If you read the Bible chronologically, where the books and verses are organized roughly in the the order they occurred you get through about Genesis 7 and then read Job.
The book is fascinating for so many reasons but one thing really caught my attention today. We’re obviously still very early in the story of the Bible. Adam and Eve have fallen, Noah survives the flood and the Tower of Babel has been shut down and in fairly few pages we see God’s big idea torpedoed over and over and over and He is starting something brand new out of nothing with Abram.
By this point it would be easy to read of our failure after failure and understand God’s frustration, and anger or impatience would seem understandable. But then Job comes in and we see something from another angle entirely. A vision that, if taken seriously, is shocking. First of all we see human kind sitting at the mercy of the enigmatic conversations and motives of the “sons of god” and their council, including Satan. We know Job is a righteous man because the text says as much and yet his life is thrown into turmoil to prove a point. The deaths of his family and servants, and all of his anguish, are part of heavenly point making. It’s hard to read Job and not feel as though the whole thing is just horribly unfair - and that indeed is the main conversation of the book between Job and his three friends who all essentially argue that God IS just as opposed to capricious...while the reader knows all along that in fact Job is a victim and “inscrutable” would be putting things gently.
What caught my eye today though was a famous line from Ch10 where Job asks God “do you see as a man sees?” Job never says God is unjust - in fact he’d likely suggest that anything God does is just by definition even if it seems otherwise to us. God doesn’t owe us any explanation either because, “who can summon him?”
And yet I suddenly see something in this question, way, way back near the beginning, a shadow of a time when God could answer, “yes” to that snarky, but penetrating question. Because Job has a number of very human things to say. Yes, God, you can do whatever you want and we have no basis to argue, especially given all that we’ve failed on these past 7 chapters, but it’s like that than couldn’t you just leave us alone? “Why do you contend with me?” And today Job’s questions suddenly seem like this crystal clear summary of the situation but written in agony and pain instead of theology and philosophy. So while God doesn’t exactly answer Job’s accusation He does defend Job from the accusations of his friends. He does restore to Job his former life (which frankly always felt very storage to me, as if a dozen new kids replaces the ones who were crushed...but whatever) and of course the whole thing was predicated on Gods demonstrative love and pride in Job.
So we don’t quite get the answer we hope for for God in this book I can almost hear him saying, “...you may have a point. Imma gonna do something about that.”
