DEAR CHARITY

Part 1

Dear Charity,

Hey, thanks for your last email!  I totally understand about life sometimes getting in the way of the things we really want to do.  I can’t tell you how many letters and emails I’ve written in my head over the years.  You’d think that the mental effort it takes to compose them in my brain would so easily translate to putting it all on paper or a computer screen, but alas!  Such is not the case, it seems.  Anyway, all that to say that you have no need to apologize at all.

I thought your idea of walking through a couple books of the Bible together sounded uber intriguing, and you just happened to pick two of my faves — Job and Mark!  I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a study on Job for, oh, like a decade now, and it’s a book that’s always sort of simmering in the back of my brain.  As for Mark, well, I can’t tell you how much I LOVE the way Mark presents Jesus.  We’ll get into it, but He is so much more human in Mark than He seems in any of the other Gospels (except possibly Luke).  At least that’s the impression it makes on me.  I’ll be super curious to hear your take on it, too.

Since you mentioned that you already started reading Job, though, and you had some questions right off the bat, let’s start there.  I know you know this by now after all the time we’ve spent together (technological though it’s been), but I do feel like I want to repeat my usual disclaimer:  I don’t have all the answers.  In fact, I think I have waaay more questions than answers myself, but I am more than incredibly happy to walk this journey with you and see where God takes us and what He says to us through His Word.  You’ve become a dear friend and sister to me, Charity.  And Job being what it is, I hope it won’t surprise you that a lot of what I’ll be sharing with you is a whole lot more personal than what I would usually put in the studies that I write to share online.  Having been through the ringer yourself, you absolutely get how difficult it is to trust the average Joe (or Josephine, as the case may be), and I don’t doubt in the least that you will treat my vulnerability with extreme compassion, gentleness and discretion.

Phew!  Enough with the preliminaries, eh?  What say we dive in!

So yeah, your first question is a doozy.  How could God Himself call Job perfect and blameless if there were still things in his heart that needed to be dealt with (which, clearly, there were)???  I’ve wrestled with that thought a whole lot myself, and since God doesn’t lie or exaggerate or stretch the truth, I have to take Him at His word and say that yes, Job was perfect and blameless — insofar as he knew God and what God desired.  That last part is the key, I think.  See, I don’t think God was judging Job based on the things Job didn’t know.  He was judging him based on what he knew and understood of God, and in those things, he was good to go.  The thing is, Job had an awful lot that he didn’t know or understand about God, and whoo-ee!  Was he about to get a serious lesson in God.

I can’t say for sure that my take on it is absolutely accurate, but that’s definitely what has come to mind after a whole lot of thought, meditation, and study of the rest of the Bible alongside Job.  It’s true that God required sacrifices of Israel whenever they committed unintentional sin, which sorta means they didn’t know what was what and yet God still judged them for it.  But I guess I kinda see that as Job’s situation.  The things he did may have been unintentional and yet they were still sin and God had to deal with him.  Was God splitting hairs with his declaration of Job’s perfection and uprightness?  I’m not sure I would look at it that way.  I think it’s more that God has an unreal amount of compassion and understanding because He knows how He made us and He knows how monumentally we struggle sometimes.

And yeah, I hear you about how Job responded to his wife when she told him to curse God and die.  Hers was definitely not a response of faith in any way, but Job wasn’t exactly a stellar model of compassion when he told her she was talking like a foolish woman.  That may have been true, but aside from the horrendous physical affliction God allowed the satan to inflict on Job, she suffered every single thing he did, so...harsh, Job...harsh.  At the end of the book, though, while the Bible points out that Job was given more children, it doesn’t say that he was given a new wife.  Interesting, no?  I like to think that part of his confession and repentance included reconciling with his wife.  That would mean she was still young enough to bear ten more children, though.  Possible?  You bet, especially since the Bible points out that Job was blessed more in his latter life than his former, which means God definitely thought of those children as part of the blessing, and He would make sure it happened.  But I am jumping way ahead of myself!

I’ll get to the words of Job in chapters 3 and 6-7, but first I wanted to address his “friends.”  Can’t help myself with the quotation marks.  I have always had a tough time thinking of those guys as true friends.  They sure start off the right way and you have high hopes that they are exactly the kind of men Job needs in his moment of dire suffering and pain.  But then, they open their mouths and it all goes off the rails.

