Have You Considered Job?

Suffering has a way of shrinking our world until it centers on the hurt. Pain streamlines a path for whatever is in our heart to quickly appear in our words and behavior. A mixture of desires for relief and demands for the world take notice of our plight produce sharp-edged words and actions. The heart is revealed quickly during a season of pain and suffering.

In long periods of agony, most seek the book of Job to help navigate the murky waters of grief and affliction. We see him as the standard we should aspire to. But I am starting to wonder if Job is such a standard bearer for how we face our suffering.  My attempts to follow Job’s path in the midst of my (comparatively small) suffering lead me toward angry venting and demanding God to say and do things he never promised to do. Did I stray from the path layed out by Job “the champion of sufferers”? I don’t think so. In fact, I believe I followed directly in his footsteps.

Job rightly starts out in patient silence, waiting for God. But after his friends start talking and his skin starts hurting, Job cries out. He curses the day he was born. He even gripes about God’s absence. As his words linger, the heavens remain silent. Tremper Longman points out: “Job’s words are more like the grumbling of the Israelites in the wilderness than like the laments in Psalms. In Numbers 11 we see Israel complaining about God but not to God. They speak as those who have no hope. While God invites the laments of the psalmists, he despises the complaints of the wilderness generation… In terms of our own prayer life, it is an important reminder to take our complaints to God…God welcomes our cries, but the book of Numbers attests to his disdain for complaints behind his back.”[1]

No one, including me, blames Job. I believe we should be honest about our pain and questions. Considering all Job lost, we can’t help but feel some solidarity with his monologues against God. Also, because we witness the story’s prelude and ending, we can’t help but feel Job has been cheated somehow. The confusing cosmic scope of the story’s beginning and end might be clues to how we misunderstand Job’s story entirely when we look for a blueprint for our path out of suffering.

We don’t know what to do with God seemingly making a wager with Satan at the expense of Job. Then, we are left dumbfounded when God skips over all of Job’s questions; instead choosing to tell Job just how little he knows about creating the world. Why didn’t God talk about suffering?  Because Job’s story leaves us with more questions than answers, we need to rethink Job’s ultimate purpose. As Longman later notes, the book of Job points us toward our need for wisdom.

Wisdom isn’t having all the answers, and wisdom isn’t a mental ascent that leaves our hearts behind. Ultimately wisdom is not a thing obtained, it is a relationship lived inside. Wisdom is a person. And that person is not Job. Job is a shadow or rough sketch of someone greater to come.

Job points us to the person who ultimately suffers as a righteous man with cosmic implications. Job is a sinful man, like the rest of us, not fully understanding the reason our “why?” questions go unanswered. But Jesus is Wisdom because he is The Word. And The Word became flesh.  He is the God-Man, who understands how our suffering will end because of his suffering.

As we walk through pain, we need Wisdom to light our path. When we are tempted to grumble, as our faith and hope wane, we need The Word to speak in our place. We can feel solidarity with Job, but we ultimately need to go further in seeing Jesus’ suffering as the larger story our pain is held inside. It is in his story we see suffering and death finally being defeated…one day.

 

[1] Longman, Tremper, III, ed. Baker Commentary on the Old Testament: Job. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012.(106-107)

Photo by Andreas Øverland