Job 10

¹ “I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. ² I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me. ³ Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the designs of the wicked? ⁴ Have you eyes of flesh? Do you see as man sees? ⁵ Are your days as the days of man, or your years as a man’s years, ⁶ that you seek out my iniquity and search for my sin, ⁷ although you know that I am not guilty, and there is none to deliver out of your hand? ⁸ Your hands fashioned and made me, and now you have destroyed me altogether. ⁹ Remember that you have made me like clay; and will you return me to the dust? ¹⁰ Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? ¹¹ You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews. ¹² You have granted me life and steadfast love, and your care has preserved my spirit. ¹³ Yet these things you hid in your heart; I know that this was your purpose. ¹⁴ If I sin, you watch me and do not acquit me of my iniquity. ¹⁵ If I am guilty, woe to me! If I am in the right, I cannot lift up my head, for I am filled with disgrace and look on my affliction. ¹⁶ And were my head lifted up, you would hunt me like a lion and again work wonders against me. ¹⁷ You renew your witnesses against me and increase your vexation toward me; you bring fresh troops against me. ¹⁸ “Why did you bring me out from the womb? Would that I had died before any eye had seen me ¹⁹ and were as though I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave. ²⁰ Are not my days few? Then cease, and leave me alone, that I may find a little cheer ²¹ before I go—and I shall not return—to the land of darkness and deep shadow, ²² the land of gloom like thick darkness, like deep shadow without any order, where light is as thick darkness.”

Job 11

¹ Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: ² “Should a multitude of words go unanswered, and a man full of talk be judged right? ³ Should your babble silence men, and when you mock, shall no one shame you? ⁴ For you say, ‘My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God’s eyes.’ ⁵ But oh, that God would speak and open his lips to you, ⁶ and that he would tell you the secrets of wisdom! For he is manifold in understanding. Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves. ⁷ “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? ⁸ It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? ⁹ Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea. ¹⁰ If he passes through and imprisons and summons the court, who can turn him back? ¹¹ For he knows worthless men; when he sees iniquity, will he not consider it? ¹² But a stupid man will get understanding when a wild donkey’s colt is born a man! ¹³ “If you prepare your heart, you will stretch out your hands toward him. ¹⁴ If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and let not injustice dwell in your tents. ¹⁵ Surely then you will lift up your face without blemish; you will be secure and will not fear. ¹⁶ You will forget your misery; you will remember it as waters that have passed away. ¹⁷ And your life will be brighter than the noonday; its darkness will be like the morning. ¹⁸ And you will feel secure, because there is hope; you will look around and take your rest in security. ¹⁹ You will lie down, and none will make you afraid; many will court your favor. ²⁰ But the eyes of the wicked will fail; all way of escape will be lost to them, and their hope is to breathe their last.”

Recently a friend of mine sent me a February 13, 2016, New York Times article written by Kate Bowler, an assistant professor of history at Duke Divinity School, and entitled, “Death, the Prosperity Gospel, and Me.” Interestingly, she has written a history of the prosperity gospel in America, the unfortunate idea that God wants you to be wealthy and healthy and that, if you just believe enough, you will be both. Kate Bowler is 35 years old. She was recently told that she is dying from stage four cancer. This is what her article is about.

…a neighbor knocked on our door to tell my husband that everything happens for a reason.

“I’d love to hear it,” my husband said.

“Pardon?” she said, startled.

“I’d love to hear the reason my wife is dying,” he said, in that sweet and sour way he has.

My neighbor wasn’t trying to sell him a spiritual guarantee. But there was a reason she wanted to fill that silence around why some people die young and others grow old and fussy about their lawns. She wanted some kind of order behind this chaos. Because the opposite of #blessed is leaving a husband and a toddler behind, and people can’t quite let themselves say it: “Wow. That’s awful.” There has to be a reason, because without one we are left as helpless and possibly as unlucky as everyone else.

One of the most endearing and saddest things about being sick is watching people’s attempts to make sense of your problem. My academic friends did what researchers do and Googled…it. When did you start noticing pain? What exactly were the symptoms, again? Is it hereditary? I can out-know my cancer using the Mayo Clinic website. Buried in all their concern is the unspoken question: Do I have any control?

