Author: samuraitheologian

FEBRUARY 6 — Genesis 39; Mark 9; Job 5; Romans 9

IN THE SECOND PART OF HIS SPEECH (Job 5), Eliphaz presupposes the stance he adopts in the first part (see yesterday’s meditation), yet adds several new wrinkles to his impassioned presentation.

First, he says that Job’s approach to God in this crisis is fundamentally flawed. By all means call on God (5:1)—but why imagine that someone as exalted as God will answer? Meanwhile, Job’s attitude is what is killing him: “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple” (5:2). Eliphaz speaks out of his own observation: he has seen such fools prospering in the past, but suddenly they are uprooted. The implication is that Job’s former prosperity was the prosperity of a “fool,” and his current loss is nothing but his due. Somewhat inconsistently, Eliphaz adds that human suffering is a function of the human condition: “Man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward” (5:7).

Second, rather self-righteously Eliphaz tells Job what he would do if he were in a similar situation (5:8-16). He would appeal to God and lay his case before him—not with Job’s attitude, which Eliphaz finds insufferable, but with humility and contrition. After all, God reigns providentially and is committed to humbling the arrogant and the crafty and exalting the poor and the needy. So Eliphaz would approach God as a suppliant.

Third, Eliphaz insists that at least one of God’s aims in bringing about loss and disaster is discipline: “Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal” (5:17-18). Those who recognize this point discover that God quickly restores their life and prosperity. They find themselves secure in every trial. Job cannot miss the implication: if he feels he has suffered unjustly, not only is he insufficiently humble, but he fails to recognize the gracious, chastening hand of God Almighty, and therefore he remains under God’s rod instead of finding mercy. “We have examined this,” Eliphaz concludes rather pompously, “and it is true. So hear it and apply it to yourself” (5:27).

What Eliphaz says carries some measure of truth. God does indeed chasten his children (Prov. 3:11-12; Heb. 12:5-6). But this presupposes that they need it; God certainly does not chasten his children when they do not need it. Eliphaz thus pre- supposes that Job deserves God’s chastening; readers of chapter 1 know he is mis- taken. True, God saves the humble and abases those whose eyes are haughty (Ps. 18:27); but Eliphaz mistakenly assumes that Job must be haughty, or he would not be suffering. So here is a lesson: false or improper application of genuine truth may be heartless and cruel—and, as here, it may say false things about God.

 

This reading is from For the Love of God, vol 2 by D.A. Carson. You can download the entire book as a free PDF here: For the Love of God, Vol 2. Alternatively, you can pick up a hard copy at the church or at your favorite book retailer.

FEBRUARY 5 — Genesis 38; Mark 8; Job 4; Romans 8

THE FIRST SPEECH OF ELIPHAZ takes up two chapters. In the first part (Job 4), Eliphaz gives shape to his argument:

(1) The opening lines are seductive (4:2-4). One might almost think that Eliphaz is respectfully pursuing permission to offer helpful counsel to Job, in the same way that Job in times past has offered helpful counsel to others. But that is not it at all. Eliphaz is not asking permission; rather, he is fixing blame on Job because he is discouraged. It turns out, Eliphaz says, that the great Job who has helped others cannot cope when he faces a bit of trouble himself (4:5).

(2) The next verse transitions to the heart of Eliphaz’s argument: “Should not your piety be your confidence and your blameless ways your hope?” (4:6). In other words, if Job were as pious and as blameless as many had believed, either he would not be in this fix, or else he would at least be able to live above discouragement. The disasters that have befallen Job, and Job’s reactions to them, prove that Job is hiding shame or guilt that must be confronted.

(3) In brief, Eliphaz holds that in God’s universe you get what you deserve (4:7). God is in charge, and God is good, so you reap what you sow (4:8).

(4) Eliphaz claims nothing less than revelation to ground his argument (4:12- 21). In some sort of night vision, he says, a spirit glided by his face (4:15) and uttered words of supreme importance: “Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Maker?” (4:17). God is so transcendently powerful and just that even the angels that surround him are tawdry and untrustworthy in his eyes. So human beings, “those who live in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust” (4:19), are less significant, less reliable. The implication, then, is that a man like Job should simply admit his frailty, his error, his sin, and stop pretending that what has befallen him is anything other than what he deserves. The way Job is carrying on, Eliphaz implies, he is in danger of impugning the God whose justice is far beyond human assessment or comprehension.

We should pause to evaluate Eliphaz’s argument. At one level, Eliphaz is right: God is utterly just, transcendently holy. The Bible elsewhere avers that a man reaps what he sows (e.g., Prov. 22:8; Gal. 6:7). But these truths, by themselves, may overlook two factors. First, the time frame in which the wheels of God’s justice grind is sometimes very long. Eliphaz seems to hold to a rather rapid and obvious tit-for-tat system of recompense. Second, Eliphaz has no category for innocent suffering, so he is embarking on a course that condemns an innocent man.

 

This reading is from For the Love of God, vol 2 by D.A. Carson. You can download the entire book as a free PDF here: For the Love of God, Vol 2. Alternatively, you can pick up a hard copy at the church or at your favorite book retailer.

FEBRUARY 4 — Genesis 37; Mark 7; Job 3; Romans 7

FROM JOB 3 UNTIL THE FIRST PART of the last chapter of the book, with a small exception at the beginning of chapter 32, the text is written in Hebrew poetry. The book is a giant drama, like a Shakespearean play. Speech follows speech, the movement of the drama carried forward on the sustained argument between Job and his three “friends.” Eventually another character is introduced, and finally God himself responds.

