Job 10:1-22 – Taking God to Task

Whoever coined the phrase “the patience of Job” obviously never read the book. For reasons which Job and no one else on earth didn’t know about, he was struck with horrible calamities. He had been a rich man with a large family who served God fastidiously. But then one day everything fell apart. All of his herds, the investment capital of the ancient world, were destroyed or stolen. His beloved children died in a building collapse, and he contracted a painful disfiguring disease. It’s the perfect situation to ask the question, “why do bad things happen to good people?” Job was about as good as they come, and his calamity was about as bad as they get. His wife’s first response was that he should abandon his faith and curse God. But Job refused. At least at first. If you stop at the end of Chapter Two, you can say that Job was patient in suffering.

Maybe the person who came up with the expression didn’t have the patience to slog through the next 42 chapters. The bulk of the book of Job is a record of a conversation between Job and three of his friends who came to comfort him while he sat on a pile of dirt, picking at his sores with a piece of broken pottery. The conversation centered, quite naturally, on the tragedies that had struck Job, and how to make sense of it all. The three friends, each in different ways, suggested that Job must have done something to deserve all this suffering. Maybe he wasn’t the wonderful guy that everyone thought he was. In other words, his suffering proved his guilt. It’s an odd way to determine right and wrong: if you’re punished, you must have done something to deserve it. The fact that you’ve been punished matters more than any record of what you may have done or not done.

Job didn’t accept his friends’ arguments. Throughout the whole conversation, he continued to insist on his innocence. As the book goes on, he becomes more and more adamant about his point. “I didn’t do anything to deserve this! Tell me what I did! This is wrong!” After a while, his friends don’t have a chance to get much of a word in edgewise as he protests his innocence and complains about what happened to him. So much for the patience of Job. What happened to him wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t right. He wasn’t just going to sit and take it; if he was going down, he’d be going down kicking and screaming.

They say that no one in prison is guilty. They’re all innocent: all you have to do is ask them. Well, that certainly seems to describe Job. His punishment doesn’t prove his crime. It only proves that the world is unjust.

Because Job is a man of faith, he didn’t just stop with the idea that the world had treated him unfairly. The world, and all the people and forces in it, don’t do anything without God’s command. We actually see this to be the case for Job. Unbeknownst to him, Satan had asked God for permission to afflict Job the way he did. So did the devil cause his suffering? Not really. Satan only did what God authorized him to do. If you give someone permission to do something, you’re responsible for what they do. For the last several years our nation has been concerned with the way prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are being treated. If it’s torture, then we want to know who’s responsible for it. Our search for responsibility doesn’t stop if we learn the identity of those who actually conducted the waterboarding; we want to know who authorized them to it. Even if Job would have known that Satan was the one who had inflict all this misery on him, he wouldn’t have stopped there. As a man of faith, Job knew that the buck stopped with God. Nobody can do anything without God’s consent. If a soldier tortures a prisoner, we want to know which military, intelligence, or political figure authorized it. If someone like Job is punished unfairly, we want to know why God let it happen.

By the time we reach the tenth chapter of Job’s book, he’s developed quite a head of steam. He’s wished that he could take God to court to get justice from him, but he knew it would be impossible. God is as wily and slick as the worst courthouse scoundrel; he’d find a way to twist every argument against Job. That doesn’t mean thought it would be right; just that God is the ultimate double-talker who could sell ice cubes to Eskimos. But it didn’t matter anyway; Job had no way to subpoena God to appear in court.

In fact, that was the heart of Job’s problem. It’s not just that life had become miserable for him; Job felt that God had abandoned him. Job had put his faith in the Lord and had committed his life to him. He had trusted that God would take care of him, no matter what. That he’d be safer in God’s care than he could be anywhere else. Now all these horrible things happened to him, and God was nowhere to be found. None of the help or comfort or guidance that Job expected God to provide could be found.

So what do you do in a situation like this? Some of us may respond like Job’s friends, and decide that maybe we had it coming after all. Maybe I really am a horrible person, if God lets things like this happen to me. But Job wouldn’t accept that argument. Others of us may be satisfied with pat little answers like “maybe God needed your children more than you did” or “God knows what’s best, so this is really a good thing if you would only see it from God’s point of view.” But Job was too wise and honest to think something like that. Others, far too many of us, give up on our faith. There’s no God. Or if there is, there are some things that are out of his control. We live in a nasty brutal world, and God is nothing more than a nice idea to help us think that things aren’t as bad as they really are. Again, Job would have none of this. His faith in God was more powerful than anything else. No loss, no sorrow, no pain would move him away from that. If something happens, it’s because God wanted it to happen.

