A FRESH READING OF THE BOOK OF JOB, by Philip Yancey

A FRESH READING OF THE BOOK OF JOB

Philip Yancey

If you had asked me when I began my study what the Book of Job was about, I would have been quick to respond.
-Job? Everybody knows what Job is about. It’s the Bible’s most complete treatment of the problem of suffering. It)s about terrible grief and bewildering pain. Without doubt the bulk of the book does center on the theme of suffering.
-Chapters 3-37 contain no action to speak of, just the opinionated dialogues of five prickly men-Job, his three friends, and the enigmatic Elihu-concerning the problem of pain. They are all trying to account for the slings and arrows of outragious fortune that have fallen upon poor Job, who sits forlorn in the ashes of what used to be his mansion.
-Despite the fact that all but a few pages of Job deal with the problem of pain, I am coming to the conclusion that Job is not really about the problem of pain. Suffering contributes the ingredients of the story, not its central theme. Just as a cake is not about eggs, Hour, milk, and shortening, but uses those ingredients in the process of creating a cake, Job is not "about" suffering;
- it merely uses such ingredients in its larger story, which concerns even more important questions, cosmic questions. Seen as a whole, Job is primarily about faith in its starkest form .
- I am drawn to this conclusion mainly because of the introductory "plot" in chapters 1 and 2, which reveals that Job's personal drama on earth had its origin in a cosmic drama in heaven. lance regarded Job as a profound expression of human disappointment-something on the order of Meg Woodson's letter [in which she wrote about her daughter's death from cystic fibrosis at age twenty-three], only longer and more detailed, and with direct biblical sanction.
-As I studied the book further, however, I discovered that it does not really present the human viewpoint. God is the central character in the Bible, and nowhere does this come through more clearly than in the book of Job. I realized that I had always read it from the perspective of chapter 3 on-in other words, from Job's perspective.
-Let me explain. It helps to think of the Book of Job as a mystery play, a "whodunit" detective story. Before the play itself begins, we in the audience get a sneak preview, as if we have showed up early for a press conference in which the director explains his work (chapters 1-2). He relates the plot and describes the main characters, then tells us in advance who did what in the play, and Why. In fact, he solves every mystery in the play except one: how will the main character respond? Will Job trust God or deny him? Later, when the curtain rises, we see only the actors on stage. Confined within the play, they have no knowledge of what the director has told us in the sneak preview.
-We know the answer to the "whodunit" questions, but the star detective, Job, does not. He spends all his time on stage trying to discover what we already know. He scratches himself with shards of pottery and asks, "Why me? What did I do wrong? What is God trying to tell me?" To the audience, Job's questions should be mere intellectual exercises, for we learned the answers in the prologue, the first two chapters.
-What did Job do wrong? Nothing. He represents the very best of the species. Didn't God himself call Job "blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil"? Why, then, is Job suffering? Not for punishment. Far from it-he has been selected as the principal player in a great contest of the heavens.
-The trouble starts with Satan's claim that Job is a spoiled favorite, loyal only because God has "put a hedge around him." Satan scoffs that God, unworthy of love in himself, only attracts people like Job because they're "bribed" to follow him. If times ever get tough, Satan charges, such people will quickly abandon God. When God accepts the challenge to test Satan's theory, thus consenting to let Job's response settle the issue, the calamities begin to rain down on poor, unsuspecting Job. I would certainly not deny the strangeness of this heavenly contest. On the other hand, I cannot sidestep the account of The Wager in Job, for it offers a rare peek through the keyhole of eternity.
-When people experience pain, questions spill out-the very questions that tormented Job. Why me? What's going on? Does God care? Is there a God? This one time, in the raw recounting of Job's travail, we the onlookers-not Job-are granted a view behind the curtain. What we long for, the prologue to Job provides: a glimpse into how the world is run. As nowhere else in the Bible, the Book of Job shows us God's point of view, including the supernatural activity normally hidden from us. Job has put God on trial, accusing him of unfair acts against an innocent party. Angry, satirical, betrayed, Job wanders as close to blasphemy as he can get-just to the edge. His words have a startlingly familiar ring because they are so modern. He gives voice to our most deeply felt complaints against God. But chapters 1 and 2 prove that, regardless of what Job thinks, God is not on trial in this book. Job is on trial. The point of the book is not suffering: Where is God when it hurts? The prologue dealt with that issue.
-The point is faith: Where is Job when it hurts? How is he responding? To understand the Book of Job, I must begin there.
-To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now. -T. S. Eliot
