6. Springtime Is Guaranteed
Springtime Is Guaranteed
How hopeless the naked wood of a fruit tree would look to us in February if we had never seen the marvel of springtime!
SOMETIMES THE STATE OF OUR SOULS seems as hopeless as the state of the trees in wintertime. Nothing can possibly be happening, God has forgotten us, the idea of springtime is preposterous.
The naked wood, bare and brittle and dry, is as much a part of the tree’s life as the sap’s rising in spring. The Lord is still in charge, still moving in mysterious ways even when He gives the enemy of our souls permission to trouble us. Permission was given in the case of Job, a man who in no way deserved the calamities that befell him. He cried out,
Why was I not still-born?
Why did I not die when I came out of the womb?
Why should the sufferer be born to see the light?
Why is life given to men who find it so bitter? (Jb 3:11, 19-20)
To ask why implies a conviction that there is a reason somewhere. Somebody must be responsible for this. A scientist, in an essay in Time, made a statement unusual nowadays for a scientist: “In the last analysis we are all creationists.” A surprising claim in view of the court fights over the teaching of creationism in public schools. Even those who subscribe to the “big bang” theory of the origin of the universe, says the writer, have to admit that something caused the bang. It seems to me there are only two options-the bang was caused or the bang was not caused. To believe the latter is to believe it proceeded by itself from nothing.
Job believed someone was responsible. He addresses God directly:
Can’t you take your eyes off me? Won’t you leave me alone long enough to swallow my spit? You shaped me and made me; now you’ve turned to destroy me. You kneaded me like clay, now you’re grinding me to a powder.
(Jb 7:19; 10:8-9, my paraphrase)
His friends accuse him of having foolish notions, a bellyful of wind, of being utterly lacking in the fear of God, “pitting himself against the Almighty, charging him head down” (Jb 15:2, 25-26).
Job in turn calls Eliphaz a windbag (16:2), but says his friends (now his enemies) can’t hold a candle to God, who “set upon me and mauled me, seized me by the neck and worried me. He set me up as his target; his arrows rained upon me from every side; pitiless, he cut deep into my vitals, he spilt my gall on the ground (Jb 16:12-13).
To some of us all this has a familiar ring. We may not be as bold or as eloquent as Job, but we’ve had feelings akin to his. One of the saddest letters I have ever received was from a man who described himself as skinny and plain, shy and rather “bumbly.” But he loves his wife and children, for whom he wants to be the best husband and father God can make him. His letter had the ring of authenticity. It sounded like an earnest and humble man, dead serious about being enlightened and corrected in the plight he describes. He washes dishes and clothes, picks up after everybody, prays with the children at night, gets them ready for school in the morning. He has his own business, and turns over all the money to his wife. He takes her out to dinner, brings her flowers, treats her courteously. But she is nearly unapproachable, says she has no time for kids or housework, prefers her full-time job. She screams at the children until she is hoarse.
“Her temperament has gotten steadily worse. I do whatever I can to avoid upsetting her, and am strengthened only by my commitment to marriage and not by romantic affection. I am undermined. I need to have my serious faults and major defects pointed out to me so that they can be corrected. There must be many, else how could one do so much for so long and not get a loving response?
“I can’t change her, only me. But how? The old plow horse simply puts his head down and keeps on going until the job is over. I just don’t know what else to do, and I ask the Lord for strength to continue as long as it takes.”
Here is an all-too-familiar modern scenario which, to those ensnared in it, God seems to be overlooking. This man is perplexed, discouraged, almost in despair. But he knows God hasn’t forgotten him, and he keeps on praying, seeking God’s help and correction.
Note that Job never denies God’s existence, never imagines that his troubles come by pure chance. God surely has something to do with it, and he has a thousand questions.
Unknown to Job was a strange encounter that had taken place in the court of heaven. The members, we read, had taken their places in the presence of the Lord, and the Adversary was there among them. The Adversary? In heaven? So the Book tells us. God asks him where he has been, and he gives what sounds like a flippant reply: “Ranging over the earth, from end to end.” God then calls his attention to a man unique among men, blameless, upright, God-fearing, opposed to evil—the sort of man against whom Satan will surely wish to try his strength.
He takes up the challenge. It’s Job, is it? Well of course he’s God-fearing. He has every reason to be. God has put him in a special category, with special protection, special privileges and blessings.