Before we clap our hands in admiration of Job’s deep and abiding faith, we need to think about where that faith leads us. It leads us straight to the prayer that Job offered in Chapter 10. And it’s a dark, dangerous prayer. In essence, here’s how it goes:
“God, you made me. All that I am and all that I have comes from you. But now you’ve taken it all away, and you’re destroying me. It’s you, Lord. No one else. You had it in mind to do this to me all along. It has nothing to do with my guilt or innocence. You’ve just decide to toy with me, and there’s nothing I can do about it. If this is what you had planned for my life, it would have been better for me if I had never even been born. All I ask, before you completely destroy me, is that you just lay off for a moment so I can have at least a moment’s peace and joy before it’s all over.”

My job as a preacher is to find a message of hope or challenge so that we can meet the gospel in each passage of Scripture. That’s not easy to do with a bitter prayer like this one. The hope and joy of our lives, of our faith, is that God is with us, that he came to live life with us, and that through the power of the Spirit we are never alone. But for Job, this constant presence of God doesn’t bring hope or peace or instruction. It only brings suffering and despair. It’s been said by some that hell is the absence of God. But that’s exactly what Job wished for: a chance to get away from God. His prayer is a twisted version of Psalm 139: “Whither can I flee from thy presence? Because I really want to!”

I’d like to offer the good news that comes at the end of Job’s book: his fortunes and health were restored, and the blessings of family and honor returned better than ever. But that’s not where we are today. There’s still 32 more chapters of Job’s book before we get to that. And for far too many people, that restoration never happens, at least on this side of glory. Victims of the Nazi holocaust, of the genocide in Darfur, of the cyclone in Myanmar, and of the earthquake in China don’t get a Chapter 42.

If Job’s prayer of Chapter 10 is where you are right now, or if you’ve ever been there, there is a bit of hope and encouragement I can offer. I’m not foolish enough to think that I can offer a pat little answer that solves the problems and makes everything alright. Here’s what I can tell you: Job’s anger, despairing prayer made it into the Bible. It’s an expression of faith, not despair. It’s the kind of prayer that people who are very close to God lift up when nothing around them makes sense.

The other piece of good news is that God didn’t give Job what he wanted. He didn’t turn away from him. Even though God’s activity in his life was painful and devastating, Job was still connected to the Lord. God won’t abandon us, even when we want him to. When life seems far more than we can bear, God won’t abandon us to our despair. We may choose to leave him, the way Job’s wife wanted him to. But God just won’t leave us alone. I suppose that’s good news. Let’s just hope that we, like Job, can handle it.

1 Kings 3:4-15: A Spirit of Humble Discernment

Solomon is best known for his wealth and his wisdom. This is the story that explains how he received both. But it may not be the story that you expect.

After David's death, the first thing that Solomon had to do was consolidate his power by eliminating any possible competition for the throne and by forming alliances to keep it. Even in the Bible, politics is a messy and dirty business. But as soon as he had done so, the very first thing he did was to seek the Lord’s blessing on his new task as king. We may question his priorities: first eliminating competition, then forming human alliances, and finally seeking God’s blessing. Like Solomon, sometimes we also do things in the wrong order. Think, for example, of our expression “I guess all that’s left for us to do now is pray.” Isn’t that the first thing that we should be doing?!

Solomon does deserve some credit however: at least he went to the Lord to seek blessing. Many of the people of Israel were offering devotion to pagan gods. But even here, Solomon is far from perfect. Even though he followed God like his father David, he also dabbled in pagan worship.

Our passage describes a “dream” that Solomon had after offering sacrifices to God. Dreams are one of those weird boundary regions between normal life and, well, things that aren’t so normal. Not all dreams are opportunities to communicate with God, but apparently this one was.

The dream starts out with God sounding like a genie in a bottle: “Tell me your wish, and I’ll grant it.” Unfortunately, this is how many people treat God, and prayer, today. Sure, God wants nothing but the best for His people and He desires to bless us. But we lose sight of what prayer is, and what our relationship to God is, when we start to treat Him like a cosmic Santa Claus or a spiritual candy machine. God offers blessing, not for us to puff ourselves up and satisfy our cravings and desires. He provides blessing for us to be the people he wants us to be, and to fill the roles in the world that He has prepared for us.

Fortunately for Solomon, this is exactly how he understood God’s offer. He didn’t ask for a pony or a sports car, or anything like that. He knew that he was going to face some major challenges, now that he was king. Apparently, he was a bit intimidated the task before him. But he also recognized that he hadn’t become king of a great nation because of his own merit, or even because of anything wonderful about his father. All of it was a blessing from God. The Lord had brought him into this position.