I can also hear it in all my hippie friends’ attempts to find the most healing kale salad for me. I can eat my way out of cancer. Or, if I were to follow my prosperity gospel friends’ advice, I can positively declare that it has no power over me and set myself free.

The most I can say about why I have cancer, medically speaking, is that bodies are delicate and prone to error. As a Christian, I can say that the Kingdom of God is not yet fully here, and so we get sick and die. And as a scholar, I can say that our society is steeped in a culture of facile reasoning. What goes around comes around…And God is always, for some reason, going around closing doors and opening windows. God is super into that.[1]

One cannot help but wonder if many who suffer do not find themselves in the place of Job to some extent: surrounded by well-meaning and concerned friends who are trying to make sense of the seemingly senseless tragedy of human suffering. Dr. Bowler appears to have good friends indeed, but there is within them, as there is within all of us, an almost insatiable desire to explain and, as she says in her article, to control. There is, in other words, an almost insatiable desire within us to not have to face the mystery of it all, the mystery of the goodness of God that resides so uncomfortably near the suffering of humanity.

As we have seen, Job’s friends have continued to poke and to prod into this mystery denying that it is a mystery at all! We see this in the next round of Job’s series of confrontations with his friends. In chapters 11 and 12, Job and Zophar discuss the dilemma of the goodness of God and the reality of human suffering.

Job, keeping with his courtroom metaphor, offers a struggling but believing indictment of God.

In Job 9 Job invoked a courtroom metaphor bemoaning the lack of an arbiter between himself and God and also bemoaning the fact that God can never truly be summoned to court because he is God. In Job 10, he continues this metaphor by offering his indictment of God.

¹ “I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.

John Chrysostom saw in the phrase “in the bitterness of my soul” a way to let Job off the hook for what he was about to say for Chrysostom concluded that Job speaking “in the bitterness of my soul” meant that “it is not him who speaks but his bitterness.”[2] To be sure, it is possible, as we have said, to speak uncharacteristically when one speaks out of one’s pain. Again, Job’s words should be seen as the words of a severely suffering man and we should seek to be understanding and withhold withering judgment. However, it is indeed Job who is speaking, and I will remind us that when God finally responds at the end of the book, He does not merely overlook Job’s words, chalking them up to emotional excess, He also rebukes and corrects.

² I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me. ³ Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the designs of the wicked?

⁸ Your hands fashioned and made me, and now you have destroyed me altogether. ⁹ Remember that you have made me like clay; and will you return me to the dust? ¹⁰ Did you not pour me out like milk and curdle me like cheese? ¹¹ You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews. ¹² You have granted me life and steadfast love, and your care has preserved my spirit. ¹³ Yet these things you hid in your heart; I know that this was your purpose.

Verses 2-3 and 8-13 are a bit of a mixed bag, theologically. On the one hand, Job recognizes God’s power and authority as well as the fact that God is Creator. Job has not become an atheist. On the other hand, Job points to his affliction as a potentially absurd reality, for through it God was marring His own creation. He next asks if God might potentially be committing the same error as his friends.

In verses 4-7, Job wonders aloud if God has not perhaps been guilty of the same error of which Job’s prying friends are guilty.

⁴ Have you eyes of flesh? Do you see as man sees? ⁵ Are your days as the days of man, or your years as a man’s years, ⁶ that you seek out my iniquity and search for my sin, ⁷ although you know that I am not guilty, and there is none to deliver out of your hand?

In other words, “Are you, God, also looking for sin within me when You know that I am innocent.” Job’s rhetorical question about God’s “eyes of flesh” and God seeing “as man sees” carry an indictment of the men that surround him, including the man to whom he was speaking, at that very moment. It is almost as if Job wants to know if everybody, including God, is going to join in condemning him of sins that he has not committed. The rhetorical nature of these questions carries with it some ambiguity. Does Job think that God sees him in this way? I suspect he does not think this. But his suffering raises the absurd idea that God is not treating him any better than his own finite and fallen friends.

