Great Expectations

“But reach out with Your hand now and touch all that he has; he will certainly curse You to Your face.”   Job 1:11  NASB

Certainly – The story of Job is the story of expectations.  God expects Job to survive the test.  haśśāṭān expects him to fail.  Job, caught in the middle, expects God to treat him justly.  At least that’s what we expect.  But the story turns out to dash everyone’s expectations, and perhaps that’s the real lesson here.  Expectations and reality are not the same.  To be seduced by expectations means to have a view of the future that isn’t based on the the twists and turns of reality, and in the end, facing and living with the reality of human existence is all that we can really expect.  Perhaps this is why the story of Job is so unsettling.  We want a reality with reasonable conclusions.  In other words, we want—expect—answers to our most fundamental questions.  Like questions about justice.  And the story of Job doesn’t provide them.  It leaves us hanging.  We identify with Job’s complaint but we bristle at God’s reply.  Our expectations are dashed on the rock of divine providence.  We’re left without an answer.  Oh, well, not exactly.  We get an answer—“Who are you to ask Me?”—but it’s not the answer we expected—nor the one we want to hear.  We might say that the story of Job is a lesson in managing our expectations.  That doesn’t make it any easier to swallow, but it does put an end to false expectations.  Now we have to learn to live with it.

We should have guessed that this would be the outcome when we encountered the Hebrew ʾim- lōʾ, translated here as “certainly.”  It’s made up of two words; the first covering a wide range of meanings generally connected with “if.”  Since it is combined with the negative particle, lōʾ, Scott’s comment in TWOT is important: “The peculiar result of this idiom is that in such contexts ʾim has negative force; ʾim lōʾ is positive. This Hebrew idiom, coming through the LXX, is rightly interpreted in Heb 3:11, 18 (KJV), but missed in 4:3, 5 (KJV).”^[1]  In other words, the idioms reverse our expectations.  Instead of the negative “if not,” we get the positive “certainly.”  Things are not what they seem, even in the vocabulary.  It’s interesting that the author let’s haśśāṭān use this idiom.  Does he foreshadow the reversal of expectations in the mouth of the accuser?  Certainly, a clever linguistic device.

Now the disturbing part of this proposal.  According to the text, haśśāṭān has no power or authority to bring disaster upon Job unless God grants it!  And God does.  We must ask “Why?”  The stage is set for the unexplainable will of God, hidden in the divine mystery.  It is our perennial question.  Whenever circumstances assault us with what we consider unmerited suffering, the question pushes itself upon us.  We expect some kind of reasonable divine response, but instead we are confronted, perhaps slapped, with the enigma of divinity.  And at this point, precisely because of this point, we are asked for trust; a trust that exceeds our rationality.  Perhaps this is the real mark of faith—to believe anyway.  The story of Job seems to tell us that God trusts us to believe anyway.  And in the end, believing anyway might be all that matters.

Topical Index: certainly, ʾim- lōʾ, trust, faith, believe, haśśāṭān, Job 1:11

^[1] Scott, J. B. (1999). 111 אִם. In R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 49). Moody Press.