Insufficient Evidence

Remember now, who ever perished being innocent?  Or where were the upright destroyed?  According to what I have seen, those who ^[d]plow wrongdoing and those who sow trouble harvest it.  Job 4:7-8 NASB

Harvest it – Eliphaz is a man who believes in perfect justice.  In his world, the righteous prosper and the wicked perish.  No one innocent is ever mistakenly harmed.  No one guilty ever gets away scot-free.  Wouldn’t that be nice?  Of course, under this ethical theory, we often draw the reverse conclusion.  If a man is successful, he must be righteous.  After all, if success is really governed by a moral, sovereign God, no man who is truly wicked would be allowed to be successful.  And the corollary: if a man experiences suffering and trauma, then that means he is somehow guilty and deserves God’s punishment.  We see this in the famous inquiry about the man born blind (John 9) and there are many, many examples of this kind of thinking in our religious worlds today.  Ultimately, this idea shows up in the theology of generational sin, for if I can’t find anything in my own life that smacks of disobedience but I continue to experience pain and problems, then it must follow (via Exodus 34:7) that I am being punished for some unconfessed and unremitted sin of my predecessors.  The sudden onset of medically unexplained cancer is often treated this way in religious circles.  Eliphaz isn’t so ancient after all, is he?

“What goes around comes around,” we say.  That’s exactly the idea of Eliphaz’ use of qāṣar, “to reap, harvest.”  We need to view this root separately from another spelled exactly the same way which means “be short, impatient, vexed” or “grieved.”  Context would have to tell you which one is being used here, and there’s little doubt once we recognize Eliphaz’ ethical argument.  Nothing special is undercover.  “You reap what you sow” is so familiar it hardly deserves comment.  But is it true?  Well, . . . human experience suggests not.  How many times have you experienced the unpunished wicked going luxuriously to the grave?  How many times has someone you know or heard about gotten away with it?  And how many times have you seen the innocent, let alone the righteous, punished for something they didn’t do?  Yes, the ethical theory might be what we wish for in an ideal world, but reality bites back, and for nearly all human history, this ideal ethical theory is just a pipe-dream.  Eliphaz’ premise just doesn’t match the evidence.  In fact, it is so far from the evidence that the Greeks were forced to posit an afterlife to correct the obvious conundrum of the sensory world.  If the prophets absolutely rejected the idea that God punishes the innocent for the sins of the past generation, then there can only be one other way to reconcile all this disconfirming evidence—everything will get straightened out in the next life.

You might think that this problem is only some ancient philosophical dilemma, but you would be wrong.  Humanity in every generation has been concerned with the fate of the righteous and the wicked.  Heaven and Hell, in some form of another, have been with us for a very long time, long before the Church put them on the cosmic map.  In civilizations prior to “afterlife” thinking, we tend to find cosmic circularity, that is, we all just keep going around and around through reincarnation or something like it until at last good triumphs.  We are extinguished in the process so that the ethical dilemma just does matter anymore.  There’s no one left to raise the question.  The monotheists didn’t take this route.  They followed Eliphaz—and were forced into some awkward positions until She’ol became Hell.  But for Job, this argument, although seemingly perfectly rational, is fictitious.  Deceptively so.  It seems so much in line with the foundational view of God’s sovereignty—a God who, by the way, is perfectly just, but human experience does not match that foundation.  So, we’ll either have to deny our experience, explain it away, or find a different picture of God.  Job leaves us with these choices.  Which one do you want?

Topical Index: harvest, qāṣar, ethics, afterlife, generational sin, Job 4:7-8