I will say that it’s sooo easy to look at those guys’ words and think that they aren’t saying anything different than what you hear in most churches these days, and I suppose if all you had was their words, they might be right on the money.  But I always have to remind myself that (spoilers!) God declares He is pretty stinking angry with them.  It’s a quite strong word in Hebrew, too.  A really good way to translate the word would be “incensed.”  God also tells them they have to offer a burnt sacrifice and ask Job to pray for them so that He won’t treat them as their foolishness demands.  That word “foolishness”?  It can even be translated as “shameful acts of wickedness.”  So yeah, God wasn’t looking at what they said as, “Well, you got some things a little off the mark but for the most part, you were okay.”  Nope.  He was furious with them and was ready to lay into them for their foolishness.

Something else that’s definitely worth noting is that the ultimate root of that word translated as “foolishness” is a verb that can be translated, “to become withered, faded.”  That right there is an incredibly potent word picture.  It reminds me of what Jesus said in John 15:4-6 — “Remain in Me, and I in you.  As the branch can’t bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you, unless you remain in Me.  I am the vine.  He who remains in Me and I in him bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.  If a man doesn’t remain in Me, he is thrown out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them, throw them into the fire, and they are burned.”

I tend to think that Job’s friends may have known God at one point, but they didn’t remain in Him, they didn’t let Him be where they lived.  The result?  Their ideas about Him became totally skewed.  You even get the sense from his words that Eliphaz became more dependent on his own visions and what he perceived to be words from the spiritual realm — a whole lot like people today who depend only on hearing a word from the Lord.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not disputing the fact that God speaks to us, but there is such a huge danger when we start dismissing the primary way He’s chosen, which is the Bible, in favor of a more esoteric and ethereal form of communication.  You know what I’m talking about.  Eliphaz seems to have taken that route and it made him all kinds of messed up, in my opinion.

Another thing that strikes me is that very little of what Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar say is untrue.  The Bible actually supports almost all of their words.  And yet God declared them to be speaking and acting out of wickedness.  What gives there?  Seems to me there were a few things going on:  1) speaking truth at the wrong time and actually causing more pain; 2) speaking on behalf of God when He didn’t tell them to speak; 3) claiming that they knew exactly what was going on without inquiring of God; 4) most of all, claiming that a thought they came up with in their own heads was a vision and/or word from God when it was no such thing.  I think they were guilty of all those things and all of them defamed God.

***SIDE NOTE:  Although it was absolutely true that Job’s friends dishonored God, I feel the need to say here that I don’t think God’s feelings towards Job’s friends was a case of “You made me look bad” or “My pride has been wounded.”  The friends were espousing a totally bent view about God to a man who’d experienced some of the worst pain possible, thus helping him not at all.  And yet all the while they claimed they were providing comfort and speaking the very words of God.  That’s what wasn’t cool with Him.***

I mean, seriously, read Eliphaz’s pronouncement at the end of chapter 5 (I’ve bolded and italicized the critical word):  “Look at this.  We have searched it.  It is so.  Hear it, and know it for your good.”  Wow.  That’s some pretty major self-promotion going on right there.  He basically told Job, “Dude, we know what’s up and whatever judgement we have pronounced on you is righteous and you absolutely should listen to us because we know the score.”  It really should come as no surprise that God wasn’t exactly thrilled with those three.

So I promised that I would talk about what Job said in chapters 3, 6, and 7.  The interesting thing to me about Job is that he holds his tongue at first and even gets a wee bit snotty with his wife about her lack of faith in God, but when he lets loose, he really lets it all hang out.  I mean, I understand that what we have in the book of Job is a poetic presentation, but it does make me wonder some things.  What tipped Job over the edge?  If he had such integrity and blamelessness and uprightness, what was the final straw?  Was it that God didn’t answer his prayers?  Was it the silence of the One he thought he knew?  Was it his physical suffering?  And, in a way more importantly, how long was he in such torment before he spoke?  We know it was at least seven days, but how long was he physically afflicted before his buddies showed up?  There’s no indication of time, but it doesn’t seem like it was years or anything, maybe not even months.  So he had dealt with his despair for a relatively short period of time.  And yet the tirade he unleashes really seems to indicate that these thoughts had been doing a slow burn in his heart long before God let the satan do its dastardly worst.

