Although he doesn’t deserve it, Job is a man on whom all the troubles of the world have come (Job 9.1-12, 14-16). In rapid succession he loses all his livestock, servants and children. Then sores break out all over his body and his wife tells him to curse God and die. If we think life is hard for us, we might want to look at the story of Job and think again.
The book of Job is told as a series of conversations. It begins with a conversation between God and Satan about Job, continues with a conversation between Job and his friends about God and his response to suffering and ends with a conversation between Job and God himself.
Job asks in 9.14-16:
“How then can I answer him,
choosing my words with him?
… If I summoned him and he answered me,
I do not believe that he would listen to my voice.”
However, Job’s experience, as the story progresses, is that it is possible for him to discuss and debate with God and what changes Job in this story is not the arguments and words of other human beings but the experience of genuinely meeting and speaking with God himself. Job asks why good people suffer and his friends reply that people suffer because of their wickedness, because they have not helped others and that we are punished in order to repent and be healed. Job knows in his heart and in his conscience that he has helped others and has not done wrong. Job’s friends are only able to tell Job what they think about God what they aren’t able to do is to help him encounter God himself. The story is told as a series of conversation because Job entering in to a conversation with God himself is what the book is all about.
Job’s friends - and, to begin with, Job, himself - think that being in relationship with God is primarily to do with our keeping a set of rules and regulations. If we do the right things then we will have God’s favour. The problem with this view is that we can look around the world and see wicked people who seem to prosper and good people who experience tragedy. This problem is acute for Job because he is one of those good people who experience tragedy. This view is still apparent in many churches today despite our knowledge of God’s grace and forgiveness in Jesus. Yet, when we act like that we are, like Job’s friends, setting up a series of standards which we believe come from God, and saying that if you don’t meet those standards or don’t repent, then you are outside of God’s will and no longer a follower of God.
But at the end of this story, it is Job’s friends with whom God is angry, not Job. In fact, Job himself has to pray for his friends so that they are not disgraced by God. The problem God has with Job’s friends is that they have not spoken the truth about God, as Job did. And yet much of what they had to say about God is standard theology about God. So, what is the difference between Job’s friends and Job? The difference is that Job wants to speak with God while his friends want to speak about God.
Job’s friends have a black and white view of God with no shades of grey and this is actually a way of avoiding encounter with God. In this way of thinking if life is going well then you know you must be keeping the rules because you have God’s favour and if life is not going well then you know you must have done something wrong and need to repent. Life is very simple and when you understand life like that you can keep God at arms length and don’t need to talk with him because you know what you have to do and all that matters is doing it right.
Job, however, knows that life is not as simple as that and, as a result, he wants to ask God about it direct. And when he starts talking to God, God starts talking to him. And what God has to say isn’t about giving Job rules and regulations to follow; it isn’t even about answering Job’s questions. It is simply about allowing Job to experience the magnitude of being in a real relationship and conversation with God. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.
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Midnight Oil - World That I See.
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