Righteous Job
Job 42: 1-6, 10-17
Listening to the story of Job in the beginning is like listening to a fairy tale story - Once upon a time, “in the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job” (1:1). He was quite a character. According to the Bible, Job “was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil.”
Most of the people I have talked to understand Job as a righteous and patient man who endured extreme suffering without one complaint. Even though he loses everything, at the end he gains even more than what he once had because of his faithfulness in God.
Doesn’t this story sound like a fairy tale with a happy ending where everybody lives happily ever after? He is so happy that all the suffering from what is lost does not matter anymore. It’s all happy and dandy.
Well, the image of Job is quite different to me. As Newsom sees, I see Job as “the rebel, who debunks the piety of his friends and boldly accuses God of injustice” (TNIB 319).
The story of Job causes me to question everything: “the motivation for piety, the meaning of suffering, the nature of God, the place of justice in the world, and the relationship of order and chaos in God’s design of creation.”
Job said, “I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust ashes” (v. 9). Hearing and seeing are two of five senses we have.
Those two senses control a lot of our emotions and our decisions. How many of you have made decisions based on what you saw and heard? I do that all the time.
If you read the book of Job thoroughly and pay close attention to what he says, he certainly does not keep his mouth shut the whole time he was experiencing suffering.
Out of so much pain, Job “cursed the day of his birth” saying, “May the day of my birth perish, and the night it was said, ‘A boy is born!’ (3:3). Job “accuses God of injustice” and demands an explanation from God
because in his mind, he has not done anything wrong to deserve such suffering, no matter what his friends say about him. Job is telling God, “Do not condemn me, but tell me what charges you have against me.
Does it please You to oppress me, to spurn the work of Your hands, while You smile on the schemes of the wicked?” (vv. 2-3) Need I remind you that today’s title is the Righteous Job? Does he sound righteous to you?
Can you imagine telling God, “God, does it make You happy to see me suffer? Does watching bad people win put a smile on Your face?” Meanwhile, the friends who came to comfort Job were busy protecting God against Job like God needs their protection saying, “Are all these words to go unanswered?
Is this talker to be vindicated? Will your idle talk reduce people to silence? Will no one rebuke you when you mock? You say to God, ‘My beliefs are flawless and I am pure in Your sight.’
Oh, how I wish that God would speak, that God would open God’s lips against you” (11:2-5). Did I mention that this was Job’s friend who came to comfort him? I think the enemy would have more mercy than this.
Why do you think Job's friends were so quick to judge him and criticize him rather than hearing him out? Do you really think Job’s friends truly believe in what they are saying about Job? Are they truly blind to the situation or too afraid to face the reality that they absolutely cannot explain nor understand?
As Christians, how do we explain to people when bad things happen to good people, when the only thing we can see is injustice in the situation? (TNIB 630) We struggle with the question “Why?” Somehow, we have to find out why it is happening so that we can make sense out of all this.
Only then may we sleep in peace. We so long for an answer that sometimes we create an answer no matter how ridiculous it may sound. I have heard the funeral officiator explaining to the people that God has taken a precious child because God needed an angel.
So this heartless God took an innocent child away from the family and friends so that God can gain yet another angel? However, it sounded pretty good saying that your child did not die in vain since your child became an angel, right?
It upsets me every time I hear that. Believe it or not, “many people are reluctant to confront the reality that human beings cannot secure their lives and their families against harm” (TNIB 630).
We don’t want bad things to happen to good people or to ourselves whether we are good or bad, but the fact is that bad things can and do “happen to anyone at any time."
Job’s friends could not accept the fact that God allows good people to suffer and let them walk through the valley of death which they do not deserve. Such understanding went against everything they have believed about God all their lives.
So what did they do? They took the easy way out. In order to make sense out of all these, they “allowed disaster to be seen as moral discipline and punishment” from God.
“When, in their attempts to justify death, pain, or suffering, theodicies speak of such things as only ‘appearing’ to be evils but ‘really’ being for some greater good, then they are forms of denial” (TNIB 630).
Isn’t that a scary statement? You mean, God actually allows the unjustified evils to take place in this world? As Newsom said, “sometimes a dramatic confrontation is required to overcome the resistance people often experience in acknowledging the reality of something they have tried hard not to see” (631).
Why do you think Job was considered righteous? Is it because he was so patient with his suffering and waited for God in silence? That cannot be true because he did not do that. Is it because he accepted all the claims his friends accused him of? He did not do that either.
What Job did was the exact opposite. Instead of keeping silent, he cried out to God aloud demanding God to explain to him why all the bad things were happening to him.
