Eliphaz and Isaiah

For He inflicts pain, and ^[f^]gives relief; He wounds, but His hands also heal.  Job 5:18 NASB

Wounds – Is Eliphaz anticipating Isaiah?  Why would I ask that?  Well, you remember this verse from the prophet: “The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating disaster; I am the Lord who does all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).  Of course, the NASB translation (and others) choose to treat the Hebrew word ra as “disaster” rather than “evil.”  There might be grounds for this choice (see the argument here ), but even if we distinguish “moral evil” from temporal punishment, we haven’t really solved the problem.  In fact, what we have done is suggest that our human perception of bad events is, as Eliphaz argues, ahuman mistake.  We might think bad things are happening to good people, but that’s because we don’t have God’s point of view.  The truth is that God is doing exactly what is necessary to uphold the moral order and therefore what we perceive as bad is really necessary and good.

My response: once again we have to deny the veracity of human experience in order to uphold the theoretical theological doctrine.[1]  And, of course, while someone might argue that in our case we could be mistaken about the true meaning of catastrophes because we are not perfectly righteous and probably deserve punishment even if we aren’t sure why, Job’s case is entirely different.  He is righteous!  The story specifically points this out.  So, even if Eliphaz (and subsequent theologians) are right about all the rest of us, he isn’t right about Job.  In fact, we might extend the Job problem a bit further and ask, “Why does the truly righteous man, the Messiah, have to suffer?  Why does God allow him to be crucified, to die in such a horrible way?”  If Job is only a story, the life of the Messiah isn’t just fable.  The problem doesn’t go away.  It just gets worse.  Catholic theologians asserted non posse peccare (Jesus was literally unable to sin) at the expense of divine immanence.  That’s why they had to claim that God had to separate from the Messiah on the cross (“Why have you forsaken me?).  God can’t have anything to do with sin.  Fine for Aquinas, not so fine for Job.  Are we ready to accept the loss of all his property and the death of all his children as misunderstood pain?

Here’s the reality—for us and for Job.  In the ancient world the idea of resolution in an afterlife wasn’t an explicit doctrine of the Hebrews.  There was something after death, but no one really knew what.  It took the influence of Hellenism to resurrect this idea and make it an integral part of spiritual hope.  But, for the most part, it is still speculative—still a function of hope, not fact.  We are in the same boat.  Perhaps we have more reason to support this hope, but it’s still hopebecause it’s an “after death” claim, and we aren’t in that position yet.  Job doesn’t hold out this kind of hope because he’s an “ancient” man, but we’re really not much better off, are we?  We hope—and wait.  So, we’re still faced with the Isaiah dilemma—and that story of a perfectly righteous man who gets what he doesn’t deserve.

Topical Index: hope, heaven, evil, Isaiah 45:7, Job 5:18

[1] I suggest this is a theoretical theological doctrine because no one has come back from the dead to explain how the experience of evil in this world is actually good in God’s world.  So, the explanation that it will all be justified in the afterlife is, at this point, a theory (perhaps a necessaryone), not a reality.