How are you finding our meditations on Job and the insights on suffering? Have you considered your theology of suffering? Is Job proving a helpful teacher?
As I’ve read through Job, pondered its truths and written on it, I have found that I have become more aware on my own small view of God. Whilst I might not be encountering any new truths necessarily, I have become aware of just how I do not believe and rely on these truths that I already know. For instance, I know that God is the Sovereign One who gives and takes away, and yet I find that I am more willing to accept His generosity in the giving of things, but less so when He decides to take the things He gave. I am jubilant to receive His kind gifts but deeply offended, sorrowful and quick to doubt His love when He takes what He had given. I dare even to think that I am more deserving of His gifts than His ‘takings’, because I am not a ‘bad’ person.
Suffering is not a measure of God’s displeasure
But as Job exemplifies, God’s SOVEREIGNTY means God is free to do as He pleases, in accordance with His good purposes. Job trusts that God is not only Sovereign, but Good, and that is why he can worship Him in the depth of his grief and sorrow. He trusts God to give him whatever He is pleased to give because ultimately, He is the One to hope in , who can work things out for His glory and our good.
Job also exemplifies that suffering is not a measure of God’s displeasure. This whole story starts because God can’t help but brag about Job. Job is a blameless and upright man of whom God approves, and yet God allows the Adversary to touch Job’s life and bring incredible pain into it. In fact, we might say that Job suffers precisely because God is so pleased with him. After all it is God who initiates the conversation with the Adversary about Job that leads to his suffering. Job suffers as a means to prove, refine and strengthen his faith and trust in God. He also suffers to show us that it is God’s purposes that will prevail, over and above the Adversary’s. The Adversary’s schemes will fail and be thwarted. It doesn’t seem so at the beginning of the story from a human perspective – in the height of Job’s suffering, as Job’s wife proves, but we know how the story ends. Ultimately, the Lord is glorified, Job vindicated and the Adversary shamed.
As those who are living much later than Job, and in the triumph of Jesus’ own suffering, death and resurrection, we have a more certain hope than Job did. We can cling to the assurance that in Christ, “the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.” (Rom. 8:18). Jesus has guaranteed us what Job merely saw a glimmer of. O for grace to trust Him more.
Job’s friends
Today, I want us to think together about what it looks like to be friends with those who are suffering. Job 2 tells us that, “Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him, they came each from his own place, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They made an appointment together to come to show him sympathy and comfort him. And when they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him. And they raised their voices and wept, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads toward heaven. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” (v11-13)
When news of Job’s suffering gets to his friends, they come to him with the intention of showing him sympathy and comforting him. These friends do not ignore Job’s pain, but are roused by it to come to him and share in his grief. There is something about witnessing someone’s pain that makes us want to avert our eyes and turn from it. Job’s friends teach us that it is fitting to see our friends’ pain and be with them as they are hurting, with the express purpose of comforting them from the pain we can see they are in.
Words cannot remove the pain or loss, no matter how inspiring.
When these three men, see their friend and fail to recognize him because of the effect of his distress, they cannot help but raise their voices in lamentation. They weep, tear their robes and sit in the dust. They see and feel Job’s losses and commiserate with him. They join him in his grief – affirming that Job’s sorrow is valid. They sat with him, wearing their grief and said nothing!
There is an unfortunate practice we have when we meet with those who are suffering: we want to inspire them with our words. We could do with a page from the book Job’s three friends are reading – be quiet. Words cannot remove the pain or loss, no matter how inspiring. The pain will remain and its devastation still be felt no matter how much truth we seek to speak. Why don’t we just sit and join in the grief – not in hopelessness mind you, but in the acknowledgement of the greatness of the loss and pain? The time for words will come eventually, but it is not when the pain is fresh.
When the grieving vent . . . without relief
But when the time for words comes, we should abandon the book Job’s friends are reading from. When Job is ready to speak, he cannot but lament his life and the pain he is in. He curses the day that he was born, wishing that he had never lived. He is in so much pain and misery that he can only hope for death – as a rest from living in the actualization of his worst fears (cf. Job 3)!
Rather than let him vent out his pain and grief, his friends decide to answer his lament. However, it does not appear to be with any compassion. When Eliphaz speaks (Job 4-5), he reveals his skewed worldview, “Remember: who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off?” (4:7). In his eyes, as with many of that time (and this present time), those who are right with God did not suffer. “Can mortal man be in the right before God? Can a man be pure before his Maker?” (4:17). In what he expresses as a word from God, he says that no man can be right or pure before God. Other than undermining his own previous statement, he is also undermining God’s testimony concerning Job. As readers we know that God testifies that Job is a blameless and upright man before Him (cf. 1:8, 2:3). This man is willing even to contradict God in order to make Job’s circumstances fit his worldview. Despite what he knew about his friend, he was willing to cast him as a villain in order to uphold his view of things. He did not even think to challenge his view of the world as being inadequate.
Instead of re-evaluating the principles that hold up our view of the world, we re-evaluate reality!
