Book Job, Servant of God
In the last article we tried to show how the Arab background of the’ book of Job can explain a great deal which has puzzled many – the poetic speeches, the language, and the origin of the book. Now we wish to deal with the message of the book, and to show how essential it is to understand this in terms of Job’s background.
We suggested that the book is not a treatise on matters of general principle, but deals with a particular case, and a particular problem. We suggested that many of the statements which on the surface look like being descriptions of man in general are nothing of the kind; they are statements which really deal with Job’s case in a particular way, in the oblique turn of speech of the Arab, using the third person ‘a man’ instead of saying directly ‘Job’, ‘Elihu’, etc.
The book is not, therefore, an explanation of the reason for human suffering. This is borne out by the actual content of the book. Job is not a man who simply suffers the normal distress brought on all men in more or less severity by chance- equally, he is not one who suffers chastisement from God for the direct purpose of improving his character. We know this, because we have been told in the prologue that Job suffers because Satan has challenged God; and that Job is by confession of the LORD suffering without cause (Job.2:3). Moreover, Job himself knows that he is suffering by the direct action of God, and so do his friends. We know the immediate reason for this, however, but Job does not.
The prologue tells us that Job is called on to suffer as a representative of God – that is, his suffering is the result of Satan’s challenge to God, and God uses his case to demonstrate the excellence of His ways in the earth, as compared to those of Satan. Job is being publicly pilloried because he is a servant of God; he is placed on public trial, as it were, to prove that men do not serve God for reward, but because they have faith in Him. If Job’s faith begins to fail under the terrible pressure to which it is subjected, we need to remember that Job (perhaps alone among the servants of God under trial) did not know why he was suffering this trial. It must also be remembered that Job suffered the actual removal of every earthly possession and comfort, and the deprivation of bodily soundness, without losing his faith in God. It is only when his fellow-worshippers accuse him of secret and unatoned sin that Job’s belief in the justice and mercy of God begins to fail.
We insist, then, that Job is not ‘Everyman’. He is, first, a servant of God who is called on to face undeserved suffering, in order to show God’s way to.men. This rotting, living carcase is, as it were, ‘lifted up’ before men as a demonstration of the lengths to which God will go in order to defeat Satan. God kills; and He makes alive: He brings down to the grave, and brings up: and those that walk in pride He is able to abase.
The Living God
The message of the book of Job, then, is the same message carried by story after story of the Old Testament. It is the message of the tale of Abraham’s offering of Isaac; of Joseph’s ill-treatment by his brethren; of all the ancient poetic songs of the Old Testament – it is the message which might be called the ‘Statement of Faith’ of the Old Testament, which in its briefest form might be given as “I, I AM”
That is, God is a living God; and because He is alive, because He is, all live unto Him; though a man were dead, yet shall he live. In meditating on this simple statement, we can begin to understand the almost instinctive understanding and trust in God of the Old Testament worthies. Abraham, for example – did God ever tell him in a detailed treatise exactly what happens after death? If He did, there is no record of the fact. But He proved Himself as a living God to Abraham by creating life out of death in the life of Isaac from the dead womb of Sarah – and, after that, Abraham knew that even though he were to slay his own son, yet the living God could recreate him as easily as He had once created him. He did not need to have it written down for him. He knew the creative power of God, and so he had faith. He could say quite firmly to the servants, as he left them halfway down the hill,
“I and the lad will go yonder to worship, and come again to you”.
But in understanding the height of the power of God as Creator, it is also necessary to understand the depths of Satan. Life can only come out of death – the heel of the seed must be bitten before the children of pride can be abased. “Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended?” said another of the Bene Kedem, showing that the balance between creation and death was understood by these other descendents of Abraham.
And so we maintain that resurrection is taught in the book of Job, just as certainly as it is taught in the story of Abraham. Indeed, the whole tale is a treatise on resurrection, seen through the life of Job. just as Isaac’s ‘death’ taught the sons of Isaac. But for those used to thinking in plain logic, the lesson has to be spelt out in different terms. As the Sadducees of Jesus’ day, their minds altered by their study of Greek philosophy, failed to find resurrection taught in the Old Testament, and Jesus had to spell out to them the things formerly understood without a philosphical discussion – that God was not the God of the dead, but of the living, because a God is not a God if He is not alive Himself – and if He is alive – well, all else follows.
