It’s Not Over Yet
“Though He slay me, I will hope in Him. Nevertheless I will argue my ways before Him.” Job 13:15 NASB
Argue – You have abandoned hopelessness (see Friday’s discussion). You have elected to be an optimist in spite of your better judgment (Heschel). You choose hope. But does that mean you just accept life as it is? You give up trying to make sense of any of the horrific observable reality? You place your faith (what little you can muster) in a God you cannot see and Whose purposes often remain clouded and mysterious? Are you expected to go along with the religious crowd and “hope against hope”?
Not if you’re like Job.
“I will hope in YHVH even if He decides I must die to serve His purpose, but I won’t go quietly!”
The verb translated “argue” is yākaḥ. It also means, “to prove, rebuke, correct, judge, decide.” Perhaps Job employs it because of its wide range of meaning. It isn’t just having an argument. It’s about justifying my complaint, proving I’m right, correcting my critics, rebuking those who accuse me, and yes, also about arguing. But it isn’t arguing in the colloquial sense that we often understand. It is not about emotionally primed words aimed at driving home my convictions. It is not laced with rejection of the other person. This is courtroom counterpoint. Job might hope in the character of YHVH and trust that YHVH is a just God, but he still is engaged in the fight. He still intends to defend himself before the Almighty. And so should we.
Hope is anything but passive in the biblical world. God is not interested in browbeating you into compliance. He loves a good fight. Think of the personal emotional battles He entered into with Jacob, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Hosea, Ezra, Jonah, Yeshua, Shimon Petra, Sha’ul. Perhaps the greatest contests came with Moses. Punch and counter-punch. No, YHVH is not a god who demands obedience or else. He is a Father who actively encourages His children to grow up. Job knows that YHVH’s purposes can’t be thwarted, but that doesn’t mean we must capitulate without a word. Often the advance in relationship requires tenacious vulnerability, a transparency that comes about by speaking your deepest matters of the heart even if they conflict with the other person.
Can we make a plan to discover hope? Yes, I think so. It will begin with exploring the depth of God’s character, by looking carefully at His interaction with past personalities. But it won’t end until we have had our say. Inclusion in the Kingdom doesn’t happen by divine declaration. It happens by fighting our way to acceptance. And there’s a very big difference between acceptance and surrender.
Topical Index: hope, argue, yākaḥ, capitulation, acceptance, Job 13:15
Dear Job,
Your arms are too short to box with God.
Sincerely,
Been There, Done That
P.S. I highly recommend you try “absolute surrender.”
Only trust HIm, — [Now].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjj3ZujY1k0
I am riding with Skip on this one. I agree with Carl that my arms are too short, but that is still not an excuse. To contend with my Maker is not so much about seeing where He is but about seeing where I am with Him, because there is no way – post eating from the Tree, that is – that I can tell! It’s dark out here! My ideas – the myths in my head that I start out with – of what and where He is are so off the mark, there is no way to correct them without engaging with Him on the basis of them. Only after I acted out what was really between my ears, and what had been handed to me in my experience (very offbase and confusing experience), have I been I able to intelligently adjust my understanding of Who He really is and who I really am.
I started out believing the Greek notion that I had to have it ‘perfect’ somehow, the first time out of the bag. From experience, I now know that a righteous person fights to the bloody death from where they find themselves starting out from, before they can even know where that is! Only a good fight can show me where I am offbase. That “rising seven times” stuff? I think Skip wrote about this as referring to seven being how many times it takes to get yourself killed. Jacob wrestled at Jabok until the point where somebody was going to die. Well, he was obviously going to be that person. He fought to the end of himself, and beyond. There is no way to get to the end of myself without throwing myself into defending where I am at to start out with.
This has been the function of the yetzer hara in me: to wrestle me to the place of my own demise, which is the only place I can surrender. Until then, a part of me is going to be continuing to hold a secret knife – a secret self-justification – somewhere. I have to see for myself that I have nothing. I am the one that has to be convinced by this fight. Avoiding it is just another way to continue thinking that, somehow, I must be ‘right’. Job got over that, finally, but only by going through it. Me too.
