6. The God Who Is Unfathomably Wise
6
The God Who Is Unfathomably Wise
In this chapter we focus on two types of literature in the Old Testament. One is the book of Psalms, and the other is an array of quite diverse books often collectively called wisdom literature. For reasons I shall mention shortly, even some of the psalms are rightly said to belong to wisdom literature.
Neither of these categories—psalms and wisdom literature—brings the story forward very much. They are not part of the sequence of narrative books that tell us what happens next to the Israelites or refer to what is going on in world history at the time. Sometimes individual psalms can be shown to spring from a particular period in Old Testament history. By and large, however, these materials contribute something a little different. They reflect the experiences, the insight, the revelation of God that his people turn over in their minds during these times. Even though this material does not, by and large, bring the narrative forward, the contribution it makes is so substantial that it cannot be ignored. We must say something about these books to understand what they contribute to our grasp of God as he has disclosed himself in the Bible.
The God Who Makes His People Sing: Psalms
Some wag has said, “Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.”[1] Given some of the things being sung today, that is a pretty scary thought. Yet the notion is understandable enough. If people are walking around with iPods, regardless of what people in Washington decide, the most fundamental shaping of the public mind, including the public mind represented in Washington, will take place via iPods (or some other delivery system).
In the Old Testament the book that incorporates most of this song-like—or hymn-like—material is the book of Psalms, virtually in the middle of the Bible, containing 150 of them. It was written over a period of about 1200 years; the collection was not the result of somebody sitting down to make it their writing project in a particular year. For example, one of the psalms is a psalm of Moses, taking you all the way back to the first part of the Bible. Many psalms were written by David, who was a musician who used his royal authority to help organize the choirs and public worship connected with the ancient tabernacle, patterns of worship and song then improved by his son Solomon to be used in the new temple whose construction Solomon oversaw. Then there are psalms that depict the experiences of the people of God as they are going into exile four hundred years later. There are even some psalms that reflect the thoughts of the people of God as they come back from exile, which brings you down to about 400 BC. The psalms cover a very broad period of time.
Obviously we can’t possibly survey 150 psalms. What I would like to do is drop in on a few of them so that you can overhear what the people were singing. The psalms are very diverse.
Those of you who have been Christians for some time or who have gotten to know some elderly believers have discovered that elderly Christians are usually the ones who love the book of Psalms. Not a lot of people know the book of Psalms well at twenty-five. This is because the book of Psalms resonates with people who have had a lot of experiences. You have to have quite a lot of different experiences under your belt before you resonate easily with a lot of the things that are said in the book of Psalms: lament, loss, shame, death, triumph, the exaltation of informed and godly God-centered praise, and prophecy anticipating what is still to come. If instead you have a very limited experience, most of these things just sound a bit over the top or a bit extravagant or even alien to you. I have been by the beds of enough people who were dying to discover that if I ask, “What would you like me to read to you?” many will say, “Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd” or “Psalm 42” or “Psalm 40, about how he lifts me out of the miry bog and sets my feet on a safe, stable place.” But until you have been through experiences where you feel as if you are wallowing in a miry bog, that psalm is probably not going to speak powerfully to you.
So let me drop in on a few psalms to overhear the kinds of things they say about God and his people. We’ll begin at the beginning.
Psalm 1
1Blessed are those
who do not walk in step with the wicked
or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,
2but who delight in the law of the LORD
and meditate on his law day and night.
3They are like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season
and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.
4Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff
that the wind blows away.
5Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the assembly of the righteous.
6For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will be destroyed.
Psalm 1
If you look at the psalm closely, you discover that it is broken into three unequal parts: verses 1–3 describe the righteous; verses 4–5 describe the unrighteous; and verse 6 is a final summarizing contrast.