This, I fear, is the attitude that many of us have. We have a way we view the world that we never think to question when reality does not match up to it. Instead of re-evaluating the principles that hold up our view of the world, we re-evaluate reality! Eliphaz quickly accuses Job of being crafty, foolish and wily (cunning) attributing this as why he has been afflicted through the death of his children and losing his possessions. It doesn’t matter that there was no evidence of Job being any of those things; his suffering must mean he was a wicked man. To Eliphaz, a + b = c. It is the wicked who suffer (a.) and Job is suffering (b.) so this means, Job must be wicked (c.).
Even if Job would have been a wicked man, would this have been a kind way to tell him that? The man has just lost all his 10 children, his wealth and his health. How heartless would someone have to be to tell another that his children were dead because of his wickedness? Worse still, all this is a false accusation! The narrator and God both testify to Job’s blamelessness and his fear of God. Eliphaz is only stirring up Job’s pain with his heartlessness.
When his other friend Bildad answers Job, he goes down Eliphaz’s route. He thinks Job is saying that God has perverted justice and so tells Job that his children died because God was punishing them for their sins (8:4). He further addresses Job as not being pure or upright, otherwise God would have acted in his favor (8:6). He thinks that Job’s suffering is proof that he has forgotten God and is godless (8:11-13). To him, suffering is proof of God’s rejection (8:20). Zophar does the same thing. He goes ahead to tell Job that he even deserves worse than he is getting (11:6) because if he were right, then he wouldn’t be suffering (11:13-15). He chalks up Job’s desire for death as an escape for the wicked (11:20).
These friends are not only heartless, they are liars! As I’ve already highlighted with Eliphaz, these guys are willing to ignore reality and falsely accuse their friend of wrongdoing. Eliphaz is also guilty of the sin of presumption – thinking to speak for God, when he is speaking from his own worldview (4:12-21). They all claim to speak for God in wisdom, but their view actually misrepresents God and the reality of life in this world. They make no room for a broken world in which God has allowed, for a time, for His will to be rejected and rebelled against. They make no room for the effect of sin and its consequences. They make no room for God to do what we cannot yet understand in line with His good purposes; they put God in a box! It is no wonder that at the end of the book God says of them, “My anger burns against you. . . for you have not spoken of me what is right as my servant Job has. . . My servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to our folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” (42:7-8)
What makes Job different to these friends? He makes room for a broken world and a God big enough to ordain even bitter providence. He dares to say, “For the arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison; the terrors of God are arrayed against me.” (6:4). Job dares to say what his friends cannot even fathom: that God is so in control of what happens that Job’s afflictions are from Him! Job’s friends, like many of us, hear that Job is accusing God of injustice or evil, but that is not what Job is doing. Job is simply acknowledging the fact that God rules the universe so fully that nothing happens apart from His purposes – good and bad! This is the great Creator to whom Job is referring and from whom Job wants an answer. Job knows that there is no hope but in this God and so he confesses, “Though he slay me, I will hope in him,” (13:15). God is the only one who can reveal why Job is suffering and give him hope, even beyond death (14:7-17).
For many of us, especially those affected by the influence of the prosperity gospel, this sounds like blasphemy – as I imagine it was for Job’s friends. Some of us would even attempt to deny the sovereignty of God if it means that we ascribe to Him as being in charge of even the pain and distress that we face. We are so afraid of pain and God having any part of it that we would rather sin by making God small and thinking less of Him! Job does something we can learn from: he holds seemingly contradictory facts, but does not conflate them upon each other. He doesn’t do the a+b=c thing that his friends do. He holds up his hands and asks God to come and make sense of things for him. He actually gives God room to be God and to reveal Himself to him. Job doesn’t allow his pain and grief and the prevailing framework to draw him into a limited view of God. He maintains his integrity, his big view of God and asks God for help in making the right conclusions. We all need to learn this from Job.
As we’ve considered Job and his friends we have learnt three things. Firstly, the power of the ministry of presence – to show up for those hurting and grieving and to simply sit with them in their pain and sorrow, commiserating and comforting them with our presence. Secondly, we’ve thought about the wisdom of silence, especially when contrasted with unhelpful, unsolicited advice. Words have a time and space, especially true and kind words. But not often in the midst of fresh pain and sorrow. It can be incredibly insensitive and hurtful to speak, especially without compassion. I would say, lead with quiet compassion and speak if necessary. Do not attempt to give big ‘answers’ to questions of grief and sorrow. Just sit with the grieving and love them as best you can.
Thirdly, we have learnt an important thing about how to develop theology: don’t be too quick to draw out conclusions. God and life do not often work out of simple equations like a+b=c. There are many more variables and complexities than we can imagine and we should be slow to develop easy answers to these complex circumstances. The big thing I think is to give God room to be great and mysterious. We cannot fit Him into a box, so we might do well to stop trying. What we can do is to learn to sit with the loose ends of the facts of God and life, uncomfortable as this may be, and ask Him to help us make sense of them. We are to do this with an unwavering faith that He will work things out in His power and sovereignty for His glory and our good. This means we might understand little, but can have the assurance of God’s grace and goodness to lean on constantly whatever comes our way! May the Lord help us to trust Him more!