"Who is this that darkens council by words without knowledge?" (Job 38:2)
Yes, I quote from God, Book of Job, chapter 38, verse - a book that I finally decided, reluctantly, need to look at.
I say reluctantly, because it is a depressing book, and depressing, not only because it deals with a series of depressing events that befall the story's main character, but also depressing because man's search for an answer to his problems, never get a result, I consider satisfactory.
I assume that you are at least a little familiar with the Book of Job, but in case you've never read it, let me give you a quick overview:
The book of Job is about the called Job (no surprises there) - a character who we're told at the beginning of the book was "a blameless and upright man who feared God and turned away from evil."
If you did not get to meet the historical job you have undoubtedly met its modern equivalent, and possibly in the church. He is the kind of guy who is so pristine and respectable, he probably makes you squirm a bit.
He is the guy Winston Churchill described as "all the virtues I despise and none of the vices I admire." He's just a little too clean and upright and Peter Perfect when we first meet him, but then everything falls apart for him.
All at once her children die, his animals are killed, all his belongings have been destroyed, and he gets a terrible case of boils on his skin, and from this desperate situation, physical and emotional despair, Job begins his quest to get answers from God, as why such evil should happen a good man.
It is a story that, until this point that resonates with us on several levels. Job suffer. We have also suffered. We could not have suffered the same extent as Job suffered, and we want answers like Job would have answers.
And then Jobs are on his quest - to search for answers to the things that make no sense in life, his quest becomes our quest, his questions are our questions, and if his God is our God, we look for his response to being our response.
Which is why it is so unsatisfactory, when we reach the climax of the story (about 38 chapters later) only to discover that the answer God gives jobs to his unjust suffering is a kind of mystery!
"Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said:" Who is it that darkens council by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man, I will question you, and you make it known to me. "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements - surely you know! Or who stretched the line on it? On what was it sunk bases, or in its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all sons of God shouted for joy? "(38.1-7)
For thirty-eight chapters, we hear Job pleading his case with God:
"I will speak to the Almighty," he says, "to argue my case with God." (13:3)
And in Job's pain, his prose degenerates into poetry (which really has been described as poetic prose of violence made it) that he regrets his inability to get answers to life's questions:
"Where is the wisdom to find and where is the place of understanding? Humanity does not know the way to it. It is not found in the soil at the living ... it can not be reached for the gold!" (28:12 -- 13.15)
Job shining, depressed and longing for death:
"Why is light for him to be in misery, and life to the bitter in soul who longs for death, but it does not come and dig it more than for hidden treasures" (3:20-21)
Job cries out the cry of the human condition, without Papering over cracks in life with all the glib cliches: And it is this experience that I think we all have, where the whole of creation seems to have gone into reverse - where instead of light appears in darkness, the light we have lived in seem to be growing in the shade and enveloped in darkness:
"When I looked for good, evil came, and as I waited for light, darkness came" (30:265)
And then Job cries out to God, not so much to the relief, or even a reversal of fortune, but simply a way to make sense of it all, so that he can see his pain is not meaningless.
And then God finally answered - out of the whirlwind of God's reply - but it is not to be the answer we had hoped for:
"Who is it that darkens council by words without knowledge? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements - surely you know! ..."
God's tone seems cynical and aggressive, and God seems to completely fail to address the issues raised by Job. God looks like, in Job 38, a domineering school teacher who gives a solid dressing-down to an errant schoolchild for having the temerity to ask too many questions.
"Who do you think you are, Job?" God asks. "Are you really the man to take me over this," God tease!
And then during the subsequent two chapters, God parades in front of Job a series of weird and wonderful animals - hippos, ostriches and crocodiles, and a whole range of things in the created order also does not seem to have any meaning, and it all seems to be designed to belittle Job.
It is a passage that leads back to me one of my most unpleasant memories from the university where one of my friends asked (what was thought to be) an inappropriate question to one of our teachers.
It was Psychology I, and the lecturer was lecturing us about Freud for a number of weeks, and on this particular day he had been going on for some hours, if I remember, on the topic Dream interpretation - telling us how when we dream, all elements In the dream, no matter how innocent they may seem, are really all just symbols of sexual activity of one or the other.
And my friend asked what I believed to be a perfectly legitimate question. She asked, "if all our dreams really about sex, what happens when we dream about sex? Are these dreams really a symbol of something else?"
And lecturer went very quiet, took off his glasses, stared directly at my friend and said, "Girly, you will never get anywhere in this University are asking questions like that!" And so he went to dress her down with a series of statements that had nothing to do with the question she had asked, so I am still not sure what his answer to this question really was?
It was not much of an answer, I felt, and when I listen to God's answer in the Book of Job, I find myself doing the same answer: It's not much of an answer! And yet I can almost hear God speak to me through the pages of this book saying, "Yes ... you've heard much worse!"
And yes, I've heard worse, and then you - glib, clic, superficial responses, which passes itself off as wisdom:
"Do not cry now. God obviously need your father in heaven" as the obvious answer is "yes, why should he when I need him here?"
"Oh God, but obviously had a good reason to take your grandmother / your mother / your child / your puppy ..."
"And you do not doubt that because doubting God's wisdom in these matters is a sin, and you should not question the wisdom of the Almighty."
We've all heard this kind of dribble and (dare we confess it), we have enough sprouted some of it even at a time in our Christian walk.
And yes, the answers that God gives to the job might not be what we were looking for, but certainly we've heard worse and certainly we hear much worse in the Book of Job itself.
Actually, if you trot your way through the entire book of job you will discover that the vast majority of it consists of three cycles of dialogue between Job and his three "friends" who are full of answers to life's troubles.
Friends of Job is well drilled in biblical theology. They know their Bibles, and they know that the only reason you get punished because you sin, and so they invoke God's case very eloquently, pointing out to Job that he is a sinner, and that if he gets hit it must be something he has brought upon himself, and although he is not familiar with the specific sin that led to his accident, he should stop living in denial and admit his mistakes in the hope that God will forgive him ..
And it's all very simple, and it is all very logical, and it all makes sense and it is all a big load of waste as far as jobs are concerned (and, it seems, so far as God is concerned)
God's answer to Job might not answer all our questions, but it is certainly a step up from glib and simplistic answer to Job's friends, and other interesting things about it, of course, that even God's answer to Job satisfy us, it has lifted Job!
This in itself is significant, I think, and researchers like to theorize about why Jobs is God's mysteries so gratifying.
The general idea is that while no job may not get an intellectually thorough answer, he is nevertheless spiritually and emotionally fulfilled through the experience of God's presence. And it is, there might be, but if we stand back and ignore a psychological analysis of the jobs it may be enough in itself to acknowledge that Jobs did not receive an answer from God, regardless of the content of this response. For while the three friends see it as their duty to speak in defense of God, it seems finally that God is well able to speak for themselves!
Jobs has his day in court, so to speak, and maybe that was all he needed. And maybe it's the right word of hope for us in all this - even if God's answer to Job might not exactly work for us is security for us here that God will take our issues seriously - that God is not deaf to our questions, let alone for our suffering. God takes us seriously, and God will ultimately go with us, although it is in God's own way, in God's own time.
So why God allows us to go through the things we go through? Well, the Book of Job tells me that I can safely leave God to answer that one for you for themselves!
It might not be the solution you were looking for, of course, any more than God's answer to Job was just the answer you were looking for, but we have to deal with life as it is and with God as God is, or as Jobs would say:
"Shall we accept good from the hand of the Lord and not evil?" (2:10) "The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord" (1:21)
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