“‘But stretch out your hand and touch all that he has, and then he will curse you to your face.’ Then the Lord said to Satan, ‘So be it. All that he has is in your hands; only Job himself you must not touch’ ” (Jb 1:11-12).
Satan leaves the Lord’s presence, and everything Job possesses is taken away—oxen, donkeys, herdsmen, sheep, shepherds, camels, sons, and daughters. Not once in all this did Job sin, or charge God with unreasonableness.
Then came a second scene in the court of heaven, God asking Satan the same question as to his travels and receiving the same answer. He gives a second challenge to the enemy: Job’s integrity remains unshaken. Satan the cynic tosses it back (Jb 2:5, 6): “Stretch out your hand and touch his bone and his flesh, and see if he will not curse you to your face.”
“So be it,” said the Lord, “He is in your hands; but spare his life.”
Job is smitten with running sores, loses his health, his position (he went from the executive suite to an ash heap), and the confidence of his wife. A woman with a thorough-going secular mindset, she advises him to curse God and die.
“If we accept good from God, shall we not accept evil?” says Job, and he “did not utter one sinful word.”
Job passes the test. His manifesto is Though he slay me, yet will I trust him. Although God answers none of Job’s questions, Job is satisfied in the end, for he has seen God, a vision “too wonderful for me to know.” The last words we hear from him are, “Therefore I melt away; I repent in dust and ashes” (Jb 42:2-6). Ashes, the place of his torment, become the place of his vision. The vision of God is at the same time the vision of his own abject poverty and ignorance, so the ash heap becomes the place of repentance.
C.S. Lewis defines the problem of suffering in its simplest form: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either the goodness or the power or both (The Problem of Pain, MacMillan, New York, 1965, p. 14). He goes on to show how the problem is inextricably linked to the mystery of man’s free will. Using the metaphor of a game of chess, he writes,
You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him—if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking—then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once the limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involves, and you find that you have excluded life itself. (ibid., p. 22)
The Book of Job is one of the earliest human records we have, and it is the record of a man confronting evil and confronted by God Himself. A living proof of a living faith was required, not only for Job’s friends, but for unseen powers in high places. Job’s suffering provided the context for a demonstration of trust. While the patience of Job is often spoken of, he has never impressed me as being particularly patient but he was particularly faithful, even though he had none of the New Testament explanations of suffering (branches must be pruned, thorns are necessary, gold must be refined, we share in the sufferings of Christ, and other reasons, about which more later). To us who have the New Testament, it would seem that Job had very little to go on, yet he kept on talking to God.
Later there was the story of Gideon. Because of Israel’s disobedience the Lord had delivered them into the hands of the Midianites who gave them a terrible time for seven years. Then the angel of the Lord came to Gideon, told him the Lord was with him, and called him a brave man. His reply sounds familiar to most of us, I think: if the Lord was with them, why has all this happened and what has become of all those wonderful deeds of His that they have heard so much about from their forebears? It looked to him as though the Lord had cast them off. He hadn’t. In fact, the Lord had planned Israel’s deliverance, and had chosen Gideon as the deliverer. The man was stunned. How could he possibly …?
It’s a wonderful story for us timid and faithless ones, for Gideon had no good feelings and no strong self-image to shore him up. He was unsure of himself and even of his lineage, needing reassurance about God, fearful. Happily he did not act on the basis of his misgivings. He obeyed.
Gideon knew nothing of the revelation we have been given in the life and death of the Lord Jesus. How plainly Jesus spoke of the necessity of suffering (“in the world you will have trouble,” “it was inevitable that Christ should suffer” [Jn 16:33; Lk 24:46, JBP]), and of the importance to the rest of the world of living proof (“The Prince of this world approaches. He has no rights over me; but the world must be shown that I love the Father, and do exactly as he commands” [Jn 14:30-31]).
We may take heart from the suffering of Job. Suffering was the necessary proof of the reality of his faith—to us, as to his contemporaries and his enemy Satan (his and ours). The suffering of our Savior proved the reality of His love for His Father. The world still needs to be shown that there are those who, no matter what the circumstances, will, for love of Him, do exactly what God commands. The end He has in view is a glorious one. We can fully count on that, as we can count on the naked wood’s one day exploding into a glory of blossom.