But what about God calling Him perfect and blameless?  Because that would completely refute the truth that Jesus was the only sinless man.  Unless Job isn’t a real person.  That’s a possibility, even if he is mentioned in the New Testament (the mere mention of a person doesn’t necessarily mean he was real person).  Yet if Job did actually exist, then did he not sin until he let loose with his accusations against God?  Can’t escape the fact, though, that God says that Job spoke rightly of Him.

Here’s a thing — Job clearly harbored doubt and fear concerning God and His character.  Is God saying those things do not constitute sin?  That would be quite a revelation if that were so.

See what I mean?  I usually have more questions than answers.

This next part won’t be terribly easy to write.  I know I’ve kind of alluded to it in past emails, and I know you’re a smart lady and you probably picked up on more than I thought I was letting on.  I have dealt with (or not dealt with, in most cases) major mental and emotional problems my entire life.  I think maybe that’s why we clicked so well from the beginning.  I sensed a kindred spirit in you and the more you told me about your pain, the more I realized that our lives have taken pretty much parallel paths.

One of the reasons Job is always stewing in my brain is that I feel like I am him in so many ways.  There are a few phrases that he uses that, man, they could be my theme song.

“There [the grave] rest those whose strength is spent.”

“...to those who wait for death but it does not come.”

“...to the man who has lost his way, whom God has hedged about.”

“Is my strength the strength of a rock?  Is my flesh bronze?”

“I am sick of it.  I shall not live forever.  Let me be, for my days are a breath.”

That last one in particular has been on my lips (or, to be truthful, screamed until my throat was raw) more often than I care to admit.  I can’t tell you how many times I begged God to leave me be so that I could just curl up and die.  I didn’t ask to be a plaything between Him and the satan, nor did I ever have any desire to be a cosmic object lesson.  Yet just like Job, I have so often felt like that’s exactly what my life is, the only thing that my life is.  I know you can completely relate, based on what you’ve told me in the past.

I gotta tell you, Charity, over the years, I’ve had my fair share of Job’s friends.  I’ve had people tell me that the things I was feeling were wrong and sinful; I’ve had people tell me that they knew that my faith was shallow and weak and that’s why God was putting the screws to me; I’ve had people tell me that it was clear I was harboring some unconfessed sin because victorious, forgiven people (like they clearly were, as they took the time to assure me) didn’t struggle with emotional issues.  Possibly the worst, though, were the well-meaning friends who thought they were being encouraging yet all they were doing was adding to my agony.  I think maybe one of the reasons God gave us the account of Job is precisely so we would know exactly what NOT to say to people who are in excruciating pain.  Knowing when to speak and what to say is a delicate art that must be practiced, you know?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in particular from the life of Job, it is that no matter what other people try to lay on you, whether their intentions are righteous or not, you absolutely must maintain the stance held within these words:  “Therefore I will not keep silent.  I will speak in the anguish of my spirit.  I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”  Please, please, oh please do not ever let anyone convince you that suffering in silence and not giving voice to your complaints is somehow more God-honoring.  The writer of Ecclesiastes said that there is a time and a season for everything under the sun, and believe you me, that most definitely includes pouring out your complaint to God.  And yes, it also means voicing your complaints to a trusted other in your life.  We were never meant to go through life with a “God and me is all I need” attitude.  That’s why God even fashioned Woman in the first place — because it was not good for Man to be alone.  Of course I’m not advocating wearing your heart on your sleeve and overwhelming every person you set eyes on with every problem you’ve ever had.  But I’ve seen so many people be extremely damaged by the supposedly Christian ideal of never having a negative word to say.  You definitely have to be VERY choosy about who you share with, and who knows, maybe Job would have had a better time of it had he been a little more careful, but that doesn’t mean keeping your mouth clamped shut at all times is the way to go.  I am learning more and more every day just how much I really need to lay it all — the good, the bad, and the hideously ugly — before God and to my small, trusted circle of sisters.

Well, my friend, I don’t know if any of what I’ve written is in any way helpful, and I hope my own questions haven’t served to confuse you any further.  Like I said, we are on this journey together and I hope we can help lighten each other’s burden as we go along.  If anything I’ve said has done just the opposite, please let me know and we can talk it out.

Until next time, keep reading, keep asking questions, keep pouring out your complaint to God, and know that I am with you in spirit!

May God’s Light and Truth guide you,

Beth