Discussing Job

Thoughts from a discussion on Job

 

            An Internet conversation, especially on a forum like Twitter can be good or bad. It can be a free for all, with unwelcome guests – on some days I have unwelcome guests into a conversation, and on other days I am afraid I have been the unwelcome guest. But the other day I entered a conversation where I mentioned something and before long a conversation was taking place between two people who had never had a conversation before.

We were talking about two perspectives on the Book of Job. One perspective said that unless you accept Job as a blameless man from the beginning of the book you will misunderstand the book’s message to us. The person on our Twitter feeds that had begun the conversation was especially pointing out that most of us at times, reading through the book of Job find ourselves agreeing at some point with Job’s friends, or even with Elihu who seems like the cold arrogant theologian type who has no sense of humanity in his bones. All he has is answers with little compassion. This first perspective, a wonderful perspective in my opinion, leads us to look at ourselves when we are tempted to join in with Job’s accusers and find ourselves tempted to point the finger at Job. This view certainly speaks to us. How often have we seen someone suffering and then began to think about what they did wrong and how they got to that point of suffering that is in their life. We also do it with ourselves before we do it with others. Job refused to do it to himself in his suffering. He had lived what in the Hebrew Scriptures was called a perfect or blameless life, and he claimed that as the truth about himself. That is what offended his friends about Job. We wish to enjoy a sort of benign tolerance for shared mediocrity. After all, are we not all sinners and good ole boys? It becomes an assault the joy we have in our shared mediocrity when someone boldly says, no my suffering isn’t because of my sin – I am a righteous man and this suffering isn’t about my sin.” Such a clinging to one’s righteousness in the midst of his suffering shatters for all of us the illusion of our joyous celebration of shared mediocrity. We are all sinners becomes less a confession and more an excuse for the collective. Job shatters the bonds of our sameness based tolerance. He defies convention and claims to be a righteous man rather than accepting the role of sinner.

With our English language backgrounds, we quickly want to speak to Job and say “Hey no one is perfect. No one is blameless. How dare you speak that way? You are supposed to admit “hey we are all sinners, and then you can glibly claim phrases and announce to the world “I am okay, you are okay.” Job if you had done that, your friends would have shared like mannered phrases with you and everything would have been okay-dokey smokie. But you refused to take that view. Instead you said, “I want God to explain this. I have lived a good life. I have provided for the poor, treated my servants with dignity and respect, have been legs for the lame and eyes for the blind. I want God to explain.” Perhaps he wasn’t interested so much in God giving him a rational answer to his question of why. He was looking I believe for something else. He was looking for God’s presence in his suffering. He was willing for God to slay him as long as he could see him in this time of his suffering. He was a blameless man, and he wasn’t willing to let go of his blamelessness.

 The Hebrew usage of the word we translate into either “perfect” or “blameless” doesn’t fit well into our English language vocabularies or how we speak of one being blameless. In our English vocabularies and usage, we think of someone who is blameless as someone who has arrived and fulfilled the standard of the law. What more can there be once they have arrived at blamelessness or perfection. But that doesn’t capture so well what being blameless meant within the Hebraic Scriptures. In the Hebraic understanding of holiness, the life of the righteous was a continual walk passing through varied stages of life. A two year old’s blameless way is not the same as a twelve year old’s blameless way, is not the same as a twenty-two year old’s blameless way, is not the same as a forty-two year old’s blameless, is not the same as an eighty-two year old’s blameless way. Blamelessness was to walk in basic harmony with God in the stage and development of life in which you were passing.

This viewpoint opens up a second way of reading the book of Job that had been mentioned by one of the persons in our conversation. He described a book written which instead of viewing Job as a work primarily showing us the fallacy of Job’s accusers, set forth to show how Job entered a difficult season in which through his perseverance, his clinging to righteousness, his hunger after God, he actually grew to be a more complete man with a more perfected faith in the end of the book than in the beginning. The reality is that the Book of Job can be read both ways. The reality is that sometimes we are tempted to accuse and we need to ask ourselves if we really want to join Job’s friends in pointing with our accusing fingers to a man grieving and suffering? The reality also is that we are sometimes in suffering and the way of glibness and easy clichés is not the way to develop spiritual wholeness or to most obtain the wisdom of God from the experience. It would seem that a proper appraisal of one’s own station in life including holding on to our basic if not perfect righteousness is part of our dealing with suffering. These are not easy situations and they do not call for easy solutions either from the sufferer or from the onlooker.

The Book of Job actually opens the door for the experience of a relationship with God that speaks more boldly to us than clichés, perfect theological statements, and sound doctrinal conclusions based on our understandings of verbal inspiration. I am not denying that these experiences are to be viewed through the prism of Scriptural wisdom, but relationships are always more than codified agreements with declared principles of conduct. This is why the New Testament is insistent that law could not produce righteousness. Rather there was a need for a human being to enter the world and through his humanity to fulfill the righteousness of God. There might be a possibility that one could keep all the commandments of the law. But the Hebraic concept of perfection or blamelessness upon reaching one stage of perfection would ask, “isn’t there a next stage, surely we have not exhausted what it means to be image bearers of the living God?” Perhaps this provides us a way to understand the Book of Job, as a blameless man asking questions his friends did not understand as he reached forward to hearing from God, to knowing the presence of God in this experience of suffering.

We can almost see that the Book of Job is a book that is waiting for an answer. Even when the book of Job is over, it seems like nothing is really answered. Then we read of another suffering servant who takes up where the Book of Job ends. He is the umpire that Job asked for, the one who could stand between God and man. We express in our faith that he was tempted in all ways as we but that he was without sin. We imagine that meant he was perfect and nothing could be added to his life or understanding that he had arrived. Yet the writer to the Hebrews tells us that he learned obedience through his suffering. He learned. He grew. He experienced. He moved forward from infancy to the point of ascending to heaven and inheriting the authority of His Father vested in him as an equal, something he had given up for a time to be our redemption.

I cannot begin to explain these things. But there is no end to the perfection we were meant to learn in relationship with God. We were created in the image of God. The more I understand about our creation and our redemption, the more I am moved by an explanation of what it meant for God to create us in his image. God created us, male and female, to be image bearers of the living God. But moreover God created us as image bearers so that the day would come when God himself would fill our image bearing forms with his eternal presence. What does this mean for our desires to grow, to mature, to be blameless, and to be perfected? Our goal is not the keeping of a law which could show sin but not bring about perfection; but the filling of our beings as image bearers with the very presence of the God who became flesh and dwelt among men.