DEAR CHARITY

Part 5

Dear Charity,

Thank you so, so very much for your super kind words in your last email.  Like I said, I know I can really get going and not come up for breath, which has ended up hurting some people I consider very dear to my heart.  I was more thankful than I can even tell you to hear that you haven’t felt that way in our friendship.  I promise you that I will do everything in my power to keep it that way, but I want to say that I will also do my best to check in with you about this on as consistent a basis as I can without turning it into something awkward and weird.  Deal?

Well, now we get to it.  What God said to Job.  Yeah.  I confess that I had written an entire response that I thought pretty well summed up my thoughts, but then I kept thinking and praying and I had a few really good conversations with an incredibly wise friend and mentor, and...my first email went into the digital version of the circular file.  Not so much because anything I wrote was wrong but because I realized I wanted to approach things from a bit of a different angle, one that I think does a better job of addressing what I think the book of Job is really getting at in the first place.

You wrote, “I still don’t fully understand it.  God’s response to Job seems to be a resumé of His might and power, yet I can’t get past the truth that Job never questioned those things.  What he questioned was God’s justice.  And God replied with a treatise on the wonders of His creation...”  I totally hear you.  That’s the thing that’s been tangled in my brain for years.  Job’s complaint rested on his belief that even though God definitely did deal rightly with the wicked, He had not given Job a fair shake.  After granting him so much, God had suddenly and without cause (at least from Job’s point of view) turned on him.  Job even recognized the truth that God could do as He pleased with His own creation, so why did God respond to Job the way He did and what did Job hear in His response that made him repent?

With good and very understandable reason, Job was quite focused on himself and his suffering.  But here’s something that I had thought about before but never really pursued until my friend brought it up again.  Job’s whole thing was that he wasn’t wicked and therefore didn’t deserve the treatment God was dishing out to him, right?  So when it comes down to it, Job and his friends actually had pretty much the same view of God and life.  Think about it for a second.  Job didn’t actually refute his friends’ perspective that the righteous are blessed by God and the wicked are punished by Him.  For all of them, good deeds necessarily resulted in God’s blessing and wicked deeds necessarily resulted in God punishing you in some way.  Truth is, Job never once contradicted that.  That tells me that Job had a foundational misunderstanding of God, which is sort of a game changer for me, but not in the way a lot of people might think.

In order to explain that last sentence, I have to take a deep dive into just what the Bible is trying to say at the beginning of the book of Job.  The one thing I can’t get away from is the fact that God started the whole ball rolling and He had no problem calling Job perfect.  And yeah, the Hebrew word used in the book means exactly that — whole, complete, finished.  So what made him perfect?  How could God say that he was perfect?  And come to think of it, how could Job be perfect when we’ve been told for millennia that Jesus was the only perfect human being who ever lived?  Is it possible we’ve been wrong for a really, really long time?

I think that the issue comes down to a drastic and extreme misunderstanding of perfection and sinlessness.  Because I think the Bible makes a distinction between the two that we’ve been overlooking for way, way too long.  And right here, I need to apologize profusely and sincerely because I wrote to you before about Job being perfect because of his actions and his obedience to God’s commands.  I’m now realizing that it wasn’t the uprightness of his actions that made Job perfect.  I, and a whole lot of other people, have been taught all my life that sinlessness and perfection are synonymous and interchangeable words.  If you say a person is perfect, you are saying that they are without sin and vice-versa.  But I want to emphatically state that I do not believe the Bible agrees with that way of looking at it.

Sinlessness is all about obedience to God.  If you are fully obedient to all God’s commands, you will be sinless.  It’s about following through on what your heart and mind are telling you to do.  The problem is that we don’t always follow through even when our hearts and minds know what God desires from us and what He wants us to do.  I think what the Bible is telling us about perfection, on the other hand, is that perfectness is all about knowing God and being known by Him.  Being perfect is about the intention of your heart and how you relate to God.  And here is the truth of Job — you can have an incomplete understanding of God and still be perfect.