The Righteous (Ps. 1:1–3)
Psalm 1:1 describes the righteous negatively: what they are not like, what they do not do. “Blessed are those who do not walk in step with the wicked”; that is, they avoid walking along with them, marching beside them. They do not want to be coordinated with them. For if they do that long enough, they might begin to “stand in the way that sinners take.” To “stand in the way” of people is not an appropriate translation (almost all of our English translations say something like that). The trouble is that in Hebrew to stand in someone’s way does not mean what we mean in English when we use the same words. To stand in someone’s way in English means to impede them, to block their path, like Robin Hood and Little John on the bridge, each standing in the other’s way, guaranteeing that one of them ends in the stream. But in Hebrew to stand in someone’s way means to have your feet in their moccasins, to do what they do, to be indistinguishable from them. You are not blocking them; you are where they are. You stand in their way. This is why this version renders it in somewhat of a paraphrase, “stand in the way that sinners take.” You’re now where they are.
If you do that long enough, you might “sit in the company of mockers.” Now you are in your recliner, you pull the lever, you look down your self-righteous nose at the ignorant, stupid, right-wing, bigoted Christians, and every comment you make is a mocking sneer. The very first verse of the very first psalm says, in effect, “Blessed are those who do not do these things.” It describes the righteous negatively.
Psalm 1:2 describes the righteous positively. They “delight in the law of the LORD and meditate on his law day and night” (1:2). This is what they think about. And it changes them.
When I first started teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, we had a lecturer there—already an old man—who loved to utter any number of one-liners born out of fifty years of ministry. Some of them were really good. One of his best was “You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are.” We are not just what we say or what we do, because we can say and do things to cover up what is really going on inside. But what we think, we are. So this text says that the righteous person learns to think God’s thoughts after him. He delights in the law of the Lord. He meditates on God’s Word day and night. It is not a question of quasi-magic: “a verse a day keeps the devil away.” This is much more than having a Bible verse handy or mechanically making sure that you have your “devotions.” It is such a love affair with all that God says that it feeds your mind. You go for a lunch break, or the light turns red ahead of you, and you sit in your car and your mind naturally gravitates toward thinking through what God has said. This sort of meditation is going on all the time. You meditate on God’s Word day and night, and that means that you are now not listening to the advice of the wicked or developing paths that are indistinguishable from theirs or slinking down into sly mockery.
Psalm 1:3 describes the righteous metaphorically: “They are like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.” The land of Palestine—the land of Israel—is a semi-arid land, a bit like the American Southwest, so during some seasons of the year there is no rain at all. The dry arroyos in the Southwest look like death warmed over. Then sudden rains come and gullies flood with water and host quite dangerous flash floods. These arroyos are often called wadis in Israel. When the rains come, the land that seems like death suddenly blooms; it comes to life with desert flowers. But only where there is a confluence of streams, not intermittent water, do you find trees whose leaves never wither, trees that bring forth fruit in season. In that sense such trees always prosper. This is not promising what some people today call “a prosperity gospel”: follow Jesus and become filthy rich. The language of Psalm 1:3 is lodged in the metaphor of this tree, which “prospers” even when there is heat and blight because it is well watered; it is evergreen. In due course it produces fruit.
This metaphor is not uncommon in the Bible, precisely because the people who wrote the Bible experienced these sorts of things all the time, observing the cycles of the seasons. Hence Jeremiah 17, written about 600 BC or a little later, reads:
5Cursed are those who trust in mortals,
who depend on flesh for their strength
and whose hearts turn away from the LORD.
6They will be like a bush in the wastelands;
they will not see prosperity when it comes
[i.e., the prosperity of life and growth].
They will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.
7But blessed are those who trust in the LORD,
whose confidence is in him.
8They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.
Jeremiah 17:5–8
So here in Psalm 1:1–3, the righteous person is described negatively, positively, and metaphorically.
The Unrighteous (Ps. 1:4–5)
In verses 4–5, the focus shifts to the unrighteous. The contrast is very strong: “Not so the wicked!” (1:4). “Not so,” as if everything of significance that you care to affirm of the righteous you have to negate with respect to the unrighteous. Are the righteous those who avoid the counsel and the patterns of life of rebels and ungodly people? Not so the wicked, not so. Are the righteous those who delight in the law of the Lord and think about it day and night? Not so the wicked, not so. Are the righteous those who can be likened to a tree planted by streams of water that yields fruit in its season and whose leaf never withers? Not so the wicked, not so.