¹⁴ If I sin, you watch me and do not acquit me of my iniquity. ¹⁵ If I am guilty, woe to me! If I am in the right, I cannot lift up my head, for I am filled with disgrace and look on my affliction. ¹⁶ And were my head lifted up, you would hunt me like a lion and again work wonders against me. ¹⁷ You renew your witnesses against me and increase your vexation toward me; you bring fresh troops against me. ¹⁸ “Why did you bring me out from the womb? Would that I had died before any eye had seen me ¹⁹ and were as though I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave. ²⁰ Are not my days few? Then cease, and leave me alone, that I may find a little cheer ²¹ before I go—and I shall not return—to the land of darkness and deep shadow, ²² the land of gloom like thick darkness, like deep shadow without any order, where light is as thick darkness.”

Job concludes his case against God by saying that he is in the ultimate lose-lose. If Job sins, God will not show him mercy, and if Job does not sin God will still hunt and smite him as if he had. Therefore, in his despair, Job sees God as something of an unjust despot.

In Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, the psychopathic killer Hannibal Lecter writes a letter to FBI agent Will Graham (who is hunting another killer named Hobbs) about the pleasure of killing. In the letter, Lecter alleges that God himself enjoys killing.

Why shouldn’t it feel good? It must feel good to God— He does it all the time, and are we not made in His image? You may have noticed in the paper yesterday, God dropped a church roof on thirty-four of His worshipers in Texas Wednesday night— just as they were groveling through a hymn. Don’t you think that felt good? Thirty-four. He’d let you have Hobbs. He got 160 Filipinos in one plane crash last week— He’ll let you have measly Hobbs. He won’t begrudge you one measly murder. Two now. That’s all right.

Watch the papers. God always stays ahead.

Best, Hannibal Lecter, M.D.[3]

It is a terrible letter, and a blasphemous one. Lecter’s letter comes out of a twisted and depraved mind. Job’s words are not quite like Lecter’s. Job does not accuse God of being a sadist, of taking perverse joy in the pain of others. Most significantly, Job’s accusation does not arise from a warped mind but rather from a broken heart and a grieving heart.

Both Lecter and Job are in error, but the former’s error is sinister, calculated, and the reflections of a lost mind whereas Job’s error is the error of a struggling child. I offer Lecter’s letter as a contrast to Job’s because it is important that we are fair to Job even while we grieve over his unfortunate and mistaken words.

Zophar offers a defense of God but, in so doing, really only defends his faulty view of God.

Zophar shows Job considerable less understanding in Job 11.

¹ Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: ² “Should a multitude of words go unanswered, and a man full of talk be judged right? ³ Should your babble silence men, and when you mock, shall no one shame you?

You will immediately notice that Zophar comes out of the gate with considerable more heat than light. He accuses Job of trafficking in mere words, of being “full of talk,” of being a babbler, of being a mocker, and being worthy of shame. Zophar has no sympathy for Job. He next reveals why:

⁴ For you say, ‘My doctrine is pure, and I am clean in God’s eyes.’ ⁵ But oh, that God would speak and open his lips to you, ⁶ and that he would tell you the secrets of wisdom! For he is manifold in understanding. Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves.

Amazingly, and cruelly, Zophar takes the theory of retributive justice up a notch by claiming that Job is so guilty that God is actually showing him mercy. In other words, Job must be extremely wicked indeed and Job must actually deserve more than God is giving him. It is an amazingly shortsighted and stubborn and thoughtless thing for Zophar to say.

⁷ “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? ⁸ It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? ⁹ Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea. ¹⁰ If he passes through and imprisons and summons the court, who can turn him back? ¹¹ For he knows worthless men; when he sees iniquity, will he not consider it? ¹² But a stupid man will get understanding when a wild donkey’s colt is born a man! ¹³ “If you prepare your heart, you will stretch out your hands toward him. ¹⁴ If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and let not injustice dwell in your tents. ¹⁵ Surely then you will lift up your face without blemish; you will be secure and will not fear. ¹⁶ You will forget your misery; you will remember it as waters that have passed away. ¹⁷ And your life will be brighter than the noonday; its darkness will be like the morning. ¹⁸ And you will feel secure, because there is hope; you will look around and take your rest in security. ¹⁹ You will lie down, and none will make you afraid; many will court your favor. ²⁰ But the eyes of the wicked will fail; all way of escape will be lost to them, and their hope is to breathe their last.”

