Today’s reading: Job 39-40; 1 Corinthians 13
I used to have a much more simplistic understanding of God’s response to Job, but the more I’ve understood where Job and his friends are coming from in their view of God, the more I’ve seen of what God is really getting at with Job.
In the past, I saw God’s words to Job almost like a parent telling their child that they don’t know enough to question them, but without giving them any reason or answer for it. On one level, there is some of that, and it’s not illegitimate. As a child is often missing the larger context for their parents’ decisions and/or lacks the maturity to understand, even if they do have the context, that reality is infinitely more applicable in our relationship with God. His knowledge, wisdom, and power are so far beyond our own, categorically different in many ways, that we could never reasonably expect to truly understand a single decision made by the Lord, let alone the sum total of them. And there is undoubtedly a decent bit of, “Given who I am, who are you to question and accuse me?” But there’s also more going on.
The thing I have missed in the past is how much explanation God is actually giving Job in His response to Him. He doesn’t explain to Job why he is suffering as he is, but He does pull back the curtain a bit to allow Job to see that his simplistic view of the world is inadequate.
Like we’ve talked about numerous times, Job and his friends believe God runs the world according to a strict principle of just retribution. Put glibly, good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. This understanding has been the entire basis for the conversation in the book so far. Job’s friends see his suffering and know he must have committed some incredibly heinous act to be deserving of such severe suffering, and for Job’s part, knowing he has done nothing so heinous, he has essentially accused God of getting this one wrong.
So one of the big things God accomplishes in His response to Job is to show Job how much that simplistic view of the world falls short. How much of the natural world is beyond Job’s consideration? And even if he tried to consider those aspects, how much of it is beyond his understanding? How do the wild donkeys and the pregnant does fit into Job’s categories of everything operating according to just retribution? If there is a drought in the wilderness, beyond the reach of man, whose sin caused that drought? And if there is abundant rain and vegetation growing for the wild animals outside of human visibility, whose good works brought about that blessing? God’s governance of the universe is not limited to Job, his understanding, and his perception, but extends from the grand working of the heavens to the maintenance of the most insignificant flora and fauna that Job doesn’t even know exists. Given all that, how could the world possibly operate and Job and his friends believe? And the reality is that, if the world does not operate this way, then Job’s declarations that God is wrong in his case are baseless because they assume a mode of operation that God has never claimed nor promised.
All that said, while God is certainly also telling Job, in this, that he really has no place question God’s decisions, and especially of accusing Him of mishandling things, He is also helping Job understand where his worldview needs to be reassessed if he is going to rightly regard the Lord.
No comments:
Post a Comment