Well, what are they like? “They are like chaff that the wind blows away” (1:4). The image is of the ancient grain harvest where someone beats the heads of grain with a winnowing shovel. The chaff falls off and the wind blows it away, leaving the grain to fall to the threshing floor to be gathered and turned into flour and bread and all the rest. The chaff blows away or is burned up: it is rootless, lifeless, fruitless, useless. That is how the psalmist describes the wicked.
A Final Summarizing Contrast (Ps. 1:6)
This final contrast, strictly speaking, is not between the righteous and the wicked but between the way of the righteous and the way of the wicked: “For the LORD watches over the way of the righteous” (1:6); that is, he owns it as his; he protects it. “But the way of the wicked will be destroyed” (1:6) like tracks made on the seashore when the tide is out. The tide rolls in and the tide rolls out; you no longer see the tracks. Fifty billion years from now, if I may dare to speak of eternity in the categories of time, no one will be talking about the significance of Stalin or Pol Pot, but every cup of cold water given in the name of Jesus will still be remembered and celebrated, because the Lord watches over the way of the righteous; the way of the wicked will perish.
That is the first psalm: two ways to live, and there is no third. There are a lot of psalms like that. They are sometimes called “wisdom psalms.” These psalms and wisdom literature sometimes get tied together because in wisdom literature the way of wisdom is cast against the way of folly in a simple and absolute polarity. Wisdom literature regularly offers you a choice between two ways. That is what this psalm does and therefore why it is sometimes called a wisdom psalm.
In the New Testament, the most remarkable wisdom preacher is Jesus. In fact, Jesus is an astonishingly flexible preacher, using many different modes of speech: apocalyptic imagery, one-liners, parables, and much more. But in more than a few of his addresses he uses this basic wisdom polarity: two ways. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7), for instance, Jesus offers a number of vignettes that are exactly along this line. He says, in effect, “Picture two people: one builds a house on rock; the other builds a house on sand. The house on sand is not stable. The storms come in, the water rises, the winds lash the place, and it collapses. The house that is strongly built on rock endures” (see Matt. 7:24–27). Note well: there are just two houses. You’re rather missing the point if you say, “Jesus, suppose you try hardpan clay.” You cannot respond to wisdom preaching in that fashion. In the same context, Jesus says, “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13–14). Once again it misses the point to long for a medium-sized gate. You cannot do that; this is wisdom literature, wisdom preaching. There are only two ways.
Now you see what is scary about wisdom literature in general and Psalm 1 in particular. If we are really honest, we must face the fact that we never quite fit the good way. Oh, there may be times when we delight in the law of the Lord and meditate on it day and night. There are other times, quite frankly, when it is a real struggle to delight in the law of the Lord. There are times when the counsel of the ungodly sounds very attractive. If there are only two ways, where does that leave us?
What wisdom literature does is clarify our thinking and show us that there are some absolute polarities out there that must not be fudged over, even though most of us find ourselves in the middle, sometimes acting this way, sometimes acting that way. This is true of a man like King David himself, who is responsible for some of these psalms. King David can be described as a man after God’s own heart, yet he also committed adultery and even arranged for a murder. One wonders what he would have done if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart. If there are only two ways, where does that leave David?
Wisdom literature clarifies the polarity between holiness and unholiness, between righteousness and unrighteousness. But although it clarifies, it cannot save us. If all we had were wisdom literature, it would tend to puff us up when we are doing well and drive us to despair when we are not. Like the law studied in the last chapter, wisdom literature cannot save us, even though it is a powerful teacher.
But Psalm 1 is not the only psalm in the Bible, of course. We must quickly survey a few others.
Psalm 8
Psalm 8 not only praises God for his power in creation (“You have set your glory above the heavens” [8:1]) but also marvels that God has a peculiar relationship with human beings, with mere mortals: “what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (8:4). God has actually set them above the rest of the created order.
5You have made them a little lower than the heavenly
beings and crowned them with glory and honor.
6You made them rulers over the works of your hands;
you put everything under their feet:
7all flocks and herds,
and the animals of the wild,
8the birds in the sky,
and the fish in the sea,
all that swim the paths of the seas.
9LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Psalm 8:5–9
Do you hear how adoring this is? This is a hymn that has been composed as a reflection on Genesis 1–2. Quite a few psalms are meditative reflections used in the corporate worship of the people of God, reflections based on earlier Scriptures. God’s people reflect on God’s truth and join together to sing these truths—that is, they do not just recite certain truths or merely read them, but instead sing them.
Psalm 19
This is another psalm that is a reflection on how the created order reflects who God is.
1The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
3They have no speech, they use no words;
no sound is heard from them.
4Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
their words to the ends of the world.
In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
5which is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
6It rises at one end of the heavens
and makes its circuit to the other;
nothing is deprived of its warmth.
Psalm 19:1–6
Then after talking about how the Lord has disclosed himself in this created order, the psalmist talks about how the Lord has disclosed himself in Scripture.
Psalm 14
To change the pace entirely, take a look at the opening line of Psalm 14: “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God’” (14:1). I have a friend in Australia who has a bit of a reputation for talking about Christ with a bluntness that other cultures might find more than a little aggressive. He once gave an address titled “Atheists Are Fools, and Agnostics Are Cowards.” Whatever you may think of the approach, there is a sense in which my friend is in line with this psalm, which begins: “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God’” (14:1). That is so out of line with contemporary perceptions. In some circles shaped by the contemporary “new atheism,” the fool is the idiot who believes that there is a God.
But look at it from God’s perspective. Just grant for a moment that the God of the Bible is the God who is there: who is the fool? This is not written from the point of view of someone who sets himself up in the heritage of René Descartes, a sort of Cartesian independence, saying, “I think I’m in the place where I can evaluate whether God exists and which God it will be.” This is the God who is there, who has named himself and disclosed himself. In his mercy he has come back again and again to save his people, and he keeps promising an even greater deliverance to come. He insists that the reason people do not see this reality is that this side of the fall we human beings suffer from such a deep moral and spiritual corruption that we are blind to the obvious. It is the fool who says in his heart, “There is no God.”
This does not mean that no Christian is a fool. What it means is that everyone who has become a Christian started off a fool, and if in this respect we are no longer fools, that too, in the Bible’s storyline, is a mark of singular grace. Christians never have the right to say, “I am smarter than you are,” because Christians deep down know that they can never be more than fools who have been shown forgiveness and grace. We are never more than poor beggars telling other poor beggars where there is bread. But it does us a world of good to hear the Bible’s perspective on who is the real fool.
Psalm 40
Here is a psalm with quite a different flavor. This is a psalm of personal experience that develops into something more. I do not have space to go through all of it, but we shall try to pick up its main points. The superscription informs us that this psalm was written by David.
1I waited patiently for the LORD;
he turned to me and heard my cry.
2He lifted me out of the slimy pit,
out of the mud and mire;
he set my feet on a rock
and gave me a firm place to stand.
3He put a new song in my mouth,
a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see and fear the LORD
and put their trust in him.
Psalm 40:1–3
We do not know what this miry bog is, what this slimy pit is. It was obviously something so awful in David’s experience that he felt the way you do in a slimy pit: desperate, unable to get out, sliding into oblivion, sucked down. And God pulled him out.
Much of the rest of the psalm talks about how the psalmist will respond by devoting himself to the living God and how he will give testimony to this in the community of God’s people. Then in the last part of the psalm he openly acknowledges that just because he has been through this sort of experience, it does not follow that he will not go through other bleak experiences. Just because you have been through a divorce does not mean that you are therefore going to be spared cancer. Just because you have had cancer does not mean that you will not lose your spouse. Just because you have had a kid go off the rails does not mean that you will not be in a car accident. Life in this fallen and broken world brings many kinds of heartaches, defeats, and discouragements. David gives thanks to God for God’s help and release from this particular miry bog, but he is realistic enough to look into the future and say, in effect, “There are so many other things, Lord God, where I’m going to need your help.”
11Do not withhold your mercy from me, LORD;
may your love and faithfulness always protect me.
12For troubles without number surround me;
my sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see.