Perhaps we can put the matter differently by thinking about the circumstances of Satan’s challenge to God. We have said that Job and his friends, as sons of Abraham, worshipped Abraham’s Living God (remember the words of Abraham to God), “Oh that Ishmael might live before thee”, and God’s answer; “I have heard thee…” But also in that area idolatry was rife, no doubt practised by the inhabitants of the land before the advent of the sons of Abraham, and no doubt also by many of Abraham’s sons who found idolatry attractive. We believe that it is this claim between the two ways, the ways of idolatry and those of a living God, which caused the book of Job to be written. We think that Satan in the book was one of the ancient Arabian ‘demons’, a witch-doctor priest who believed himself to be a demon, by virtue of his possession by a ‘god’. Arabia has always abounded(and maybe still does abound) with this type of priest. Such a man would make his living by walking up and down in the land, and offering his services as a diviner, prophet, etc., for a price. Such a man offered religion for money – and his accusation against Job is linked with his belief that payment is a necessary part of religion. The ‘demons’ supposed to lurk in the desert rocks are, in fact, called ‘shaytan’ in Arabic, i.e. ‘Satan’. .
Now one of the principles which needs to be understood when considering this matter is that a worshipper is, or becomes, like the god he serves. This may be seen Scripturally in Ps. 115:4-8 and Is. 44:9, where the worshippers of idols are stated to be as dumb and as blind as their dead gods. It can also be seen in Rom. I, where the Apostle Paul shows how those who wdrshipped beasts became as beastly and vile as their gods. And so the man who serves a Living God must necessarily live with the life of God, live “unto him”, as Jesus puts it. Once this tenet is firmly held, it must also follow that the man who thinks that he will not be raised from the dead is beginning to doubt in his heart that God is alive. He has begun to go over to Satan, who at rock bottom represents human pride. And so we return once more to the case of Job and resurrection.
Job and Resurrection
Up to this point, we have dealt with Job as a faithful servant of God, put on trial so that the way of God may be demonstrated in the earth. We have not dealt with the view that Job was a believer in ‘works’ before his trial, and learnt faith afterwards, because this seems totally irrelevant both to the time and content of the book. However, if Job were indeed a man of faith before his trial, as we maintain, he must have believed in resurrection.
We do indeed believe that he did; but his belief was not stated in the kind of wc,i western minds expect, but in the kind of,way in which Abraham understocd resurrection – that is, by understanding that God is the Creator of life, and that men who believe in such a God will live to Him. There are places in the book of Job which simply do not make sense unless Job held this belief. For example, there is the statement by Job,
“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither”.
To return to a womb is to return to a place-of birth. The ‘womb’ here can only mean the earth; he has been born once of his mother in the sense that his mother was a creature of the earth; and he returns to the actual dust of the earth. But if the earth is seen as a womb, there can be a new birth some day.
However, certain statements of Job need to be taken into consideration. One of these is in 7:9.
“He that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more”.
Does Job really mean that no one who dies ever lives again? We suggest that this is a place where Job is employing the oblique speech of the Arab about himself, and is not making a general statement about all men. For the previous verses speak of his own life, and its end,
“The eye of him that hath seen me shalt see me no more…”
Job really means that he will go down to the grave, and never rise. He is not speaking about all men, or discussing whether or not there is a resurrection. He has lost faith in his own resurrection, not in the resurrection of all men.
But why should Job have come to this terrible conclusion about himself, if he still believed that God could and would raise the dead? Perhaps the answer can be seen in later verses of this chapter.
“Why dost thou not pardon my transgression, and take away mine iniquity? for now shall I sleep in the dust; and thou shalt seek me in the morning, but I shall not be.” (v.21).
This verse surely is the whole key to Job and resurrection. There was to be a resurrection morning; oh, yes; but Job would not be there…. God would come to seek his own, and Job would be left unrevived. Why? because God would not forgive him his sins – you can see that Job did not think that he was righteous in any personal way. He understood the true meaning of righteousness through the forgiveness of sins; but he had come to to the frightening conclusion that God was no longer prepared to forgive his sins, and so had left him without hope.
