Today’s reading: Job 8-9; Romans 11
The opening lines of Job 9 are so important in understanding this story, and are almost painful to read and to feel Job’s struggle.
In answering Bildad’s argument that this kind of calamity can only come about as a response to wrongdoing, Job 9 opens with Job saying, “Truly I know that it is so…”
Job has the same spiritual understanding as his friends, that if you do well, you will be blessed, but if you veer from the right way, bad things will befall you. For Job’s friends, who are looking in from the outside, this level of calamity can only be the result of serious/heinous wrongdoing and injustice. It’s not that they want to assume bad things about their friend, but that the situation doesn’t leave any other option, so far as they are concerned. While Job shares their view on the world, and believes his calamity should only be the result of serious wrongdoing, he is not looking in from the outside, but is in the position to know that he truly is innocent.
And as much as we might want to say, “Yeah, but nobody is actually always good, so there must be plenty of wrongdoing he could point to, so he must not be being honest here,” we have to remember that even God Himself declared that Job is upright and blameless. This is one reason that some people believe Job to be fictional, a parable rather than historical events, because nobody could actually be as righteous as Job. But the fact of the matter is, whether Job is a parable, putting the most righteous man possible into this situation, so that there is nobody who could be less “deserving” than him, or whether Job is a historical figure who was truly that good, the story itself tells us that Job is being forthright when he declares his innocence.
This means that Job is in a position where he believes these things should only be happening as a result of serious sin, but he also knows he is fully innocent. What could he possibly do with that?? This is why he says he wants to make his case to God and argue that he doesn’t deserve this. The problem that Job doesn’t understand is that God would agree, Job doesn’t deserve these things, but “deserving them” is not why they’re happening in the first place.
But man do I feel for Job here…
A number of years ago I accidentally got into what blew up into a massive conflict with a small-group leader in my church. I say accidentally because, from my perspective, there was no reason for any conflict at all, but this person took great offense to the conversation, kicking my wife and I out of his house. Genuinely confused as to what had happened, we went to get advice from some other leaders in the church who knew them and us well and found out that the other couple had already gotten other people together and told them we were slandering the group of leaders, etc. At their advice we ended up having to get the church elders involved, and it was honestly just a huge mess. The problem was, in the midst of it, everybody kept telling me I must be in the wrong.
Looking back, their perspective was not unlike the perspective of Job’s friends. They weren’t there to see and know objectively what had happened, and generally, a conflict of any size, let alone one that turned as large as that one did, involves wrong-doing from both sides. So what I heard from every mature Christian on the matter, including the elder who came in to help mediate the conflict, was that I needed to be honest and own my portion of it. And when I said that I believed I was innocent in the matter, and that I had spent a lot of time before the Lord, because of how much things had blown up, asking Him if there was something I missing and needed to own, but felt His answer was that there wasn’t, I was told by multiple people how arrogant I was. They simply had no category for things going as far awry as they had without me doing something to instigate or further the conflict.
But when all the people you respect and would look to for advice are unified in telling you you are in the wrong, but you know that you, in all actuality, are innocent, what do you do with that? And when you have to answer them, like Job, “Truly I know that it is so… but that’s not what’s happening in this case,” what do you do with that?
I have never felt so vexed in all my life as in that situation, and my situation was nothing compared to Job’s. I honestly can’t even wrap my head around how confused, frustrated, sad, and alone Job must have felt sitting there among his friends…
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