They are more than the hairs of my head,
and my heart fails within me.
13Be pleased to save me, LORD;
come quickly, Lord, to help me.
Psalm 40:11–13
“The worst thing that I face,” David says in effect, “is not this slimy pit experience through which I have passed, but my own sins, sins which cripple me and crush me and take me down because I look at my own heart and I cannot fit into the good side of Psalm 1.” “My sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see” (40:12).
But there are still other troubles David must face, not least those who mock him and give him difficulties:
15May those who say to me, “Aha! Aha!”
be appalled at their own shame.
16But may all who seek you
rejoice and be glad in you;
may those who long for your saving help always say,
“The Lord is great!”
Psalm 40:15–16
So here is a psalm of huge intensity as a believer looks at how God has helped him and anticipates the way he is going to need God’s help in the future.
Psalm 51
Before thinking through this psalm it is very important to read the superscription: “A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.” This refers to the account where he seduces a young woman next door who is the wife of one of David’s own soldiers fighting on the front in one of David’s wars. How callous is that? It transpires that Bathsheba becomes pregnant by David, and she lets the king know. So he arranges to have her husband, Uriah, shipped back from the front. He sends a message that Uriah is to bring back a message to the king, ostensibly to communicate between the officers in the field and the commander-in-chief. In fact, this is David’s way of getting the bloke home, for if Uriah comes home, surely he will sleep with his wife. As for the timing of the birth—well, it is not unheard of for that to be off a month or two. As it turns out, however, Uriah is so concerned for his mates at the front that he cannot even bring himself to go home, so he sleeps in the open courtyard of the palace, prepared to return to the front the next day.
King David knows he is snookered. So he sends back a message by this young man’s hand—a sealed message—for the unit commanders on the front. They are to arrange a skirmish, and everybody else in the platoon will receive some sort of code or signal to know when to fall back—everyone except this young man Uriah. They find themselves in a skirmish, the signal is given, everybody falls back except Uriah, and he is killed.
David thinks that he has gotten away with it. Then the prophet Nathan confronts him. David is in the depths of public humiliation and shame. His actions are all out in the open. What a mess! Nevertheless, David has been broken, and in the midst of his deep repentance he writes Psalm 51. That is what is meant by the superscription: the psalm was written “when the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.”
1Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your unfailing love;
according to your great compassion
blot out my transgressions.
2Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin.
3For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is always before me.
Psalm 51:1–3
Haven’t you felt like that when you have awakened in the middle of the night and remembered some insanely evil or stupid thing you have done, and you break out into a cold sweat and squirm and wish you could undo it but can’t?
“My sin is always before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (51:3–4). That is a stunning comment. At one level you want to say that it is not true. David sinned against Bathsheba: he seduced her. He sinned against Bathsheba’s husband: he had him bumped off after sleeping with his wife. He sinned against his own family: he betrayed them. He sinned against the military high command: he corrupted them. He sinned against the people: he was not acting as a righteous king. It is hard to think of anybody that he did not sin against.
Yet he has the cheek to say, “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (51:4). At the deepest level, David’s words speak the exact truth. What makes sin so heinous, what makes sin so wretched, is precisely that it defies God. Certainly it is awful when we hurt our friends. It is awful when we wound one another, so when we wake up in the middle of the night with those feelings of huge shame, it is not surprising that we are embarrassed because of what our friends will think of us now on account of what we have said or done that was so insensitive or cruel. But beyond all of this horizontal shame lies a much bigger guilt that we are rarely aware of and rarely squirm over: guilt before the living God. David, however, gets this right. He is squirming over his sin because he sees what it is in God’s sight: “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” What gives sin its most horrendous odor, its most heinous aspect, is precisely that it is defiance of the God who made us and who judges us on the last day. David understands this because he understands the opening chapters of Genesis. The heart of Eve’s problems or Adam’s problems is not that they broke a little rule or betrayed each other’s trust; rather, they de-god-ed God.
In any sin that we commit, whether it’s genocide or cheating on our income taxes, the most offended party is always God. “Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight.” That is why, as we have seen from the beginning of the Bible’s storyline, what we must have—whatever else we have—is God’s forgiveness, or we have nothing.