- As I studied Job further, however, I saw that I had been harboring the wrong image of what took place. Yes, there was an arm wrestling match, but not between Job and God. Rather, Satan and God were the chief combatants, although-most significantly-God had designated the man Job as his stand-in. The first and last chapters make clear that Job was unknowingly performing in a cosmic showdown before spectators in the unseen world.
- The strange scene of The Wager reminded me of a few other places where the Bible affords a brief glimpse behind the curtain. Consider, for example, Revelation 12, which depicts an even more bizarre contest: a pregnant woman, wearing the sun for a dress and twelve stars for a crown, opposes a red dragon so enormous he can dislodge a third of the stars from the sky with one sweep of his tail. The dragon lies in wait, seeking to devour the pregnant woman's child at birth. And there's more: a flight into the desert, a serpent who tries to drown the woman, and a fierce war in heaven.
-Biblical commentators propose as many interpretations of the details in Revelation 12 as there are commentaries, but almost all agree that the weird images point to the great disruption in the universe caused by Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. In a sense, Revelation 12 presents another side of Christmas, adding a new set of holographic images to the familiar scenes of manger and shepherds and the slaughter of the innocents. Which is the "true" story of Christmas: Luke's pastoral version or Revelation's account of the cosmos at war? They are the same story, of course; only the level of viewing differs. Luke gives the view from earth and Revelation shades in details from the unseen world.
The two worlds come together vividly in three Jesus' most famous stories, the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son. All three make the same point: great joy breaks out in heaven when a sinner repents.
-Today, anyone can watch a sinner repenting, for televised Billy Graham crusades portray the scene live and in color. The camera follows a young woman as she makes her way through the stands to an area set aside for repentance -and conversion. But Jesus' stories imply that far more may be going on out mere: beyond that stadium scene, in a place concealed from all camera lenses, a great party has erupted, a gigantic celebration in the unseen world. Belief in an unseen world forms a crucial dividing line of faith today. Many people get up, eat, drive their cars, work, make phone calls, tend to their children, and go to bed without giving a single thought to the existence of an unseen world. But according to the Bible, human history is far more than the arising and falling of people and nations; it is a staging ground for the battle of the universe. Hence what seems like an "ordinary" action in the seen world may have 'an extraordinary effect on the unseen world: a short-term mission assignment causes Satan to fail like lightning from heaven (Luke 10); a sinner's repentance sets off celestial celebration (Luke 15); a baby's birth disturbs the entire universe (Revelation 12).
-Much of that effect, however, remains hidden from our view-except for the occasional glimpses granted us in places like Revelation, and in Job. An ordinary person in the seen world, Job was called upon to endure a 'trial with cosmic consequences. He had no glimmer of light to guide him, no hint that the unseen world cared about him, or even existed. Yet like a laboratory test animal, he was handpicked to settle one of the most urgent issues of humanity and to determine a small piece of the history of the universe. Is it absurd to believe that one human being, a tiny dot on a tiny planet, can make a difference in the history of the universe? It certainly seemed so to Job's friends.
- The Wager offers a: message of great hope to all of us- perhaps the most powerful and enduring lesson from Job. In the end, The Wager resolved decisively that the faith of a single human being counts ~o r very much indeed. Job affirms that our response to testing matters. The history of mankind-and, in fact, my own individual history of faith-is enclosed within the great drama of the history of the universe. God has granted us "the dignity of causation," said Pascal. We may doubt with Elihu, whether one person can make any appreciable difference. But the Bible rustles with hints that something like The Wager is played out in other believers as well. We are God's Exhibit A, his demonstration piece to the powers in the unseen world. The apostle Paul, borrowing an image from the processional of gladiators into the Colosseum, pictured himself on public display: "We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men" (1 Cor. 4:9 Phillips). And in the same letter he commented, in an astonishing aside, "Do you not know that we will judge angels?" (1 Cor. 6:3 Phillips) . We humans inhabit a mere speck of a planet in the outer suburbs of a spiral galaxy that is only one of about a million million such galaxies in the observable universe, but the New Testament insists that what happens among us here will, in fact, help determine the future of that universe. Paul is emphatic: "The whole creation is on tiptoe to see that the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own" (Rom. 8:19 Phillips). Natural creation, "groaning" in travail and decay, can only be set free by the transformation of human beings.
