Expendables

Then the Lord said to Satan, “Behold, all that he has is in your ^[g]power; only do not reach out and put your hand on him.” So Satan departed from the presence of the Lord.  Job 1:12  NASB

In your power – “The Lord gives; the Lord takes away.”  Is that your living motto?  Do you really believe (and act upon) the idea that whatever happens to your status, possessions, relationships—everything external—is really a function of God’s hand?  The Greco-Roman world certainly doesn’t believe this.  With the rise of individualism, men came to believe that they were the masters of their own fate.  That idea is now so embedded in our culture that any attempt to dislodge meritocracy is greeted with rejection and contempt.  In fact, recent political populism is a good indicator of just how thoroughly Greek we really are.  MAGA is built on the idea that we control our outcomes.  God might be in Heaven looking down on our struggles, but He’s not involved in the P&L or the Balance Sheet.

Not so in the ancient world.  In Job’s world, everything depended on the favor of the gods.  Want your crops to yield abundance?  Make the appropriate sacrifice.  Want healthy, vibrant children?  Offer the right kind of prayer (and sacrifice).  Want protection from your enemies?  Plead for God’s mercy (and sacrifice).  The list goes on.  Life depends entirely on the divine will.  In fact, this idea is so much a part of the ancient Hebraic world that it still exists today—on Rosh Hashanah when observant Jews ask for God’s favor since God determines who will succeed and who will fail.  You remember that fateful statement of Rabbi Reimer: “ . . . Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur mark a trial before God, whose verdict determines our fate in the coming year.”[1]  Since the rabbis were influenced by Hellenistic thinking, the implications of God’s “all-knowing” attribute meant that there couldn’t be any really “new” events or actions in human history.  If God already knew how things were going to go, and He couldn’t be mistaken in His knowledge, then it just wasn’t possible that future events (from our perspective) might be different than what God knew, and therefore, our destinies are fixed from God’s point of view.  Even ancient scriptures seem to suggest this theological conclusion.  For example, Job’s statement that even the wicked were designed for a purpose; the purpose, of course, known to God before they became wicked.  If you recall, John Calvin logically concluded, based on this idea, that God already selected those who would be saved and those who would be condemned to Hell before the foundations of the world.  All of this might seem logically inevitable, but it doesn’t sit very well with our experience of choice.  When Jack Riemer echoes the rabbinic teaching that our annual destiny is determined by God’s decision at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, he uses the appropriate word, a word that should cause each of us moral shock.  That word is “fate,” most assuredly a Greek idea.

We confront this Greek idea at the beginning of Job’s trials.  God gives haśśāṭān the “power” to mess with everything Job has.  In other words, nothing Job had done to produce his wealth and status is really his.  It’s really the result of God’sbenevolence, and therefore God can justly revoke it all by letting haśśāṭān take it away.

God uses a common Hebrew idiom to express this: yādĕ, from the word for “hand.”  “The primary meaning of this noun is ‘the terminal part of the arm used to perform functions of man’s will. . . The phrase ‘into (or “under”) someone’s hand’ conveys authority involving responsibility, care, and dominion over someone or something.”^[2]  We have the same kind of idiom, so there’s no confusion about what God is granting.  The only question about His permission is why it is limitedto external possessions and relationships.  Since God ultimately allows suffering of the body, and He knows that He will eventually allow this, why start out with restrictions?  If we consider Job a lengthy discussion of the justification of unmerited evil, perhaps we might recognize the progression that confronts every one of us.  Since meritocracy is built into our cultural DNA, if God wants to demonstrate the progressive levels of challenges to faith, it seems reasonable to begin with those things we think are the result of our efforts.  They are the first to go because they are the first ego-related outputs.  We are much more likely to consider our health under divine providence than our bank accounts.  But not so, according to the ancient world.  It’s all the result of divine providence.  Therefore, God does whatever He chooses to do with the loan He has granted us.  And since the first thing to revise is the view that we somehow have earned these things, God grants haśśāṭān the power to take them all away, believing, of course, that Job’s faith has a much deeper foundation than material goods.  That leaves us with the only real question here: What about us?

What happens to your faith when the finances are gone?  When a loved-one dies unexpectedly?  When disaster strikes without warning?  “The Lord gives and the Lord takes away,” you say, but is that what you really feel?  Or is there a twinge of “unfair” floating behind the confession?  If Job is an instructive story about the quality of true faith, it must deal with our built-in propensity to think that what we have is ours.

Topical Index: yādĕ, in your hand, possessions, meritocracy, Job 1:12

[1] Jack Riemer and Elie Spitz, Duets on Psalms: Drawing New Meaning from Ancient Words (Ben Yehuda Press, 2023), p. 98.

^[2] Alexander, R. H. (1999). 844 יָד. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 362). Moody Press.