Other Psalms
There are many other psalms, of course. Psalm 110 looks to a coming one who is simultaneously a king and a priest. It’s the chapter most frequently quoted in the New Testament. Psalm 119, the longest chapter in the Bible, is full of thanksgiving to God and is a meditation on the nature of God’s words, of God’s self-disclosure in words, of his law, his decrees, his judgments, his teaching, his truth. It is all about what we would call the Bible. It provides us with ways to think about the fact that God is a talking God, a God who speaks and gives us his words. Psalm 139 says something of the same. “How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them!” (139:17).
This is the God who makes his people sing in thanksgiving, contrition, petition, lament, and reflection. Taken together, these psalms indicate the kind of relationship that God wants his people to have with him. It is deeply authentic, not the kind of religion characterized by mumbo jumbo, merely formal religious duties, self-importance, and religious arrogance, all of it carefully masking a stinking hypocrisy. The intensity of the psalms conspires to underscore that God cannot be deceived by religious rituals. He wants his image-bearers to enjoy a real relationship with him, the true and living God. Here is wisdom.
Wisdom Literature
Several books make up the wisdom literature of the Bible, and we will glance at some of them.
Proverbs
The book of Proverbs has one kind of literature: many proverbs. Many of these proverbs are not isolated reflections but are linked thematically. For example, many of the proverbs revolve around two metaphorical women: Lady Wisdom and Dame Folly. We are following either one or the other. Wisdom literature forces us to choose “this path” or “that path.” It will compare two things and say, “This is the way of wisdom. This is the way of folly. Make sure that what you follow is the way of wisdom.”
At the beginning of the book is a proverb that recurs in a variety of ways: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov. 1:7). A little later: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding” (9:10). The fear in view is not the kind of cringing fear that a whipped dog has when you pick up a newspaper, knowing that you are an arbitrary and cruel master who extracts cheap glee out of scaring the poor little thing to death. This is the fear of God that recognizes that he is matchlessly holy, righteous, and just—and we are not. God is our judge as well as our only hope. There lies the beginning of wisdom. This is the opposite of what we found in Psalm 14:1: “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’” A right sense of how to live under the sun must begin with God and his self-disclosure. There is the beginning of wisdom.
Job
One of the most remarkable books in the wisdom collection of the Bible is the book of Job. We do not know when it was written, though it is probably very old. It depicts a man who is not perfect but is an astonishingly good man: filthy rich but generous, caring, and loving. He even prays preemptively for his own ten children lest they should commit any sins and do something bad. He is generous with the poor. He could testify, “I made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully at a virgin” (Job 31:1). He is an astonishingly pious man, and his piety is genuine.
What Job doesn’t know is that behind the scenes the devil, whom we met as the serpent in Genesis 3, makes a wager with God: “The only reason that Job likes you is that he is filthy rich and you protect him. You take away all the good things that he possesses, and he will turn around and curse you to your face.” God says, “Go ahead. Just don’t hurt him” (see Job 1:9–12). Successive waves of marauders invade his property: his cattle are stolen, his herds are decimated, a windstorm blows down the house where his ten children are having a party and kills them all. Job responds by saying, “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” (1:21).
Satan says to God, “Skin for skin. Just take away this chap’s health, and he’ll curse you to your face.” God replies, “Go ahead, but spare his life.” Pretty soon you find Job on an ash pit using pieces of broken pottery to pick his scabs. When three friends come to visit him, they sit down for a week and do nothing but keep quiet—the wisest thing they could do.
The rest of the book is set out as a drama. These friends think they have mastered theology and can give Job all the correct answers he needs. They say, in effect, “Job, do you believe that God is sovereign?”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe that God is just?”
“Yes.”
“So if he is sovereign and just, and you’re suffering, then the implication is . . . ?”
Job says, “I know that God is sovereign and just, but quite frankly I do not deserve this. I am an innocent sufferer. I should not be suffering this.”
“Job, do you hear what you are saying? Are you implying that God is making a mistake or that God is unjust to you?”
