Sackcloth and Ashes: Travels with Job (9)
“I know that You can do all things, and that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.” Job 42:2 NASB
Purpose – Do you really believe that God can do all things? Perhaps we are only truly capable of such a statement when we have suffered the inexplicable at the hands of YHVH. It’s easy to assert that God can do everything when life is good, when the blessings flow. But when life turns bitter, sour to taste and touch, do we still maintain with firmest conviction that God can do everything, including allow this catastrophe into our lives for His purposes? Do we believe when we are in the refiner’s fire?
Job’s use of the Hebrew verb zamam begins the process of rebuilding faith. This verb and its derivative, mĕzimmâ, is unexpected. Along with the root, it is almost always used to describe YHVH’s judgment against the wicked. When it is used of men, it is about evil plans and deeds. Perhaps we’ve misunderstood Job’s return to faith. Perhaps Job now recognizes his error and he uses this word to remind himself that God is justified in punishing. Too often we think Job’s statement means Job will now expect God to bring about good things once more, that Job has relented. But what if Job is acknowledging that he deserved some sort of chastisement and the blow should not be softened. Perhaps rebuilding begins when a man sees into the depths of his resistance. Even a righteous man has dark places in the soul.
If Job’s statement is really an acknowledgement that God is unraveling those dark places, then we gather another insight into spiritual chastisement. First, we notice the statement of Tournier. “We do not realize how terrible psychological determinism can be. It wears down the will as concrete wears down the fingernails.”[1] Tournier amplifies. “ . . . as long as these psychical mechanisms are unconscious they are all-powerful, but when they become conscious they are less so. The way is open then for faith and trust to win their victories.”[2] In other words, like all men, Job must be peeled back one layer at a time before he can come to the depths of his own self-reliance. He must be pushed to see his automatic spiritual justifications, his unexamined religious assumptions and his potentially divergent paths. Job’s story is not simply about the role of good and evil in the world, or the culpability of God in the process. Perhaps we need to read it as an intensive therapeutic session in which Job is forced to re-examine all he has assumed to be true in order to find that these beliefs created a kind of determinism about his life and his expectations. God upsets the apple cart in ways that we can hardly grasp. But the end is not chaos. It is a chance to rebuild the relationship with the Lord on the only grounds that are immune to futile assumptions, i.e., the personal character of YHVH. Without this, life is just substituting platitudes.
Topical Index: rebuild, zamam, purpose, thwart, Job 42:2
[1] Paul Tournier, The Meaning of Persons, p. 225.
[2]Ibid., p. 227.
Skip, you have really been plumbing some depths here! Psychological assumptions.. Hmm. This is paradigm stuff. Job endured the deconstruction of his entire world, but in that chaos, he saw the insufficiency of where he was traveling on the best guesses of himself as well as the world around him. We all automatically go along with what seems to work. That is how we are made. It is only when we get to see how these things and assumptions are NOT working (experience of disfunction) that we have the opportunity to change. We are not going to be judged on what we did not have the opportunity to change. Job was not judged unrighteous for his untested assumptions, either (which is why he could be called “righteous” up until that point), but he WAS given the opportunity to test them!
I was reading Lamentations this morning, and began to notice some startling parallels with Job. Layer Lamentations over Job, and pretend he wrote it, just for fun (yes, us broken people know how to get our jollies in tragic places). I remembered what Skip had said about prophets; that they are required to live the communal experience, as well as YHVH’s side of it, too. A prophet is in a unique position to see both sides. Perhaps that experience is what qualifies them to even be a prophet? Anyway, it is quite clear that Job is a prophetic book. He is passing on clear and revealing insights as well as knowledge of future realities. I have begun to wonder if he was given his experience, not only to show him his own personal untested areas, and give him the ability to test them (guess and check!) but also was given a larger purpose for his suffering: viz as a designated prophet. God took a good man and turned him into a universal man.
All suffering links us with Christ, as His suffering linked Him with us, Abraham certainly had a better grasp of the role of the future Suffering Servant after Mount Moriah. Surely Job, too, was afterward able to appreciate more deeply the substitutional sacrifices he had probably been doing up until that time through rote. We are all so disconnected in all dimensions that, if we were to suffer the DIRECT consequences of that disconnect, we would all be suffering tormented deaths every day! There would be no good days at all. Lamentations says that “it is by the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed”. The suffering of that innocent victim represented our ability to have any good days, for sure.
Suffering, after its relentless refocusing us to our own misery, reconnects us to the misery of all around us. Suffering gets us beyond all ability of altered states of reality to insulate us from that suffering; it confronts us with what we want most to avoid. We cannot have compassion for the suffering of others if we are not connected to our own. The ones on this earth, like I think Beth has pointed out, that have suffered, also have a genuine way to love others by compassion, as well as understand better the compassion (like passion) that Christ shared with us. I can tell that the world is a better place because you have suffered, Beth (and others). I am sorry, and, I thank you, too. Halleluah!
“In the days of His life on earth, Yeshua offered up both prayers and pleas, with loud crying and tears, to the One able to save Him from death; and He was heard because of His reverence. Though He was a Son, He learned obedience from what He suffered. And once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him—called by God Kohen Gadol ‘according to the order of Melchizedek.’” [Heb 5:7-10]
This is our way for the righteous enduring of suffering. Reverence. Prayers and pleas with loud crying and tears, to the One able to save from death. Learning obedience from what is being suffered. Then, in the process of being made perfect, becoming vessels of Messiah, the Source to others who will obey Him, royal priests, also according to the order of Melchizedek.
He CAN accomplish this in us, but only through HIS wisdom and ways, and that through much suffering, if it must be. And only He knows how much and in what ways that is so. Blessed be His name.
“‘For this very purpose I raised you up—to demonstrate My power in you, so My name might be proclaimed in all the earth.’ So then He has mercy on whom He wills, and He hardens whom He wills. You will say to me then, ‘Why does He still find fault? For who has resisted His will?” But who in the world are you, O man, who talks back to God? Will what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?; Does the potter have no right over the clay, to make from the same lump one vessel for honor and another for common use?'” [Rom 9:17-21]