| In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. He was honest inside and out, a man of his word, who was totally devoted to God and hated evil with a passion. He had seven sons and three daughters. He was also very wealthy—seven thousand head of sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred teams of oxen, five hundred donkeys, and a huge staff of servants—the most influential man in all the East!
(Job 1:1-3)
This is your typical, “Long ago, in a land far, far away…” prologue. Job is a good man, who is described as “blameless” and “upright”. Job is so spiritually cautious that whenever his kids have a party, he offers sacrifices just in case they sinned. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they did. You can never be too careful.
But winter is coming to Uz. And it’s coming with a vengeance.
All of a sudden the scene changes in the story. The writer transports the reader to heaven, where God is undergoing role call with the angels. But somehow Satan sneaked passed security and slips in with the angels. And through a short conversation, God grants permission to Satan to wreak havoc in Job’s life.
And this is where the story really gets interesting. Philip Yancey notes that this story plays out like theatre, but with the action playing out on two stages. On the lower stage is earth; life as we know it. But on the upper stage is heaven, and an unprecedented match between God and Satan.
Here’s the real key to the story: we as readers know what’s happening on both stages, but the characters on the lower stage do not. All they can see is what is happening on earth.
And the action continues on the lower stage…Job receives word that his oxen are all stolen. Job receives word that lightning has killed his sheep and servants. Job receives word that his camels have been captured. And to top it all off, Job receives word that a mighty wind has swept in from the desert and collapsed his house, killing all of his children. By the end of this, it would be almost funny if it weren’t so sad.
We wait with baited breath to hear Job’s response.
He grieves. He falls to the ground. He yells out at God in anguish in the most heartbreaking lament:
Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
And naked I will depart.
The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away;
May the name of the LORD be praised.
(Job 1:21)
And, in all of this, Job did not sin.
We switch scenes again, to another conversation between God and Satan. Satan again sneaks into heaven, and God asks, Where have you come from?
Now this is where my over-active imagination does overtime, because I like to imagine Satan as this sort of demented, evil Quasimoto, all hunched over and creepy, as he responds, “I was roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it”. That statement is enough to give me the willies.
Anyway, God starts boasting about Job and how faithful he is, which seems a bit confusing compared to our regular perceptions of God. At first glance, it appears that God is using Job as a pawn to win a bet. But the whole conversation – and really, the whole book – hinges on Satan’s one question…does Job love God for nothing?
In other words, Satan is saying to God, Job worships you because it is in his best interest. He loves you like a child loves the ice cream man, like an addict loves their dealer. Turn off the faucet of blessing and watch his devotion for you dry up like a desert.
And God answers this challenge, allowing Job to be harmed in any way, but not to be killed.
And if you can hear this next part without wincing, you should be a doctor – Satan afflicted Job with excruciating sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. Sores that were so painful that Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself to try to find relief.
And this time Job’s reaction is different. He doesn’t praise God as before, but rather, goes and sits on a pile of ashes at the Uz dump – which may have been out of grief, or perhaps because the sores that covered his body resembled leprosy, which would have socially forced him to be isolated for fear of spreading his disease.
Enter the character of Mrs. Job, who sadly, has gotten a bad rap. Now, I’ll admit, her statement, “Just curse God and die!” sounds a bit calloused. But you have to consider the context – Job’s wife has also lost everything. She lost her children and everything she owned, and now is caring for a sick husband, who once he dies, will leave her destitute.
But Job’s response is classic: “Woman, you are talking foolish! Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”
And the text says that Job did not sin IN WHAT HE SAID. But I think that at this point, inside Job must have been starting to struggle.
Enter Job’s friends – Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. Generally when a person goes to visit a sick friend, regardless of how they look, you grit your teeth and force out a smile and say it’s not that bad. But Job’s friends, who traveled from far away specifically to comfort him, can’t even contain their shock at the appearance of Job. At first they don’t recognize him, then they cry and yell and tear their robes and sprinkle dust on their heads. They had heard it was bad, but nothing had prepared them for this.
And after all that, they collapse on the ground with Job and sit in silence for seven days and seven nights. Let’s pause the story for a minute here. This is worth a moment of consideration. Imagine this. Seven days. Seven nights. Silence.
John Ortberg notes that this silence was so powerful that it became a part of the Jewish custom. Friends will come and sit with a friend who mourns for the period of a week.
Really, the reaction of the friends is counter-intuitive. Our instincts tell us to encourage, to lift hope and raise spirits. But that’s not what Job’s friends did. They didn’t give advice – they were just there. Job was so bad, there was no point in telling him how good he looked.
