Submission or Compliance

Therefore, I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes.  Job 42:6  NASB 1995

Retract – Submit—to give in, to back down, to capitulate, to agree, to consent, to accede.

Comply—to obey, to adhere to, to conform, to acquiesce, to consent, to accept.  Which is it?  Or is it both?

The Hebrew term, māʾas, is a bit strange here.  It usually means “despise, refuse, reject”  as we see in Psalm 36:4.  But here it seems to be reflexive, that is, applied by the speaker to himself.  He rejects himself.  He refuses what he previously claimed.  He despises his prior stance.  It’s the end of the Job story (almost) and Job has come to the end of his argument. Overwhelmed by God’s majesty and sovereignty, he realizes that he really has no ground to stand on.  But before we jump on the bandwagon of his “friends” and support their continual assertions that Man has no right to demand anything of God, we need to recognize that Job submits, but not because he admits his guilt.  He submits because he honors God’s essential superiority.  It’s not that he couldn’t ask for an answer.  It’s that he shouldn’t expect one.  He’ll have to trust in God’s character even if he is reprimanded for demanding God’s reply.  God does reply, but the reply is one that underscores Job’s insufficiency.  māʾas is the Hebrew equivalent of mea culpa.

God’s reprimand doesn’t end with Job.  What we learn from Job’s response tells us something important about the approach of Job’s friends.  Irvin Yalom summarizes the lesson:

“Because we cannot live frozen in fear, we generate methods to soften death’s terror.  We project ourselves into the future through our children; we grow rich, famous, ever larger; we develop compulsive protective rituals; or we embrace an impregnable belief in an ultimate rescuer.”[1]

“There is a crucial difference between how things are and that things are.  When absorbed in the everyday mode, you turn toward such evanescent distractions as physical appearance, style, possessions, or prestige.  In the ontological mode, by contrast, you are not only more aware of existence and mortality and life’s other immutable characteristics but also more anxious and more primed to make significant changes.  You are prompted to grapple with your fundamental human responsibility to construct an authentic life of engagement, connectivity, meaning, and self-fulfillment.”[2]

“ . . . it usually takes an urgent or irreversible experience to awaken a person and jerk him or her out of the everyday mode into the ontological one.”[3]

Job has had one of those “urgent” experiences.  His struggle has been ontological.  His questions are about the essential nature of things.  What he encountered in his friends’ rejoinders amounts to “an impregnable belief” which God is about to undo.  Next.

Topical Index: retract, māʾas, refuse, submit, mea culpa, Job 42:6

[1] Irvin D. Yalom, Staring at the Sun: Being at peace with your own mortality, p. 5.

[2] Ibid., pp. 33-34.

[3] Ibid., p. 36.