Instead of accepting his friends’ explanation and accusations as a fact, he declared “the disasters morally wrong and to have someone to blame” (630). Instead of finding someone around him to blame, he went directly to God and blamed God for what happened.
Job refused to settle with what his friends were telling him, but he chose to wrestle with God until God gave him a peaceful mind. There is another person in the Bible who is famous for wrestling with God.
This famous wrestler is none but Jacob. He was coming back home to face the biggest challenge in his life, his own brother, Esau. What did he do as he was crossing over the Jabbok?
“He finds himself confronting a mysterious opponent he had not expected (Genesis 32:22-32)” (Balentine 702). He wrestled with this unknown person all night “trying to secure a victory and if not, at least a blessing” (702).
Clearly, Jacob was no match for this unknown figure, but he wasn’t going to “give up the fight.” Unexpectedly, the blessing that “he had tried to secure by force, he receives as a gift.” This experience changes him completely.
He is no longer Jacob, but “Israel,” “the one who fights with God.” Wrestling or fighting with God is no joke. It left Israel wounded with a broken bone where he left that place limping.
Sometimes it takes more than physical but also “spiritual woundedness.” However, “if it is a defeat, it is a ‘magnificent defeat.” Frederick Buechner says, “in such encounters with God, brokenness becomes the source and sustenance of blessing.”
In United Methodist, all the ordained ministers come with the promise that we will go wherever God sends us through the Bishop. When we become Christians, we come before God with the promise that we willingly will endure in the process of following God.
We come before God promising to follow God even though we don’t have all the answers of what God is doing in our lives and to follow God no matter what happens in life.
Remember what Jesus said about being a disciple? “If any want to become My follower, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for My sake will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25).
Sometimes, personally I don’t like this demand too much. I rather “prefer a less volatile relationship with God, one that does not require us to follow Job into the whirlwind or Jacob into the Jabbok or Jesus into Gethsemane” and end up on the cross (Balentine 703).
God knows exactly what I desire, however, it doesn’t mean that my life will be pain free. As Christians, it is so important for us to accept the fact that bad things happen to good people as well as bad people and not all the bad things are the punishment from God.
More than anything, we Christians need to know that God does not require us to have answers to all the “Why” questions. Living “in our modern culture, there is a tendency to assume that every issue has a single answer; every problem has a single solution” (TNIB 637).
We need to walk away from the misunderstanding that “if one works hard at it, then the answer will appear, the problem will be resolved, and one can move on."
“In religious terms, this assumption expresses itself in the expectation that study, prayer, and instruction will result in knowing the answers to the questions of life” which is far away from the truth.
Truth is that “there is no single answer that can put an end to that question once and for all.” For example, just because God did not heal you or your loved ones from physical illness, it does not mean God did not hear your prayers nor ignore your pain.
God has a million other ways to heal us besides physical healing. “Our craving for an answer is an attempt to evade what we know to be true. Especially in times of religious crisis, richness of meaning and even a sense of peace are not to be found in a pre-packaged answer
but emerge from the experience of wrestling with God.” Christians be careful not to try to create an answer when you are clueless of why God allowed such things to take place.
Please be careful not to speak for God when you have no idea what God is thinking. However, help others to accept the reality and go before God with cries and honesty of how you really feel about the whole situation and especially about God.
Even though Job never received answers to his “Why" questions but his personal experience of God helped him to be “released from his obsession with justice and” was able to “begin the process of living beyond tragedy” (TNIB 631).
If going through that process is too hard for you to handle alone, use the community, the faith community God has surrounded you with. Take advantage of what God placed in your life through this Church.
Use the prayer times made available to you every Tuesday and Friday nights here at Church to boldly wrestle with God. Ask your Bible Study small group folks to pray for you. Ask the minister and all the leaders and members to help you in your journey.
Remember, the pain is real. Just because Job received a happy ending after the struggle, the severe pain that he experienced did not disappear that easy.
If I had to go through such suffering as Job or Jesus, I would require years of therapy and counseling even after the happy ending. Don’t try to deny your confusion, fear, and pain. Don’t try to come up with decent answers to a chaotic situation.
Don’t even try to protect God, acting as though nothing is happening. I pray to God that God will bless you with confidence and complete trust in God that is strong enough to be honest before God even though it means to confront God.
May you walk away from the shallow answers but find true peace and healing in God as you continue to wrestle with God. Through your faithfulness and willingness in God, may the LORD find you righteous throughout your life. Amen.