That’s one of the great things about God: when he gives you a role to fill, he provides you with the resources and abilities to need to fulfill it. He’ll never call you to do something, whether it’s becoming a parent or starting a new ministry, without giving you what you need to succeed at it. So this is exactly what Solomon asked for. His prayer basically was “Lord, you’ve given me this huge responsibility. I need insight and wisdom to make decisions and to guide your people the way you want me to.” In other words, his request for blessing was directly related to the role that God had given him. It was nothing frivolous that would swell his ego or satisfy his cravings.

God recognized and honored Solomon’s faithfulness. As king, Solomon was renowned for his wisdom; immediately after this episode, we encounter an example of his kingly wisdom. Solomon’s wisdom wasn’t “intelligence,” or the mastery of a bunch of facts. His wisdom was discernment: how to make good decisions for himself and for his nation: decisions that would draw them all closer to God’s will.

One of the other amazing things about God is that he loves to overwhelm us with blessing and joy. Not only did he grant Solomon’s request to be an insightful ruler, but he also threw in a “bonus blessing:” wealth and honor. Solomon didn’t ask for it, but God gave it to him anyway. Kind of like the loving grandparent who buys a treat or brings a present even though it’s not your birthday or any other holiday: “just because.” And Solomon’s wealth also became legendary.

As a side note, we should note that Solomon didn’t actually use his gift of wisdom and discernment as well as God would have liked. Like the rest of us, he was a sinful person who let his ambitions and passions get the better of him. He never gave up his worship of pagan gods, and married wives who led him away from his worship of God. He amassed his wealth through a system of taxation and forced labor that crushed the lives of many of his people. There’s a warning here for us: just because God gives us a gift doesn’t mean that we always use it, or use it properly.

Returning to Solomon’s request, however, we can note that in this situation he provides an example for us all to follow. Solomon was humble enough recognize that he didn’t have all the answers: he couldn’t be the leader that God wanted him to be all on his own. Instead of relying on his own sense of what ought to be done, he humbled himself and sought God’s guidance for the tasks that lay ahead of him. None of us will probably ever rise to the level of power and influence that Solomon had. But his humble spirit and his desire to be led by God’s will is something that could benefit us all. Here are two examples.

A couple weeks ago I returned home from General Assembly, the national council of our denomination. I was one of over 700 commissioners and more than 200 advisory delegates that gathered to make decisions about a wide variety of issues facing our church. During our week together, I noticed a spiritual struggle that was going on. On the one hand, I was overwhelmed and impressed by how many people shared Solomon’s spirit: a desire to be surprised and challenged by the Holy Spirit and a willingness to see past their own opinions to discover where God would lead them. I was amazed by the number of people who were able to engage in productive and meaningful discussions with others who didn’t see eye to eye with them on some significant issues, so that they could work together to discover God’s will. On the other hand, however, I was dismayed by other people showed up at General Assembly with a firm sense of what they believed, and they did their best to convince everyone else to agree with them. Instead of humble discernment, these people engaged in strident advocacy. They had their agendas, and they wanted to get everyone on board with them. These were the people who spoke about “us” and “them,” instead of “we” and “God.” The people who were so forceful and focused on their opinions stretched across the theological spectrum. Even if I agreed with someone like this on their position, they would push me to agree even more strongly and firmly and I started to feel like I had become “the enemy” that they were cornering.

The same thing could have happened in our congregation, following our decision to accept a building proposal. Almost a quarter of the people at our congregational meeting voted against the project. It would be easy for us to think of ourselves as “winners” and “losers” on this issue. Some of us could retreat into negativity and bitterness and allow this issue to separate us from the congregation. Others of us could puff ourselves up and crow about getting our own way. Either response is a bad one, and misses the whole point. We are, together, seeking to discern God’s will. How can we move forward together and continue to learn from each other? Let me lift up one person as an example. He is someone who said during the congregational meeting that he didn’t like the plan, and he later told me that he voted against it. But he has abilities and experience that we need to make the project succeed, and he’s joined the building committee in order to make it succeed. As he told me, “I was against this project, but now that it’s going forward, I’m going to do my best to make it work.” This is an example of the humble discernment which Solomon sought. It’s a willingness to move beyond our own opinions, recognize that perhaps God is leading things in a different direction than we’d prefer, and do our best to cooperate with it. This is only possible if we, like Solomon, admit that we don’t have all the answers and need his guidance. And when it comes, to be willing to follow where he leads.