“Worthless.”

“Stupid.”

“Iniquity.”

“Wicked.”

Here are the offerings of Zophar, a man so committed to a theological a priori that it colors even how he treats his friends. It is a common trap, and one in which any of us could fall: allowing our preconceived assumptions about what suffering must mean and imply about the one who is suffering. When we take this approach, we embrace too narrow a view of both God and man, assuming that the latter simply must be guilty and that the former simply must be punishing.

Or maybe you’re a priori assumption is not the theory of retributive justice. Maybe it is some other template, some other theological mold into which you instinctively force any and every situation of suffering. It is scary to allow mystery to stand, to reject the need to explain and to diagnose.

Let us return to where we began, with the story of Kate Bowler, her devastating diagnosis, and her friends’ attempts to understand, to explain. She continues thus in her article:

The prosperity gospel tries to solve the riddle of human suffering. It is an explanation for the problem of evil. It provides an answer to the question: Why me? For years I sat with prosperity churchgoers and asked them about how they drew conclusions about the good and the bad in their lives. Does God want you to get that promotion? Tell me what it’s like to believe in healing from that hospital bed. What do you hear God saying when it all falls apart?

The prosperity gospel popularized a Christian explanation for why some people make it and some do not. They revolutionized prayer as an instrument for getting God always to say “yes.” It offers people a guarantee: Follow these rules, and God will reward you, heal you, restore you. It’s also distressingly similar to the popular cartoon emojis for the iPhone, the ones that show you images of yourself in various poses. One of the standard cartoons shows me holding a #blessed sign. My world is conspiring to make me believe that I am special, that I am the exception whose character will save me from the grisly predictions and the CT scans in my inbox. I am blessed.

The prosperity gospel holds to this illusion of control until the very end. If a believer gets sick and dies, shame compounds the grief. Those who are loved and lost are just that — those who have lost the test of faith. In my work, I have heard countless stories of refusing to acknowledge that the end had finally come. An emaciated man was pushed about a megachurch in a wheelchair as churchgoers declared that he was already healed. A woman danced around her sister’s deathbed shouting to horrified family members that the body can yet live. There is no graceful death, no ars moriendi, in the prosperity gospel. There are only jarring disappointments after fevered attempts to deny its inevitability.

The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America’s addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder. At some point, we must say to ourselves, I’m going to need to let go.

Yes, we need to let it go: the need to explain, the need to diagnose, the need to understand every mystery, the need to tell ourselves and others why. These needs are understandable, but they tempt us to think that we are more than we are. We are not God. We cannot explain everything. We cannot understand everything.

Christ has come not to answer all of our questions but to tell us that God is with us and God is with us this much. As Dr. Bowler said, at the center of our faith is a dying man. We must remember that. A dying man. But not only a dying man: the dying God-man. And not only the dying God-man: the dying and rising God-man.

The God man who has passed through suffering and pain to eternal bliss.

The God man who sweat drops of blood in the garden and now sits at the Father’s right hand.

Jesus is the answer to our questions.

He is the way.

He is the mystery that has been revealed.

He comes not to satisfy our curiosity or even to explain all of our pain. He comes to stand with us in the midst of it and remind us that the one option we can definitely rule out is that God does not love us or that God hates us or that God is playing a game with us. Jesus reminds us that whatever the answer to the “Why?” that we ask in our suffering is, it is rooted in the loving heart of a holy God who does care and who does love us.

Christ is the love of God…especially for the hurting.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/14/opinion/sunday/death-the-prosperity-gospel-and me.html?_r=3&utm_ source=This+nightly&utm_campaign=c481ee7bc2-Feb+15+Nightly&utm_medium=email&utm_ term =0_ 4b29b52ce6-c481ee7bc2-248594133

[2] Manlio Simonetti and Marco Conti, eds. Job. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture: Old Testament. Vol. VI. Thomas C. Oden, Gen. Ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2006), p.2

[3] Harris, Thomas (2008-12-24). Red Dragon (Hannibal Lecter) (p. 322). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.