Now, if you know the story, you’ll know that after the week of silence, the friends dash any image we may have of them possessing Yoda-like wisdom – you know the old saying “it is better to be quiet and thought wise than open your mouth and remove all doubt”? That may have been written about these friends. Their words were foolish. But their silence was brilliant.
After all this, Job speaks. And the scriptures don’t say this, but I bet on that upper stage, God was on the edge of his throne waiting to hear what Job was going to say. Had he repeated his mantra “the Lord gives and takes away, praise the Lord”, the book would have ended and we all could go home. But instead, Job curses the day he was born.
Job goes on to request that the day of his birth be removed from the calendar. He asks that those who curse days would curse that day. He doesn’t tell us who it is that curses days…seems like a limited profession.
Job pours out a poetically polished string of anger and sadness and pain and grief for the next 28 chapters. He wants to know why God has forsaken him. And once his friends have heard all they can stand, they pipe up with their opinion on the cause of Job’s suffering.
Job’s friends spend 22 chapters voicing a theory that would have been the basis of theology at that time – often called the “Doctrine of Retribution”, this is the theory that good brings good, and bad brings bad. Job was rich and powerful, and now he’s poor and sick, so he must have done something really juicy to make God so mad.
Philip Yancey notes that the arguments of Job’s friends are often repeated today, for some reason more frequently in Christian circles. Suffering people have told Yancey about those around them who make their suffering worse through their “encouragement”…such as “The reason you’re in the hospital is a problem of faith. If you believed enough, God would heal you” or “Your depression is a matter of spiritual warfare. If you would just rebuke Satan, you’d be fine.”
For some reason, we associate well-being with the presence of God, and that suffering comes only when someone has done something wrong. Noone ever writes a book called “Where is God when I feel awesome?” or “Why do good things happen to good people?” Noone ever wins the lottery and says, “Why me, God?”
It’s true that pain isn’t a part of God’s plan, and he shares in our suffering and looks to the day when we will all be healed and whole.
And yet…
While God hates pain, it does not mean that he can’t redeem it. Ask anyone who has walked on their faith journey for many years and seen much pain and much joy, and I guarantee that they will all tell you that the time of growth was always in the time of suffering. We all desire to live in summertime all the time, but that is when we become self-absorbed and seemingly self-sufficient. Perhaps summer in our lives only exists to let us catch our breath between winters.
This may seem bizarre, but I know that Steve Carrell can say this better than me. Take a look at this clip…
LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE CLIP
Isn’t that true? They were my prime suffering years…let me tell you a little story. Right around the time I turned 16, I started having nightmares. As I said, I have an over-active imagination, which has led me to have an above average amount of nightmares, and also a long string of nightmares about leeches after watching Stand By Me as a child – you know the scene I’m talking about? – but this was different. What started out as the odd weird dream turned into every single night waking up encompassed with fear. I know now that they are irrational, and not even really scary at all, but at the time, it was terrifying. I really can’t put it into words, but the feeling of being scared in the middle of the night being utterly alone and helpless took over my life. I started to become afraid to fall asleep, and I would stay up as late as I could just so I would be too tired to dream. Eventually I was sleeping only around an hour a night, and started feeling anxiety and depression during the day. Insomnia does something horrible to your life. Between not sleeping and feeling constant fear and several other circumstances, I became someone other than myself.
And, right in the middle of this, my grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer. You kinda have to know my family and their history to understand the whole story, but the point form version is that this woman has undergone Job-like suffering, and through it all, has been a model of grace and faith and hope to our whole family, and to me in particular. This was the straw that broke me.
I’m not a cry-er, but I distinctly remember sitting in a car at Kinsmen Park sobbing, crying about my grandma and myself and how unfair everything seems to be (and yes, I was a teenager, and hormones may have had something to do with it!). But somehow through this confusion, I decided to go on a missions trip to Australia. And as I got on the plane, I remember saying to God…that’s it. Can you do anything else to me?
And God’s answer was…Yes. I can do so much more. I can show you who I am. I can love you, and comfort you, and be everything that you have been looking for in so many other places.
And again making a long story short, God showed himself to me that summer. That summer was when I understood for the first time that Christianity is not about the things that we do not do, but about a genuine relationship with Jesus. I understood and accepted who God had made me to be, rather than running from my gifting and hiding from His call for me.
And I know with every ounce of my being that none of that would have happened if I had gone into that summer without being broken first. I would have relied on my own strength, not God’s. I would have been my own person, not His child. I know looking back, that on that upper stage, God was orchestrating a beautiful confrontation between me and myself, and God won.
I know that countless people have suffered so much more pain that I have. And I know that I can expect to suffer more in the years ahead. But for many, and in my own life, there is a duality about pain – it causes you to wonder where God is and why he would allow it, and it can cause you to depend on his presence in a way that nothing else can.