We could say that this meant a loss of faith on Joo’s part – and perhaps this is a fair judgment. But remember that Job had been visited with more terible suffering than had ever been known in the earth, and that Job knew this had been directly brought on him by God. What conclusion could he come to, other than that God had forsaken His servant, and forsaken him for ever? Well, perhaps he could have divined that God had a purpose with him, and wouldin the end justify him; but in the depths of personal loss and debilitating disease Job’s confused mind could not rise above this agonising depression – he saw himself as dead – which brought, eventually, the true lesson home of how God alone can raise up a man from death. Indeed, Job himself, in the depths of despair, understood that only God could justity him; but he thought God was not prepared to do so (Job 9:30.31).
Job’s agony of mind can perhaps best be seen by reading through ch.I4. Here is a man born full of trouble – Job himself, not all mankind. He will leave the world like a shadow, and be no more; till the heavens be no more, Job will not wake from his sleep. And then the impassioned desire of a man without hope
“O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave…. that thou wouldest appoint me a set time, and remember me!”
Job would wait – how willingly – if only he thought this possible. But now God has sealed up his iniquity in a bag, carefully preserving it against him; and “thou destroyest the hope of man (Job)”. And, meanwhile, he has nothing but agony of flesh, and his soul weeps.
In this way Job, prodded by the stupid personal accusations of his friends, descends into the valley of the shadow of death. And in this black hole, Satan is waiting to make that death eternal. Satan, who is king of the children of pride. Deserted as he thinks by God, Job falls back on the one thing he refuses to give up, his pride, his self-respect – and in clinging to this, well-nigh accuses God of injustice. That is he come close to calling God a liar. At the beginning of the book, God and Satan are at odds; but at the end, Job has become the Satan by trying to justify Satan’s way instead of God’s.
Job’s Justification
Implicit in the understanding of God as the Living God is the idea that He kills, but also makes alive. He brings life to men not by lifting them up beyond the skies, but by bringing them down to death and then raising them up. Unless a man can realise his total dependence on the life of God – unless he can divest himself of all pride, – that man cannot be saved. But in every age, all men are not asked to descend personally into the depths in their lifetime. God has given us examples, so that a man can look at them, and understand, and be saved. In due time the Lord Jesus came into the earth, descended into hell, and ascended up into the life of God. But before Jesus’ example was displayed to the world, another man was publicly brought down to hell in order to show men God’s way. That man was Job,who, if he were not the perfect example, in that he came near failure at the last, at least pointed to the coming of the Son.
And so the end of the story demonstrates the justification of Job out of death into life; justification by the mercy of God, when he came to realise the folly of things he had said, and stripped himself of pride before God. First, the mediator stood and accused Job of setting himself up against God; and when Job realised his position, God Himself demonstrated to Job that which he had begun to doubt that He is a Living God, Who can create and does create, and therefore has the sovereign right to deal with His creation in His way, that is, to save by death. For He who creates can recreate; but man, child of pride, can do neither.
And the last lesson is that in this salvation, the final enemy is destroyed, Satan, King of the children of pride. This is why God gives the example of Leviathan. Leviathan was, no doubt, an actual animal known to Job; But he was an animal which man could not tame. Yet God could overcome him – and herein is the parable. Leviathan, king of the children of pride, is a symbol for the pride of man. Man cannot tame it; but God can. And He tames it by subjecting men – whom He has created and so has the right to deal as He wills with them – to suffering and death. God is saying to Job, “Choose your God. Myself, the Living God, Who created all things; or Leviathan, greatest of the beasts, symbol of man’s untamed pride. But if you choose Leviathan – remember that I am He Who is able to kill him; you cannot control him”.
Job, completely humbled, chose God – and so God lifted him up, and gave him life as a symbol of eternal life, after the death in the grave. And in choosing God, Job was able to mediate for his friends, and to save them. Here you can see how that Job is not’Everymare. He is the Servant of God, who suffers so that he, and others, may understand God’s ways through death into life, and who is at the end lifted up for the salvation of his brethren. He is the true type of Christ.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One