Okay, so I realize that my last statement probably seems like I am a total nutter who shouldn’t ever try to teach the Bible again.  I hope you’ll bear with me, though, and hear me out.

First of all, I would never even dare to come anywhere near saying what I did unless I thought the Bible pretty clearly supported my statement.  There are two things that are absolutely and firmly stuck in my head about Job.

1)  God Himself declared Job perfect

2)  God said that only Job spoke correctly about Him

Without either of those things, my argument is more worthless than a lawn mower in the Sahara.  But God DID call Job blameless and He DID declare that He was furious with Job’s friends while commending Job for speaking rightly about Him.  No one can ignore those two extremely important facts if they hope to understand the truth about Job.

So why did I say that realizing that Job had a misunderstanding of God was a game changer for me?  Because it made me see that biblically speaking, perfection isn’t about knowing everything there is to know about God and being right about everything when it comes to God.  If that’s what it was about, then Job most definitely wasn’t perfect and God was lying when He said Job was.  And since we know for absolutely certain that God doesn’t lie, it leaves me with one conclusion —  namely what I just stated.

Think about what Jesus said at the end of Matthew 7 when He told His disciples that there would be people on the Day who would think they were part of the kingdom but God would say, “Get away from Me.  I don’t know you.”  Think of what Paul wrote to the church in Corinth about Israel in 1 Corinthians 10.  By referencing going through the sea and eating and drinking spiritual food, he was comparing Israel with those in the church who had been baptized and participated in communion, and he was stating that just like some of those in ancient Israel stumbled and God “laid them low in the desert,” there were some in the church who would also suffer the same judgement, thus not truly being part of the kingdom in the end (like those Jesus mentioned in Matthew 7).  Paul concluded by warning the Corinthians, “...anyone who reckons they are standing upright should watch out in case they fall over.”

Perfection isn’t about doing all the right things.  Job did the right things, but in the end, that’s not what made him perfect in God’s eyes.  God saw Job’s heart and He saw that Job had an intense desire to know Him and understand Him.  And he was willing to confront God and even accuse Him in order to have his desire fulfilled.  That is the heart of the book of Job.

But what about Job himself?  What did Job hear when God spoke?  Did he hear something in there about God’s love?  Did he hear something about how much compassion God had for him?  One answer to those questions for sure is that Job came away from the encounter with a much deeper understanding of God and I know that his relationship with Him would forever be on a different level.  Job confessed that he spoke about things he didn’t understand, things too wonderful for him to know.  But here’s the thing — so many people want to use that as a justification for ceasing to wrestle and struggle with God, to which I say, “Yeah, but did you read what God said about Job?  Did you catch the part where He said that Job spoke rightly of Him where his friends didn’t?”  Job’s refusal to let God off the hook, his absolute assurance that continuing the wrestling match was the right thing to do because God needed to give him an answer — I really believe that is what God commended.

People want to argue that Job is about Job being on trial, but it’s really not.  Neither is it about God being on trial.  See, it’s a whole lot more cozy to believe that Job had some major sin he was hiding and that he wasn’t quite as upright and blameless as he claimed, which is why God had to do what He did, than it is for us to agree with God and say that Job was perfect and we really don’t fully understand why God did what He did in allowing Job to suffer so horrendously.  The first thought is understandable and comfortable.  The second is confusing and scary.  But Charity, if we are ever going to come out the other side of our worst, darkest abyss like the one you’re in now, we absolute MUST wrestle with that thought because anything less has every potential to leave us with nothing but a weary acceptance of our fate without any true understanding.  I’m not saying that’s inevitable and I’m not saying that’s always a bad thing.  I know many people who are perfectly happy exercising what some have been pleased to call Christian resignation (I’ll gladly give you my thoughts on that if you’re ever interested), and I truthfully couldn’t be more thrilled for them.  But for people like you and me, it’s not the way we were made and it’s totally unacceptable to us.