Now, back to Job. We pick up after many, many chapters of complaining…and at last, God responds. This is my favorite line:
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.
(Job 38:3)
And God does what only God can…he throws out a fury of questions, the purpose of which it would seem is to confuse Job and make him feel small in the presence of God. But once you understand the nature of the questions, you get a clearer picture of what God is trying to do.
Does the rain have a father?
Do you send the lightning bolts on their way?
Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Does the hawk take flight by your wisdom and spread his wings toward the south?
God’s questions are indicating something about what kind of person he is. They are filled with references to his abundant goodness, even though there is no “strategic gain” in it. And why make these references, in the midst of Job’s suffering, to the wonders of creation?
Because God is a God of extravagant goodness. And he is uncontrollably generous. He is irrationally loving. He is good for no reason at all. He is good when we are undeserving of good. He is good because he loves to give.
I could give you countless examples of this from this text, but I really would love to encourage you to read for yourself the dialogue between God and Job in Job 38-41. God goes into great detail about the unique characteristics of his creatures, and describes the pleasure he takes in the way a stork runs, and the tail of the hippopotamus, and the untameable nature of the crocodile…
And why does God go into all of the seemingly insignificant details of the animals he has created, animals that don’t appear to have a specific purpose? Because God takes pleasure in the least strategic creatures.
What God is really saying to Job is “I’m worth it. Life, following me – I’m worth it. Don’t give up. This pain you feel overwhelmed by now is not going to last forever. I am the kind of God that is worth getting close to.”
Because God is a God of extravagant goodness. And he is uncontrollably generous. He is irrationally loving. He is good for no reason at all. It’s his nature.
In the end, Job never finds out about the conversation in heaven. In that sense, Job’s story is our story. We live on the lower stage, and we will never know what is on the upper stage, or why winter comes.
But Job does find something much better. Job finds out who God is.
My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you
(Job 42:5)
When God came to earth, he came in the winter. Jesus, like Job, was a man well acquainted with sorrow. He understood grief.
Where was God? He was on the ash heap, just like Job. Jesus was also so physically beat up that he was unrecognizable. He himself had to go through separation from the Father, as he cried out on the cross, ‘My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?’
If it is winter in your life, and you wonder where God is, you don’t have to wonder any more. He is the God of the ash heap. Perhaps Jesus was never closer to us than when he was far from the Father.
And now for the epilogue…Job and God square up, and in the end, all is forgiven. And as you can expect with a God as generous as the one we serve, Job’s blessings are restored and then some. But something has changed this time. John Ortberg writes of the closing of the book of Job, where the writer tells us something that we might miss, but ancient readers would be sure to note. As is common, they mention that Job had more children – 7 sons and 3 daughters, to be exact, but goes on to mention the names of each of the daughters and not his sons. For Hebrew genealogies, this is extremely unique. Not only that, but the names of the daughters are unusual – generally names of children would have been sensible names that described a character virtue or theological truth. But the names of Job’s daughters are all about beauty – Jemimah is his first daughter, which means “dove” – a beautiful bird. The second daughter is named Keziah, or “cinnamon” – a prized spice. And the third daughter, Keren-Happuch, means “horn of eye shadow”. That’s like naming your daughter Maybeline or Estee Lauder.
Not only does Job give his daughters unusual names, but he also leaves them an inheritance – a very unusual act for a father to do. Inheritances were for sons, not daughters. You see, sons were strategic, they were obligated to care for their parents in the old age. Instead of giving money to daughters, parents would give the money to their daughter’s husband’s fathers. So why does the writer include this in the story?
Because now Job delights in and gives to the least strategic creatures. And he is extravagantly generous. He is irrationally loving. He gives for no reason at all. Remind you of anyone?
Satan was so incredibly wrong about Job. The central question to Job’s story is, Can a human being hold on to God and faith and love in the midst of winter? And the answer is, One can. One did.
Job couldn’t see the upper stage. He couldn’t have known the magnitude of his story in the scheme of spirituality. And the truth is, we’re not all that different. We live our lives on the lower stage for an upper stage God.
We find ourselves sitting on the ash heap, scraping proverbial boils off our skin with a broken piece of pottery, feeling lower than we could imagine – in pain, fear, broken and lonely and hurting…we discover in those moments and acutely feel more than anyone else can – we are not alone after all. Even in winter.
I’m going to call the music team out, and they’re going to share with us a song, telling a story much like Job’s. Only this time, it’s from God’s perspective. Listen to the words, and reflect on the images, and then Dean’s going to come out and pray. |
