To Speak Well of God (Part 10 of 0)

To Speak Well of God – Part 18

18.1 Reflection

Remember how the drama began. God started it. Not Satan. It was God who provoked Satan to consider Job (Job 1:8), not the other way around. And now, at this late stage in the analysis, we are well set to appreciate exactly what it was that God was starting.

I recall an episode involving a school-friend of mine who, when we were both nine, went around the school playground challenging everyone to arm-wrestling matches. He was a good kid, no bully; it was just that he had recently obtained some newly developed strength and proficiency at arm-wrestling and so was delighted to tour the playground encouraging anyone of our school year to compete. He generally won, obviously, else I presume he’d have stopped issuing the challenges; such is the nature of nine-year old boys after all (and perhaps some older ones, too!). This kept him entertained for many days that summer term, I recall. There’s a certain degree of immaturity and self-promotion at work, obviously; arguably combined with a certain degree of insecurity. Yet as long as the conduct is con­fined to nine-year-olds arm-wrestling in the schoolyard, it’s all pretty harmless.

But the problem is this. Is the book of Job teaching me that my God is the same? That He is no more mature than a braggadocio nine-year-old? After all, God can confidently challenge Satan in order to prove him wrong, because His divine omniscience guarantees Him full knowledge concerning Job’s true character. But is the Joban drama showing me no more than the Almighty wandering around the celestial playground issuing intellectual arm-wrestling challenges He knows He can’t lose? Is this my God?

If I’m under the impression that God performs all this to demonstrate Satan’s error, presumably the answer has to be ‘yes’. Unfortunately, for under those cir­cumstances, the only thing resulting from the barter between God and Satan is a victory for God and a defeat for Satan — which victory God knew He would secure. But understanding the three friends who ended up being saved as the embodiments of the Satan, I see a God whom I can speak well of very easily. No wonder God initiated this interaction with Satan — He was concerned with saving their lives, even of those opposing Him! That’s what my God goes around provoking: Salvation.

My God is indeed an awesome God. 18.2 The Big Picture

The book of Job is a book of wisdom. It is delightfully small in plot: just three main characters and the all-too-revealing interactions deriving from their inher­ent natures. The characters are:

  • God, whose inherent nature is Life (not counting His armor-bearer Elihu as a separate character in his own right, which is appropriate).
  • The Satan, Leviathan, human pride, the second most powerful force in the universe, who is in essential opposition to God. He appears in the triumvirate form of the three friends of Job; (yet it is also true to say that the three friends are victims of Leviathan as much as they are unwitting promulgators of him).
  • Job, the Righteous Man, who attempted to wrestle with the Satan to defend his God, and through whose intense suffering God was able to free the three friends trapped in their own pride.

What is now tremendously attractive is the simplicity of the whole drama. The book simply presents the three fundamental forces in the spiritual universe: God; Good; and Evil (I am using ‘Good’ to mean obedience to God and ‘Evil’ to mean rebellion to Him). God directs the drama to show how each of these fundamental components interacts with the others.

Since there are only three characters in the spiritual universe, there are only four potential interfaces in that universe (and life is lived at the interface). I don’t wish to sound unapproachably mathematical but in general, for any three-component system A B & C, there are four potential interfaces: A-B; B-C; A-C and the triplet A-B-C. In our case, that translates to the interfaces between: God & Evil; Good & Evil; God & Good; and all three together. The drama of Job, with superb simplicity, steps through these combinations in turn and reveals the inherent nature of each interaction (see Figure 18_1).

So, per Figure 18_1, we can summarize the book of Job this way:

  • The Prologue (ch 1-2) where God interacts with the Satan. The subject is how the Righteous Man, Job, behaves.
  • The Debate (ch 3-31) where the Satan interacts with the Righteous Man. The subject is how God behaves.
  • The Intervention (ch 32-41) where God interacts with the Righteous Man (initially through one sent before to straighten the way and then directly). The subject is how Leviathan, the Satan, behaves.
  • The Epilogue (ch 42) where all three parties collide and the conclusion of the matter is revealed. God speaks concerning all three parties. The Righteous Man speaks concerning God and himself. The Satan is left with nothing to say. (I suspect it will also be this way at the ultimate conclusion, at the end of days.)

As a further symmetry, God empowers both the Satan and the righteous man to have an effect in each other’s life (Figure 18_1). In the prologue, God empowers the Satan to affect the life of Job. The Satan, being Satan, can only act destructively. His self-centered jealousies operate to destroy Job’s life as much as he is (they are) able. In the epilogue, God empowers the righteous man to affect Satan’s life. God can confidently announce that the righteous man will act to bring salvation, even to the ones responsible for afflicting him; because it is the inherent nature of the righteous to reflect God and therefore propagate salvation, which Job faithfully does.

There is symmetry upon symmetry, yet all within a beautifully simple integrity, in this remarkable book.

18.3 To Speak Well of God

This structure reveals the book of Job as the classic education of wisdom. It lists simply and completely all the elements and interfaces in the spiritual world, so that a profound and complete understanding of spirituality can be attained by the attentive reader. Overriding the plotline of interactions is the theme itself: “theol­ogy”: the words that a man, whether he in is opposition to God or in resonance with Him, (i.e. whether he is satanic or righteous), will speak about his God.

