Faith and the book of Job
Faith and the book of Job
Fifthly, the cross of Christ is the ground of a reasonable faith. All suffering, physical and emotional, sorely tries our faith. How can it be reasonable, when calamity overwhelms us, to continue to trust in God? The best answer to this question is provided by the book of Job. It will be worth our while to clarify its thesis.
Job is introduced as a ‘blameless and upright’ man, who ‘feared God and shunned evil’. But then (after we as readers have been permitted a glimpse into the deliberations of the heavenly council chamber), Job is overtaken by a series of personal tragedies: he is deprived successively of his livestock, his servants, his sons and daughters, and his health. It would be hard to exaggerate the magnitude of the disasters which have overwhelmed him. In the rest of the book the full spectrum of possible responses to suffering is rehearsed in the dialogue which develops between Job, his three so-called ‘comforters’, the young man Elihu and finally God himself. Each of the four proposes a different attitude, and specially noteworthy in each is the place accorded to the self.
Job’s own attitude is a mixture of self-pity and self-assertion. Refusing to follow his wife’s advice that he should ‘curse God and die’, he nevertheless begins by cursing the day of his birth and then longs with anguish for the day of his death. He utterly rejects the accusations of his three friends. Instead, he frames his own accusations against God. God is being brutally cruel to him, even ruthless. Worse still, God has altogether denied him justice (27:2). The contest between them is grossly unfair, since the contestants are so unequal. If only there were a mediator to arbitrate between them! If only he himself could find God, in order personally to press charges against him! Meanwhile, he vehemently maintains his innocence and is confident that one day he will be vindicated.
By contrast, the attitude recommended by Job’s friends may best be described as self-accusation. Job is suffering because he is sinful. His afflictions are the divine penalty for his misdeeds. That is the conventional orthodoxy about the wicked, which they repeat ad nauseam. ‘All his days the wicked man suffers torment’, says Eliphaz (15:20). ‘The lamp of the wicked is snuffed out’, adds Bildad (18:5), while Zophar’s contribution is that ‘the mirth of the wicked is brief’ (20:5). From this basic premise they draw the inevitable deduction that Job is suffering for his wickedness: ‘Is not your wickedness great? Are not your sins endless?’ (22:5). But Job will have none of it. His friends are ‘worthless physicians’ (13:4) and ‘miserable comforters’ (16:2), who talk nothing but ‘nonsense’ and even ‘falsehood’ (21:34). And God later confirms Job’s verdict. He refers to their ‘folly’, and says that they ‘have not spoken’ of him ‘what is right’, as his servant Job has (42:7–8).
Elihu enters next. Although he is angry because Job has been ‘justifying himself rather than God’ (32:2), he is diffident on account of his youth to speak. When he does, it is not altogether easy to distinguish his position from that of Job’s three comforters. For sometimes he too repeats the old orthodoxy. He also anticipates Yahweh’s speech about creation. Yet it seems right to call the attitude he recommends self-discipline, for his distinctive emphasis is that God speaks in many ways (including suffering) in order ‘to turn man from wrongdoing and keep him from pride’ (33:14, 17). So God makes people ‘listen to correction’ and ‘speaks to them in their affliction’ (36:10, 15). Indeed, ‘who is a teacher like him?’ (v. 22). His teaching is even a kind of ‘wooing’ (v. 16), in which he pleads with people to repent and so seeks to deliver them from their distress.
At last, when Job, the comforters and Elihu have exhausted their arguments, Yahweh reveals himself and speaks. Judging from Job’s response, the recommended attitude now may be called self-surrender. God is far from joining Job’s three friends in their accusations, and he does not blame Job for maintaining his innocence (42:8). He takes his complaints seriously, and therefore replies to him. Yet Job has uttered ‘words without knowledge’, since it is never right to blame, accuse, let alone ‘correct’ God (40:2). ‘Would you discredit my justice?’ God asks (40:8). And Job replies: ‘My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes’ (42:5–6). Previously he has defended, pitied and asserted himself, and accused God. Now he despises himself, and worships God. What has he ‘seen’ which has converted him from self-assertion to self-surrender?
Job has been invited to look afresh at the creation, and has glimpsed the glory of the Creator. God bombards him with questions. Where was he when the earth and the sea were made? Can he control the snow, the storm and the stars? Does he possess the expertise to supervise and sustain the animal world – lions and mountain goats, the wild donkey and the wild ox, the ostrich and the horse, hawks and eagles? Above all, can Job comprehend the mysteries and subdue the strength of behemoth the hippopotamus and leviathan the crocodile? What God gave Job was a comprehensive introduction to the wonders of nature, and thereby a revelation of his creative genius, which silenced Job’s accusations and led him – even in the midst of his continued bereavement, suffering and pain – to humble himself, repent of his rebellion, and trust God again.
If it was reasonable for Job to trust the God whose wisdom and power have been revealed in creation, how much more reasonable is it for us to trust the God whose love and justice have been revealed in the cross? The reasonableness of trust lies in the known trustworthiness of its object. And no-one is more trustworthy than the God of the cross. The cross assures us that there is no possibility of a miscarriage of justice or of the defeat of love either now or on the last day. ‘He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?’ (Rom. 8:32). It is the self-giving of God in the gift of his Son which convinces us that he will withhold nothing from us that we need, and allow nothing to separate us from his love (vv. 35–39). So between the cross, where God’s love and justice began to be clearly revealed, and the day of judgment when they will be completely revealed, it is reasonable to trust in him.
We have to learn to climb the hill called Calvary, and from that vantage-ground survey all life’s tragedies. The cross does not solve the problem of suffering, but it supplies the essential perspective from which to look at it. Since God has demonstrated his holy love and loving justice in a historical event (the cross), no other historical event (whether personal or global) can override or disprove it. This must surely be why the scroll (the book of history and destiny) is now in the hands of the slain Lamb, and why only he is worthy to break its seals, reveal its contents and control the flow of the future.