-As I studied Job, it struck me that The Wager was, at its heart, a stark reenactment of God's original question in creation: Will the humans choose for or against me? From God's point of view that has been the central question of history, beginning with Adam and continuing on through Job and every man and woman who has ever lived. The Wager in the Book of Job called into question the whole human experiment. Satan denied that human beings are truly free. We have freedom to descend, of course-Adam and all his descendants proved that. But freedom to ascend, to believe God for no other reason than, well .
- for no reason at all? Can a person believe even when God appears to him as an enemy? Or is faith one more product of environment and circumstance? The opening chapters of Job expose Satan as the first great behaviorist: Job was conditioned to love God, he implied. Take away the rewards, and watch his faith crumble. The Wager put Satan's theory to the test. I have come to see Job's trials as a crucial test of human freedom, an important issue in modern items as well. In our century, it takes faith to believe that a human being amounts to more than a combination of DNA programming, instincts of the gene pool, cultural conditioning, and the impersonal forces of history. Yet even in this behaviorist century, we want to believe differently. We want to believe that the thousand hard and easy choices we make each day somehow count. And the Book of Job insists that they do; one person's faith can make a difference. There is a role for human beings, after all, and by fulfilling that role Job set a pattern for anyone who ever faces doubt or hardship. Very often, disappointment with God begins in Job-like circumstances. The death of a child, a tragic accident, or a loss of job may bring on the same questions Job asked. Why me? What does God have against me? Why does he seem so distant? As reader's of Job's story, we can see behind the curtain to a contest being waged in the invisible world. But in our own trials, we will not have such insight. When tragedy strikes, we will live in shadow, unaware of what is transpiring in the unseen world. The drama that Job lived through will then replicate itself in our individual lives. Once again, God will let his reputation ride on the response of unpredictable human beings. For Job, the battleground of faith involved lost possessions, lost family members, lost health. We may face a different struggle: a career failure, a floundering marriage, sexual orientation, a body shape that turns people off, not on.
-- At such times the outer circumstances-the illness, the bank account the run of bad luck-will seem the real struggle. We may beg God to change those circumstances. If only I were beautiful, or handsome, then everything would work out. If only I had more money more easily believe God…
-But the more important battle, as shown in Job, takes place inside us. Will we trust God? Job teaches that at the moment when Eli l h is hardest and least likely, then faith is most needed. His struggle presel1ls :l glimpse of what the Bible elsewhere spells out in detail: the remarkable truth that our choices matter, not just to us and our own destiny but, amazingly, to God himself and the universe he rules. In short, God has granted to ordinary men and women the dignity of participating in the Great Reversal which will restore the cosmos to its pristine state.
- All the reasons for disappointment with God ... as well as all cancers all deaths, all broken relationships, all the collected groanings of our savage planet-all these imperfections will be wiped away. We may at times question God's wisdom and lose patience with his timetable.
-(The disciples, after all, felt bitter disappointment when Jesus rejected their dream of a physical kingdom in favor of an invisible, spiritual kingdom.) But all the prophets' lavish promises will someday come true, and we, you and I, are the ones selected to help bring that about. No one has expressed the pain and unfairness of this world more poignantly than Job; no one has voiced disappointment with God more passionately. We must still attend to Job's complaints and to God's fierce response. But the Book of Job begins not with the complaints-the human viewpoint-but with God's point of view. In the prologue, the scene of The Wager establishes a' darkly shining truth: Job-and you and I-can join the struggle to reverse all that is wrong with the universe. We can make a difference.
-The Book of Job gives no satisfying answers to the question "Why?" , Instead, it substitutes another question, "To what end?" By remaining faithful to God through his trials Job, crotchety, sardonic old Job, helped abolish the very pain and unfairness of this world that he had protested so vigorously. And Meg Woodson, who stubbornly clings to God's love in the shadows, even after watching two children die .. . she too is helping to reverse those wrongs.
- Why the delay? Why does God let evil and pain so flagrantly exist, even thrive, on this planet? Why does he let us do slowly and blunderingly what he could do in an eye-blink? He holds back for our sakes. Re-creation involves us; we are, in fact, at the center of his plan. The Wager, the motive behind all human history, is to develop us, not God. Our very existence announces to the powers in the universe that restoration is under way. Every act of faith by everyone of the people of God is like the tolling of a bell, and a faith like Job's reverberates throughout the universe.
-Our present life reds like a real fight- as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.

- William James,

The Will to Believe I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children's game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes in the end.

-T S. Eliot