“Oh, no. I am not saying that. I know that God is sovereign. I know that he is just. But I still have to say that what I am going through isn’t fair.”
The discussion gets hotter and hotter until eventually the friends begin to say, “Job, you do not understand. You have committed more sins than you can possibly recognize—sins that you have committed that you don’t even know about, more than you can possibly imagine. Otherwise, you are really saying that God is unjust. What you ought to do is confess them in any case, even if you cannot name any specific sins. Just confess them generally to God, and God will forgive you and everything will get better.”
Job replies, “How can I possibly do that? How can I repent of something that I do not know that I have done wrong? How can I possibly repent and claim that I am asking for God’s mercy and forgiveness when I don’t think that I deserve this? That would actually be making me a liar, and I would be sinning against God. What I really need is a lawyer. I wish I had somebody who would go between God and me; that is what I need.”
The tension in the drama mounts and mounts. I shall not unpack all of the levels of argumentation, but eventually God speaks. He addresses Job with a series of rhetorical questions: “Job, have you ever designed a snowflake? Where were you when I made the first hippopotamus? Did you give me any advice on how to cast the constellation Orion into the heavens, Job?” At the end of two chapters of these rhetorical questions, Job says, in effect, “I’m sorry. I spoke foolishly, claiming that I know more than I do.” And do you know what God says? “Prepare to defend yourself; I will question you, and you shall answer me” (Job 40:7)—followed by two more chapters of rhetorical questions.
God’s chapters are stunning because at the end of the day he provides no systematic answer that will sort out the entire problem of innocent suffering. All of his rhetorical questions combine to mean one thing: we human beings are not always going to get explanations, but God is bigger than we are and sometimes we just have to trust him. At the end, Job repents (see 42:1–6)—not of imaginary sins that his “friends” think he needs to confess in order to win back God’s favor, but of his rather presumptuous tendency to insist on answers rather than to trust.
God nevertheless insists that Job basically got the account right. Doubtless Job was becoming a bit pushy toward the end, but God’s displeasure is reserved for the three “friends” who think they have God all figured out.
At the end of the story God restores the fortunes of Job. This should not be surprising. After all, at the end of time, according to the Bible, not only will justice be done, but it will be seen to be done. The restoration of Job’s fortunes is a kind of microcosm of the bigger story of world history under God: justice will prevail in the end. That too is wisdom.
Ecclesiastes
In Ecclesiastes, Solomon sets out to find meaning in life. He engages in vast public works and discovers that is ultimately meaningless, for none of them is finally enduring. He devotes himself to wisdom, literature, scholarship, and meditation, and after a while he discovers that these are not very satisfying either. Then he devotes himself to generosity or asceticism or hedonism and then something else and something else. Nothing finally satisfies; nothing finally endures. Everything done here is still “under the sun.” At the end of the book, when he looks back over his life at all the things he has attempted to do in his effort to seek pleasure, meaning, and fulfillment, he concludes,
1Remember your Creator
in the days of your youth,
before the days of trouble come
and the years approach when you will say,
“I find no pleasure in them”. . . .
13Now all has been heard;
here is the conclusion of the matter:
Fear God and keep his commandments,
for this is the duty of every human being.
14For God will bring every deed into judgment,
including every hidden thing,
whether it is good or evil.
Ecclesiastes 12:1, 13–14
That is to say, what he finally comes up with is a teleological vision, a vision of what happens at the end. You have to live in light of the end. That is wisdom because we will give an account to this God.
Conclusion
When we feel in our hearts and minds, as we grow older, that there has to be something more—there has to be something more satisfying, there has to be something bigger—we are right to listen to that brooding voice, because we were made for God and our souls will be restless until we know him. Those are the kinds of things that wisdom books teach us as the Old Testament barrels along in anticipation of the day when Wisdom incarnate—that is, Wisdom in the flesh—will come, when there is some final resolution between the perfections that God demands in Psalm 1 and the compromise of misconduct of our own lives, between David as a man after God’s own heart and David as a wretched sinner in desperate need of God’s mercy. A resolution is still coming, and his name is Jesus.