What it comes down to is that Job is about wrestling with the truth that sometimes bad things happen to people who absolutely do not deserve them to happen.  Job is about struggling to understand a God who tells us that He loves us and yet doesn’t stop us from suffering unjustly.  Job is about refusing to let God off the hook in our striving to understand.  THAT, my friend, is what made Job perfect and blameless and upright.  He refused to stop trying to understand the God who had his loyalty and his obedience, and God knew that’s what was in Job’s heart when He told the Accuser that Job was perfect.

Hear me when I say this — I totally, completely, absolutely get that it feels like it would be WAAAY less painful to stop struggling and wrestling and groaning and wailing and begging and pleading.  It may even feel like that’s the right thing to do because it feels like surrender, which we’re constantly and consistently told is a Christian virtue.  And you know what?  For some people, that’s where they’re at and that’s cool.  But God gave His people the book of Job so that for those of us who are like Job, those of us who cannot let it go and need to stay in God’s face until He responds, we’ll know that it’s SOOO okay with God that we do that.  Not only is it okay, but He commends those of us who take that path.

You know what?  Many rabbis and Jewish scholars actually think that was the whole point of the book of Job.  It was never meant to be a definitive statement about God and the problem of evil.  It was supposed to let the people of God know that it was so very okay to confront Him and show them just how far they could go in what they said to Him.  That’s why God doesn’t answer Job’s questions or accusations in any kind of satisfying manner.  Because that wasn’t the point.  The real point was that God could take whatever we throw at Him and in truth, He prefers that to a blind reliance on tradition and “the way we’ve always taught it” which is what Job’s friends were all about.

I also want to remind you about Jesus.  Yeah, He told God, “Your will be done,” but let’s not forget that the Bible says His agony was so severe that the capillaries under His skin burst and He was sweating blood.  I know you know the kind of screaming and howling He was doing in that garden.  It was no gentle folding of the hands and looking up serenely at the sky while He made token prayers so that He could say He identified with us when we suffer.  Something that no one ever seems to remember is that He begged and implored God not to make Him go through with what He knew was coming until He ran out of time.  He was pleading with God right up until the moment they came for Him.

So I have to continue to wrestle and struggle with God.  Just like my friend, Job.  And yeah, I may say some things that don’t sound spiritually correct to pious ears, but like Job, I refuse to silence my complaint or say that others are correct when they’re not.  Like Jesus, I will beg and plead until God tells me I’m out of time.

I’ve continued to do a whole lot of thinking about what God said to Job and what Job heard.  Something else my friend pointed out to me was that Job and his friends were really arguing about something that was, when it comes right down to it, pretty wildly off point.  It’s like when people go out to a schnazzy restaurant and they’re so busy taking pictures of the food to post on social media, working to get just the right angle or the best lighting, that they forget the point of food is to eat it and enjoy it, not to take pictures of it.

What if, in my analogy, instead of chiding the person taking pictures and telling them they were getting it all wrong, a friend just started eating and exclaiming about how good the food tasted?  It seems that’s what God was going for when He responded to Job.  He didn’t really have to explicitly lay out that he was missing the point.  Instead, He guided Job to what was really important in a different way.

Job:  This is unfair!  God, this is not right!  It hurts so bad...

God:  Look at Me.  Look at Me.  Look at Me.  Look at all I’ve done. I got this.  I got you.

Charity, I dare to say that there are definite reasons for the excruciating agony in your life, and it will probably take way more time than you want it to for you to process everything.  There are so many things you need to grieve before you can even begin to unravel all the threads.  But if you find comfort in anything, I deeply hope you can find comfort in this — God has not left you on your own.  I know it certainly feels that way at times.  But He’s got this.  And He’s got you.  In those darkest of moments, even though it takes every ounce of strength you possess, reach out...and know that my hand will be there in the dark, reaching back...and through me, God Himself.

Your Friend in Hope,

Beth