It also teaches us that we are guaranteed to have an effect upon the universe every moment we are alive. Every moment that we are filled with pride, our influence is constantly destructive on those with whom we interact. Conversely, every moment that we are resonant with God, our words and behavior have a saving influence. The book of Job suggests there’s no possibility of sitting passively on the fence. We’re constantly generating effects either towards salvation or destruction.

Whence then Job’s suffering? Ironically, it was a consequence of sin, just as the three friends had said all along. But not his sin, as they had wrongly supposed: it was theirs. Their intractable pride kept them from union with their God. But because God loved them, and saw the persevering faith of His servant Job, He devised a plan. By this, their pride would be brought into such sharp relief that they would be able at last to recognize their error, repent and find grace. And what an immense degree of suffering Job had to bear for this to happen! Such is the degree of damage human pride inflicts upon the world. Yet now that we can see the true source of the suffering, human pride, God is justified even as Job suffers.

And through it all, the righteous man spoke that which was right about his God, which God affirmed.

“You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (Job 42:8). Spongberg comments on God’s vindication of Job:

“Hence we learn the importance of being right. Sound doctrine is vital!!”

While Spongberg’s commendation to the vitality of doctrinal rectitude can indeed be Scripturally supported (e.g. 1Tim 4:16), I do not believe this is the point the Joban drama is trying to achieve. The point of Job’s account is not to speak well of ourselves when we speak well of God; to pat ourselves on the back perchance we should accurately perceive, or more likely receive, knowledge of some divine construct of the universe. The message of the book of wisdom is simpler than that, as wisdom often is. The wise speak well of God, which Job did; and for which the Father commends him.

By contrast, we revisit our three highly regarded friends of the common era, who presumed to speak knowledgeably of the drama. Jung, who praises man above God: “The reason He doubts Job is because He projects His own unfaithfulness upon a scapegoat”; Murray, who sees God’s behavior towards Job as: “like torturing your faithful dog to see if you can make him bite you”; and Weiss, who supposes: “God, just to make a petulant point, proceeds to do almost everything the most villainous of beings could want.” God had worked His plan of salvation success­fully, and so Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite, three former emulations of the Satan, were transformed by His grace. And all that arises from the Earth in response to this miraculous work are hate-filled epithets, the like of which we see above. Yet from whom do such comments come? The Satan! Those whose characters are filled with the pride of their own supposed intelligence: ironically the identical mindset to the three friends whom God had — successfully! — worked to save.

Most amazing of all, God knows that by working in this way He causes those who will only cast a cursory glance in His direction to be more likely repulsed by what they see, than enchanted; yet He works that way anyway. I find this is a common and deliberate methodology of God: He supplies a picture which, on the surface, will appear almost as the exact opposite of what it really is. Those who are opposed to Him will find adequate evidence to continue rejecting Him; just as those who dig deeply into an investigation of what is really happening will find the evidence that relays the beauty of the work in progress and thereby heighten their pleasure and strengthen their faith. Jesus confirms this:

“For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him” (Matt 25:29).

“Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or under­stand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: ‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people’s heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.’” (Matt 13:13-15, quoting Isa 6:9-10)

The “they” in Jesus’ latter quote is necessarily those who are predisposed to dis­believe in a loving Father. Those who come to God, perhaps, not only with a view that they have a ‘right’ to live, but to have that life filled with (their concept of) blessings and, perchance even that is not enough, also an explanation, in terms they can understand, for every event in the world they perceive as unjust. With that disastrously unfortunate attitude, their interpretation of the book of Job must conclude that God is either uncaring or outright malicious. It is a true tragedy, but those who have closed off spiritual perception are sadly left in a very black darkness indeed.

So through all the years that God has worked this type of salvation, He has equally patiently borne the vitriol of those who professed themselves to be wise and castigated the very process of salvation He initiated. How fascinating it is that even their evil-speaking of God allows the disciple to further speak well of Him! We are enabled to see His almost endless patience in bearing these attacks, in addition to the loving care He provides for those he seeks to save. Again: this is an awesome God.

And He has provoked these various revelations through a single question: “Have you considered my servant Job?”

Finally, I can say that I have. I have considered this most excellent servant of the One who has no servants. I am enabled to see a Father who provides, even pro­vokes, salvation wherever He works. Sometimes this work is straightforward and His loving nature is plainly apparent; and my theology remains unchallenged. Yet sometimes, as in the drama of Job, we see those most desperate paths to salva­tion. In these paths God reaches out even to those trapped in the deep-sea lair of the fiery, thrashing beast that is the near-indomitable Leviathan. No easy road to salvation this; and consequently the price exacted from the priest of the very high­est, ancient order of Melchizedek is stiff indeed. But God had not underestimated the righteous man Job, and He achieved the salvation He sought. God endured throughout the centuries thereafter, with almost unending patience, those who spoke of Him viciously, precisely because He initiates this particular route to salvation, along with all the others, for us.

So, yes, I have considered God’s servant Job. And consequently, I am proud of my Father.

Book on which the series is based is available

Author’s note: These studies are now concluded. My grateful thanks to The Tid­ings magazine for letting me serialize about 50% of the material from the book “To Speak Well of God,” available at Lulu.com http://tinyurl.com/pople-on-job/. Cheaper copies (about $17 USD, or equivalent) are available from the following brethren: