Sackcloth and Ashes: Travels with Job (5)
“Afterward Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth” Job 3:1 NASB
Cursed – Unfortunately, even the best of us fail. Chapter 3 begins the real story of Job. Most of the book is devoted to Job’s erosion toward justification. It all starts with a subtle shift: Job wishes he were never born.
The Greek poet Theognis probably summarized the essence of the Greek view of life when he said, “Best of all for mortals is never to have been born, but for those who have been born to die as soon as possible.” Why was he so pessimistic? Maybe he knew about Job. The crushing impact of the story of Job is not the fight between good and evil. It is rather the total lack of control that Man exercises over life. Without a good God above, the world is nothing more than a fickle and cruel place where anything can happen. Even Solomon recognized this fact. So, Theognis rightly concludes, if life is just painful suffering while traveling toward the grave, why even be born? In a world without the protection of a benevolent God, what hope do we have? Probability always wins.
Job never met Theognis but it certainly looks like he agrees. In this verse, Job begins a long lament about the day he was born. He wishes it had never happened. All of the joy surrounding his conception has been turned to excruciating sorrow. All of the pleasure is now pain. He concludes that it wasn’t worth it. Death is so much better than this living hell. At least when I’m dead, says Job, I will no longer suffer.
The Hebrew word qalal can mean “to make light of, to trivialize,” but in this context it takes on a much more powerful invective. “Curse the day I was born. Extinguish it! Cross it off the calendar.” Job’s distress reaches up to heaven and asks for a chronological eraser. If you have suffered deeply enough, you might also find yourself crying out with Job, “Why was I even born?” Theognis has no answer at all. For him, suffering is purposeless. Death is relief. But even though Job shares the same emotional context, his cry is not Greek. Job does have a God in heaven. This makes his pain even harder to understand. For the Greeks, uncontrollable fate brought unwelcomed pain. Without nous (mind), the Greek world is an irrational world. The Greek struggle is always to bring under rational control what is essentially irrational fate. But Job believes in a God of order, a God who is completely in control. The world is not accidental, fickle and vicious. Job’s suffering is not just emotional. It is spiritual. He has confronted the very edges of the God he knows and his mind is breaking along with his body.
For Job, this is the beginning of a long slide into despair. Up to this point, disaster produces heroic faith and superhuman resolve. But now the breakdown starts. For thirty-three chapters, Job falls. This is the real story of Job, the man who just wanted to know why. Push aside those first few lines about calamity. Ask yourself if you are just like Job from chapter three to thirty-three. “God, I just want to know why?” Have you surveyed your life and concluded that God needs to explain a few things?
Job’s story is not a Hollywood drama. It is the traumatic struggle to really believe in the character of a good and faithful God when the world doesn’t make any sense. It’s not easy and it’s not easily resolved. This shift is the beginning of grappling with one of the most difficult questions: If God is good, why are there undeserved evil acts in the world?
Job is no theologian. He is not contemplating the presence of “evil” from afar, playing mind games of debate while securely ensconced in an ivory tower. No, Job’s wrestling is real. His body is rotting. His children are dead. His wife has abandoned him. His fortune is gone. Job is the gutter man, trying to understand how a “blessing” God could be so cruel.
We need to pay careful attention to Job’s thoughts. He rejects the arguments of his companions. The evil that has befallen him is not the result of his sin. He has done the fearless moral inventory and found no marks against him. How convenient it would be if he could only have discovered some outright disobedience, some hidden fault. Job is a man who would waste no time repenting. He knows confession intimately. Yet the argument that his living horror results from his heart rebellion is unwarranted. Job, even by God’s own reckoning, is a righteous man. So we must carefully note that Job never assails God in his personal tragedy. He does not say, “God, You are cruel and unjust. You are playing games with my life, tormenting me for no reason.” Job rejects such attempts to put the blame on God. His thought moves in another direction. He does not ask for a change in circumstances. He asks only for an explanation.
Job and I part company. I suspected that I was not really like Job with the opening lines of the book. I might be a friend of the Most High, but I don’t think God would have mentioned me in the same breath with the words “blameless and upright.” I am, at best, a Jacob. I am the man who spent his life manipulating and negotiating and leveraging, until the day that another “man” wrestled me to the ground. And even then, I clung to him, demanding some favor. That’s why my soul limps. But Job, Job is not like me. Job truly was righteous and upright. And even now, at the point of slipping over the edge of despair, we still see Job’s righteousness. He will not blame God. He only asks for the reason behind his suffering.
Now I know that I am certainly not like Job. When personal tragedy falls on me, I may start with heroic resolve. I may declare belief. But when erosion begins to grip my soul, I am converted into Esau. I look for someone to blame. After I have confessed the open and the hidden sins that may have perpetrated this tragedy, like Jacob, I want God to fix things. And if they remain horrible, I can only conclude, like Naomi, that God Himself must be out to get me in spite of my confession. I begin to question the long-suffering mercy of the Most High. I wonder about His benevolence. Doubts about His faithfulness weave a web of bitterness in my soul. I am quite sure that the current evangelical God of light would never allow such terror to dominate my life after confession, but instead of Job’s posture of acceptance, I become a prosecutor, demanding that God give account for the way I am being treated.
This version of legalism is implied in the conversations of Job’s companions. Job’s friends are convinced that life operates on a moral version of Boyle’s Law. Boyle’s Law states that under conditions of constant temperature and quantity, there is an inverse relationship between the volume and pressure for an ideal gas. When you squeeze a balloon, you notice that the harder you push, the harder it seems to push back. When you lie back on an inflatable mattress, or pool float, it compresses up to a point and then seems to stop. This is because as you decrease the volume of a confined gas, the pressure that it exerts increases. When two variables are inversely proportional, like pressure and volume, the product of the two variables will always remain constant. This means that if you double the value of one variable, you divide the other by half.
Job’s friends argued that God’s desire to bless me is constant but the experience of blessing in this world is in inverse relationship to individual sinfulness. As my sinfulness decreases, God’s blessings increase. If my life is full of sorrow and tragedy, it is not because God has changed His mind about blessing. His desire to bless me remains the same. Therefore, the only reason that I am not being blessed is due to my sinfulness. God cannot bless me because my sin prevents it.
When Job denies that he is sinning but he nevertheless experiences pain and suffering, his friends can only conclude that he must be lying about his moral state. Under the spiritual Boyle’s Law world, it is simply inconceivable that God would allow a righteous man to suffer.
If we carefully examine our own thinking, we haven’t yet overthrown this false moral equation. We really do think that God withholds His blessings because of our sins. In fact, we might even emotionally believe that God punishes us due to our sins and rewards us due to our obedience. This is the imagined Law of Just Rewards. If I am good, God will bless me. If I am bad, God will hurt me, or, at the very least, withhold good things from me.
Erosion leads me to the desire for escape. Common wisdom suggests that there are basically two reactions to stress: fight or flight. Personally, I am a “flight” type. After heroic resolve has collapsed, I want to get away. I want a nice warm beach on a tropical island preferably inhabited by other people who want nothing more than to make me happy. When I finally realize that my fantasy flight is a sign of neurosis, that it is the unwillingness to face reality as it is, I return to God’s word. It is anchored in the only reality that matters. In fact, it is so well grounded that it even comments on my “flight” syndrome: “Hope deferred makes the heart sick” (Proverbs 13:12). Yes, Lord, it certainly does.
Topical Index: qalal, curse, Job 3:1
“If God is good, why are there undeserved evil acts in the world?”
Do not these writers provide some of the answers to this question?
“For the LORD your God is testing you, to know whether you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” [Deu_13:3]
“I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.” [Ecc_3:18]
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” [Rom 12:2]
“Consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you may not grow weary in your souls and lose heart. In struggling against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of bloodshed. Have you forgotten the warning addressed to you as sons? ‘My son, do not take lightly the discipline of Adonai or lose heart when you are corrected by Him, because Adonai disciplines the one He loves and punishes every son He accepts.’ It is for discipline that you endure. God is treating you as sons—for what son does a father not discipline? But if you are without discipline—something all have come to share—then you are illegitimate and not sons. [Heb 12:3-8]
“Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect work, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” [Jas 1:2-4]
In my understanding, discipline is not always because one has sinned but for testing, trial, and training that one will keep from sin. By it we see if we love Him with all our heart and soul. By it we see that we are but beasts. By it we learn to discern what is His will. By it we know that we are His sons and daughters. By it our faith produces endurance that we may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.
Ok, the comparison to Boyle’s Law is brilliant. I will remember that one. We expect God to be like His creation. Creation operates on Newton’s Third Law, which similarly states that every action triggers an equal and opposite reaction, thus retaining homeostasis. The problem with the sinful choices of people, however, is that ALL sin actually breaks this chain reaction; sin fractures the web. When people sin, death results. The curses are a SUBSTITUTE for that death – they defer death, but there is death, nonetheless. Yeshua died the death our sins generated for us. He literally became that curse for us.
We are so used to not actually dying when we sin that we believe the lie that something for nothing actually exists; that we can sin with impunity without that equal and opposite reaction. We believe that we can be ‘above’ the Law, too. Why, our own experience of eating from the Tree of Experience confirms it! What we do not see are the hidden actions of grace that give us another chance, at cost to heaven. Heaven absorbed our death for us, so we could have all the chances probability could muster.
Job’s friends did not understand the true consequences of sin, either. The curses are NOT payment for, nor punishment of, sin. When we see curses operating in people’s lives, we are not seeing the sum of their failures; we are seeing a reset for yet another chance. Job, too, got a reset for another chance. What chance does a righteous person need? Job was correctly living up to all the light he had, but none of us have all the light. Job did not understand some things about life, nor the God he served. Disaster will always show us some aspect of life and God that we did not know before; knowledge needful for us to stand straight in a crooked world;
Our lives are not lived just for us. The rest of creation understands this perfectly well, but we, because we live such fractured existences, have lost this understanding. Job did not realize WHY he was alive; he did not have a perfected grasp of why his life mattered to others, God, or even himself. He naturally had concluded that he must be important to God because of his good works. The demonstration of the vastness of God’s goodness cured him of that mistaken notion. He thought that he was demonstrating a good example to his friends of the consequences of ‘doing right’, but what none of them understood was that we are essential for each other at a much more foundational level than just example. Job sacrificed for his friends afterwards, for they had erred (sinned) and he was in the position to represent them. We are all intercessors for each other, much more than we realize.
This is not a competition, where the worse off others are, the better (by comparison) we are, which the Pharisee/Publican story shows us. On the contrary, the worse off others are, the worse off we are, for we are all in this together, and we need to understand, and sympathize with others AS IF they were ourselves, for, in a very real sense, they are! We are connected in a great web that has been constructed to all harmonize together to give glory to God. Disaster connects me to the disaster of all, and so returns me to that essential sympathy with all that gives me the impetus I need to intercede for all around me. Job’s disaster took him back down off his high horse and reconnected him with his suffering and deluded fellow man. He realized he was relationally on the same plane with the rest of humanity in comparison with the vastness of God, and he also could identify with the suffering of others, and, likewise, I bet his neighbors could identify with him, too!
Charles Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher of the 19th century in London stated this beautifully: “When we cannot trace God’s hand, we are simply to trust his heart.” I think this quote fits in the discussion somewhere.
Laurita, your words are like razor blades. They get to the point really fast and draw blood. They are also like the Nile, providing nourishment along the banks of broken hearts. (Skip’s too!).
“The worse off others are, the worse off we are.” “Job’s disaster … reconnected him with his suffering and deluded fellow man.” The trouble I am having is learning how to respond to others who engage in threats of self-harm, rage, and aggression. In a marriage relationship, this can be rather tricky.
Dear Paul, the Holy Spirit does all the above, for sure. I know I don’t!
I lived that marriage for decades (I am a slow learner). Bitterness defiles everybody and everything around.
What I did not realize, until I went to Alanon, anyway, was how I was contributing to the problem. Codependence is what ALL sin requires of all around it. We hate it, but that is not enough. We have to learn how not to codepend the sin of others. Alanon called this “detachment with love”. Now, I had tried detachment WITHOUT love, and I had tried love without detachment, but it took Alanon to convince me that the dependent was stuck; they were raging because they knew this. It really was up to me to make the first move. I held the lynchpin. Until I detached WITH LOVE, they could not. This was an eye opener for me.
When I changed, the situation had new options. They were scary options, because I had moved OUT of the ‘fix it’ seat, and had made a decision that I had to get out of the way and let my dependent (yes, people can learn to get drunk on rage alone – they are called “rageaholics”) hit their own bottom. That was scary for both of us. I quit trying to change him, or change the situation, and focused on changing me, along with that vital detachment with love. I had to be taught what that looked like, and it took lots of practice. I tried a whole bunch of different ways, and failed, but eventually I got it figured out. The day I did, my spouse stopped in the middle of a major rage, looked at me with bleary eyes, and declared “you are not fun any more!”. We started to work, then, on the real problems.
There’s one other “freeze”. It’s just as painful. Fear can immobilize us – especially when it happened young and traumatically. Trusting God takes a whole new meaning.
Dana, I repented for performing for love. That left a HUGE hole in my motivation! What do you do if you can’t use ways to self-stress to accomplish anything? I had lost all my self confidence (by experience) and had learned why I could NOT respond to fear of others at the same time. Well, those were the only gas tanks at my station!
Most days, I find myself at some point just standing in the middle of the floor, now, with NO confidence to move a muscle, and no self flagellation to provide it, for I repented for doing all that, too. That immobilizing fear? It taught me; it trained me to distrust self and others, too. Well, I am seeing interesting stuff. I am seeing that it was the wrong sort of trust that hung me out to dry on others’ clotheslines – and mine, too. Freezing forces you find a new set of muscles. This is not a bad thing! I am seeing that I was expending trust in myself and others in all the places that I was supposed to be trusting God, and was likewise attributing responsibility to Him that really belonged to myself and others, too. I am slowly learning to look HARD at this stuff, and try new ways. Its totally guess-and-check these days, y’all, but I can’t say that it is boring!
P.S. Instead of using self hatred or blaming others to get through your day, try asking for the faith of Christ to be formed in you, instead. Its much better than any trust you can manufacture, anyway. When I find myself lost and drifting, I am learning that it may be time to drop everything and just praise God for a while. Doing it for Him is only possible when we have quit doing it for us, anyway.
That frozen stuff? For me, it cured a whole lot of self stuff that I am finding I do not miss. Redemption not optional at that point. Disaster ground me to a total standstill; a place I could have never gotten to myself. Disaster threw all my self stuff out the window for me; something I could have never done. It froze me for me! And that’s a good thing – given to God, anyway. I just need to keep remembering to continue to give that frozen place to Him to bless and transform, and He does! Frozen? That just means I can only move in Him. Halleluah!
Wow. Not surprised, but once again The Lord has used your writing to help me find more clarity with what I am struggling. The last paragraph is the kicker. Today, Holy Spirit was telling me that I have lived in a “fantasy land” of unmet expectations most of my life. I grew up in a military family. With each move, I found “comfort” in my own little world. Each move, I allowed pushed hope away a little more. Now as an adult wife and mom, that habit/action is causing a lot of struggle inside of me and outside in my family. Thanks again Dr. Moen, for sharing your studies and thoughts.
An element morcel: more food than fibre.
2 thoughts:
– when You changed from mind to spirit he attained an epitome.
– what Yob did not understand is that he was “born” 15 billion years ago at the ” big bang” (creation event)
When he found this out he could advise others…
If that be true it would imply reincarnation until the end of reproduction era..