Japan was in retreat. There was no way they had the resources to win. But though the end was clear, there was still death and suffering to come. There was fierce resistance. And even years after the war ended there were occasional stories about Japanese soldiers who continued to live in isolated caves believing that their nation would still emerge victorious.

For Christians, the course of history is clear. In the end, love does win the day. The tomb is empty and all the wounded are made whole. Our calling is to see the world as God sees it at the end of all things. Next week we’ll listen again as God talks back to Job and to us. God is making all things new, even in the darkness and we shall not be extinguished by the dark. Thanks be to God.

[i] David Bentley Hart, The Doors of the Sea, Grand Rapids, MI: Eeerdmans, 2005, pp. 85-6.