Job 38 Approximately

There's a peculiar form of censorship unique to modern Protestantism.  At some point in my life time while I was busy doing something besides paying attention, someone ran into all the Christian bookstores and just plain bookstores for that matter, publishing houses, clicked on all the Christian web pages and even ran into churches that hang banners and such and ripped out the book of Job and all references to same.  Only a few milk toast passages taken out of context were left after this pogrom.

To help correct this travesty by revealing a bit of the stuff that's been removed, here are the first few verses of chapter 38 quoted from "The Message":


Job 38:1  And now, finally, GOD answered Job from the eye of a violent storm. He said:
Job 38:2  "Why do you confuse the issue? Why do you talk without knowing what you're talking about?
Job 38:3  Pull yourself together, Job! Up on your feet! Stand tall! I have some questions for you, and I want some straight answers.
Job 38:4  Where were you when I created the earth? Tell me, since you know so much! 


This is the earliest literary example of sarcasm I've found.  Right now, if find yourself tempted to say something like, "That's not sarcasm.  That's irony!"  Well...the two are given as synonymous in some dictionaries and in virtually all, sarcasm is given as irony directed at a person whereas irony can extend to situations as well.

I think the idea of God being sarcastic to man can make a lot of us uncomfortable.  If that makes you uncomfortable, you should read the whole book.  It'll likely make your eye twitch...at least your eye...now that's ironic. 

It might be a little easier for me to accept what's going on with God and Job here because I grew up teasing and being teased.   This was never in a pejorative way and it always existed within the context of me understanding how much I was cared for and loved.  It was affectionate.  You'd never tease other people the way we teased each other because it would be too easy for them to misunderstand because they didn't have the full context of living in our small family. 

The teasing even went beyond the verbal.  In the dark days before automated dishwashers, my mom and I washed dishes by hand...seriously.  One of us would wash, one would dry.  Turned out she was a Jedi master of wet towel snapping.  I'm not kidding, that woman and a wet towel should have had to register as a lethal weapon.  We raised bruises on each other and even cut skin once or twice.  Usually that kind of wound ended the fight but not always.  When I got to be a teenager, she eventually called a halt to the game.  She said it was because she was afraid she'd be accused of child abuse.  It could have been looked at that way I guess if you were on the outside of the relationship looking in and couldn't see the context.  Probably each of us had our feelings hurt at one time or another but that's not what I remember.  That isn't important.

There's another chapter in Job that's interesting and that would be the first one.  Here's a verse:

Job 1:8  GOD said to Satan, "Have you noticed my friend Job? There's no one quite like him--honest and true to his word, totally devoted to God and hating evil."

I don't know if I've ever read or heard this taught without some "application" about how God would never allow anything like this to happen to us.  There have even been theological constructs applied to Job over the years that are flavors of  "God doesn't do that anymore."  And again, that misses the much bigger point.

Consider what God is trusting Job with here.  Everything everyone in heaven and earth thinks about God forever will be substantively affected for good or evil by the next few weeks of Job's life.  God's investing his eternal reputation and by extension himself in Job and what he chooses.  The God of all creation trusts a man with his life and identity.  And in spite of financial ruin, disease and the death of his children, Job hangs on by his finger nails and refuses to curse God.  

Sure Job whines (SNAP!  "Damn mom...that hurt!"), but both the hurt and whining exist in the context of a relationship, in a context of a mission to further reveal the nature of God's character directly through his favorite creation and most importantly, in a context of love so deep that no particle of trust is withheld.  I can barely get my head around that last bit.  In the end I can accept it only because God says it's true.

There are a lot of commentaries on Job.  Most of what I've read on the subject has wound up starting a fire in our woodstove.  I won't go into it here.  Why bother?  Briefly however, it cheapens the message and ignores the pain in present reality to say that what happened to Job (or something substantially similar to it) can't happen to us because God wouldn't do such a thing ever again.  It also devalues us and ignores who we were spoken by God to be. 

In the end, Job is it's own best commentary and as such might be very nearly impossible to improve upon or even clarify.  God's speech at the end happens in the context of everything that precedes it.  The fact that he's speaking to Job and instructing him at the end of the book means he's not done with him.  It means he expects Job to learn.  And all that means that he expects Job to accept a greater position in the kingdom of God than Job previously believed to be his place.

Now days of course, Jesus sits with us on our ash pile, while Job sat alone on his.  When we remember to ask, he keeps us company, encourages us and even sometimes helps us off of it.  Regardless of what we remember though or choose to open ourselves to, he's still right there.

As we sit there, I think we learn that each of us has a piece of our own Job-like story.  Leaning into that is hard and we still whine a good bit.  Never the less, God is who he says he is and we are who he spoke us to be.  Each one of us who follows Christ has been trusted with a facet of God's redemptive love that's unique to our lives and experience.  If it weren't for each of us, that story would only be known as what could have been, rather than what is, rather than being born into reality through our pain, healing, sin and redemption. 

As we acknowledge our need for Christ to free us from our ash heaps and ask him for his help, he joins us, heals us and eventually transforms both us and our ashes into a unique facet of the loving and redemptive nature of the living God.  Each of us own that piece in partnership with Jesus, the God of creation.  If the story is to be told and made real, we have to live it.