I think I have learned something else, too. I have learned to look at how determined a person is to fight for where they are coming from as an indication of how likely they are to be able to love. For example; a wise woman, when she looks for a mate, looks for someone who is willing to fight for where they are coming from. She knows that it is only after a man has defended his position to the fullest that he can be persuaded to change his mind, because it is only through the fight that he is likely to reveal where his mind really is. THIS is what she has to have in a mate because she should know that everybody else is just playing games, which leaves no basis for love.
If you are not willing to fight to the death, or at least to the point of the humility of the truth (same thing), you are not representing where you are really coming from in the first place. Someone who is always ducking the fight is someone who is merely pulling others’ legs. They have no intention of revealing themselves, which is what relationship requires.
As usual, so true for me too Laurita, and the Greek free style wrestling match was well worth the – “fight to the bloody death from where they find themselves starting out from, before they can even know where that is!”
In my ignorance I can only dream about your “perfect” fight but fight I did and I am eternally grateful for having had such a duel. A friend of mine in FL found me reading the almighty fight of Jacob in “Crossing” last winter and asked if he could read it when I was done. He did and returned the following week saying, “that man speaks to me like no preacher ever has” and became an ardent Skip-reading enthusiast. Sometimes you win a wrestling match in a way that you least expect with more than one Olympic gold medal.
I don’t need to comment to you about your “wise woman, when she looks for a mate, looks for someone who is willing to fight for where they are coming from.” She won and so did I, but even more so! Long may she reign. Hallelujah!
You are right, George it cuts both ways, of course, and your wise woman comes with a great bonus: she makes fantastic quilts, too! All my best to you and Penny, too.
P.S. the ‘perfect’ part of my fight didn’t even get me out of my parking lot. just so you know. It was perfect disaster that blew my volcano. I had no idea where all that lava had been kept, but I was quite sure it could not possibly be mine! LOL!
What you wanna bet your neighbor had been wrestling for a good long while already, and Crossing happened to cross his palm right before the break of his day? I love good stories!
This discussion reminds me there is something about choice, profound and deeply real. Something about our free will that God honors in the most profound times and circumstances. I share, Tom Randolph’s account of the YCHS choir bus accident of 1976.
“The bus rolled upside down in midair and we children started tumbling towards the roof and our screaming filled every void… and then got crushed along with us.
All the way through the crash, a nightmare unfolded with relentless blossoming distress. All the way though the crash, the screaming did not stop until the bus skid to its ultimate stop. The nightmare, though, did not stop. While all along, the praying persisted even longer….We were breaking through the guardrail and I knew there was no way we were going to make it…. I could see the ground far below waiting for us. I thought about whether I wanted to live or die: and I wanted to live, I felt there was still so much I wanted to do. But then, I thought that if I die, I’ll get to be in Heaven with Jesus…
It was when the bus was rolling upside down that I realized that there was nothing that was going to keep us in our seats; I watched with compassion and tender pity as my friends in front of me began to fall towards the roof. That was enough for me…
It was when I was watching my friends falling that I knew if I closed my eyes it would be just like that time I fell off the rope swing – that all would go black…– I don’t know if that’s cowardly or not…I hoped it wasn’t…I still worry about it some…maybe I was making the wrong choice…
I had lost my bracing hold on Chris and on the seat back frame in front of me and a large shadow was rapidly spiraling down the inside of the bus. I wanted to live, but I was looking forward to waking up with Jesus. So I closed my eyes.
I was right: I did black out…but that’s not an end of feeling.
I was right: I did wake up with Jesus…just not in Heaven like I thought.
I was right: we did all die…it’s just that some of us didn’t end up getting killed.
Then the Holy Spirit came and sang to us in the wreckage, sang to the living a lyric lullaby to start our dulcet healing, sang the dead and dying into a deep sleep to propel their renewal. For we were children, we were a choir and we had sung the Lord’s praises with sincere & genuine faith. God is great: His love endures forever and He abides with us in our feelings.
There are times and places where something so tragic happens that Heaven itself kneels down and touches the earth. This does not take the nightmare away – that would reduce reality and its abundance, instead it blesses both so that, no matter what, God’s love is always at hand for us. The only thing the Lamb of God has ever taken away from us is our sins…for that was His will.
– Tom Randolph