The opening speech belongs to Job. The burden of his utterance is unmistakable: he wishes he had never been born. He is not ready to curse God, but he is certainly prepared to curse the day that brought him to birth (3:1, 3, 8). Everything about that day he wishes he could blot out. If he could not have been stillborn (3:11, 16), then why couldn’t he have just starved to death (3:12)?

Implicitly, of course, this is criticism of God, however indirect. “Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?” (3:23). What Job is experiencing is what he feared throughout his years of plenty (3:25). He has no peace, no quietness, no rest, but only turmoil (3:26).

Four reflections will put this first address in perspective:

(1) This is the rhetoric of a man in deep anguish. So many of the things about which we complain are trivial. Even our most serious grounds for complaint are usually only some fraction of what Job faced.

(2) Before we condemn Job, therefore, we must listen attentively, even fearfully. When we come across those who for good reason are in terrible despair, we must cut them some slack. It would have been wonderful if one of the “friends” had put an arm around Job’s shoulder and wept with him, saying, “We love you, Job. We do not pretend to understand. But we love you, and we’ll do whatever we can for you.”

(3) Job is transparently honest. He does not don a front of feigned piety so that no one will think he is letting down the side. The man hurts so much he wishes he were dead, and says so.

(4) Both here and throughout the book, for all that Job is prepared to argue with God, he is not prepared to write God off. Job is not the modern agnostic or atheist who treats the problem of evil as if it provided intellectual evidence that God does not exist. Job knows that God exists and believes that he is powerful and good. That is one reason why (as we shall see) he is in such confusion. Job’s agonizings are the agonizings of a believer, not a skeptic.

FEBRUARY 3 — Genesis 35—36; Mark 6; Job 2; Romans 6

IT IS ONE THING TO ENDURE WITH steadfast loyalty when the losses, however painful, are all external; it is quite another thing to endure when one loses one’s health (Job 2). Some reflections:

(1) We are still dealing with innocent suffering. God himself declares of Job, “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity” (2:3).

(2) Up to this point, God has proved Satan wrong: Job’s loyalty to God is not conditioned by crass, self-serving bartering. Here is a man who is upright and faithful when all his wealth and even all his children are stripped away from him. That is what makes Satan up the ante: “Let me take away his health,” Satan says in effect, “and he will surely curse you to your face” (2:4-5). So a new level of entirely innocent suffering is introduced, and the stage is set for the rest of the book.

(3) At this point believers must ask painful questions. Doesn’t this sound as if God is using Job in some fantastic experiment? Why should the poor chap have to lose his wealth, his family, his health, and (as we shall see) his reputation, merely to prove God right in a challenge God might well have ignored?

That question could call forth a very long book. I have no final, exhaustive answers. But some things should be borne in mind. (a) We belong to God. He may do with us as he wishes. There is something deep within us that rebels at being reminded of that elemental truth. But truth it is. Indeed, our rebellion in the face of it is a reminder of how much we still want to be at the center of the universe, with God serving us. That is the heart of all idolatry. (b) Suppose Job had known of the arrangement between God and Satan. A lesser man might have protested violently, but it is at least plausible to think that Job would have used such information to invest his suffering with profound significance, thus making it easier to endure. Indeed, he might have seen his suffering as bound up somehow in a larger cosmic struggle between good and evil. (c) Other factors to be borne in mind must await the conclusion of the book of Job—indeed, the conclusion of the Book, the Bible. But I shall return to some of these matters in the devotional for March 13.

(4) So Job now faces painful and degrading physical breakdown, emotional abandonment by his wife, and the arrival of the three miserable comforters. Innocent suffering is immeasurably difficult to endure; it is still worse when every emotional support proves to be a broken reed.

 

FEBRUARY 2 — Genesis 34; Mark 5; Job 1; Romans 5

THE BIBLE DEALS WITH THE REALITY of evil in many different ways. Sometimes jus- tice is done, and is seen to be done, in this life. Especially in the New Testament, the final recompense for evil is bound up with judgment to come. Sometimes suffering has a humbling role, as it challenges our endless hubris. War, pestilence, and famine are sometimes God’s terrible weapons of judgment. These and many more themes are developed in the Bible.

But the book of Job is matchless for causing us to reflect on the question of innocent suffering. That is made clear in Job 1, which in some ways sets up the rest of the book. Job “was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil” (1:1). Although Job was blessed with wealth and a large family, he took nothing for granted. He even engaged in what might be called preemptive intercession on behalf of his grown children: he prayed and offered sacrifices on their behalf, fear- ful that perhaps at an otherwise innocent gathering, one of his children had sinned and cursed God (1:5).

Job does not know, as the reader knows, that another drama is playing out in the throne room of God. Little is said about these “sons of God,” these angels, who approach the Almighty; little is said about Satan, though transparently he is evil and lives up to his name, “Accuser.” The exchange between Satan and God accomplishes three things. First, it sets up the drama that unfolds in the rest of the book. Second, implicitly it establishes that even Satan himself has restraints on his power and cannot act outside God’s sanction. Third, it discloses that Satan’s intention is to prove that all human loyalty to God is nothing more than crass self-interest, while God’s intention is to demonstrate that a man like Job is loyal and faithful regardless of the blessings he receives or does not receive.

Job, of course, knows nothing of these arrangements. He couldn’t, for the drama that follows would be vitiated if he did. In short order Job loses his wealth and his children, all to “natural” causes that Job knows full well remain within God’s sway. When the last bit of bad news reaches him, Job tears his robe and shaves his head (both signs of abasement) and worships, uttering words that become famous: “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).

The narrator comments, “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing” (1:22)—which of course means, in the context of this chapter, that God’s assessment of the man was right and Satan’s was wrong.