Old Sandals

The God that Job complains against is surely a God to fear, but not a God to love or respect.

Forming us in the womb, giving us life – but only so He may set a trap for us, so to speak, by catching us in some small sin, and then punishing us severely for it.

And this He does in a capricious, arbitrary way, since many very wicked men seem not to be held accountable at all.

But either way, what is the point? After a few short years of misery or bliss on this earth, we pass away – never to return – to a land of gloom, as dark as midnight.

Job is either venting, or lashing out at what he perceives to be a cruel reality. In any case, these are very serious charges, charges that beg for a response from the God of Enoch, the God of Noah, the God of Job.

In a painfully honest way, Job puts into words his deepest feelings. “What recourse is there with God? If He is right in punishing me, what have I done? How can my punishment be just? And if He is wrong, what difference does it make; is He not all powerful?”

“He wounds me without cause”, Job exclaims. “The blameless and the wicked are alike to him.”

But are they? Would Noah have agreed with that? Is that the lesson of the great flood?

Surely the God of day and night, springtime and harvest, flood waters and gentle rain does nothing without cause. Surely He makes a distinction between the blameless and the wicked.

It is Bildad’s turn to speak, and his words must have cut like a knife. “Your children must have sinned against God, so their punishment was well deserved.” How many times had Job offered burnt sacrifices on behalf of his sons and daughters, concerned about their party lifestyle?

To Bildad, Job’s success prior to this calamity was like a lush plant growing for a time in the sunshine, only to be uprooted and destroyed.

How terribly difficult it must have been for Job to cope with his suffering. He cries out, “Where is God when I am hurting? He surely sees and knows. But does he care? Is he mad at me? Do I deserve all this? If I confess my sins to him, will the pain go away? What if it’s not clear to me how I have offended him?”

The existentialist would answer, “That’s a dead end.? Our lives are not determined by what happens to us, but by how we react to what happens; not by what life brings to us, but by the attitude we bring to life.”

But is that really? true? ?Is life no more than a video game, where the goal is to run through the maze as fast as you can while looking out for sudden, seemingly random dangers? The monster jumping out from behind a rock, for example, or the explosive coconuts falling from a tree?

No, as every computer game programmer can tell you, these seemingly random events are anything but random, resulting from thousands, even millions of lines of code. There is a grand method behind the madness; it’s just beyond the ability of the gamer to fully understand it.

As was revealed in the first chapter of Job, there is a grand scheme to life too. God is in the circumstances for his own purposes, and he also wants to influence our reactions to them.

What a difference a day makes. When Job got up in the morning, he was the richest man in the country. By nightfall, he had nothing. And Job was blameless. So much for the prosperity gospel.

Some might say, “Well, you just deal with what you have to deal with.” Sounds manly enough, but even a dog does that, doesn’t it? A dog deals with a full bowl, or an empty bowl. With lots of affection or with very little. A dog doesn’t think beyond this moment’s experience.

Humans are much more than dogs. Man was made in the image of God, created to bring Him glory.

In his initial reaction to sudden, horrific circumstances, Job did exactly that.