What’s An Article about Job doing in a series about legalism? Didn’t he have enough problems without an expositor accusing him of legalism? Job teaches us about suffering and patience and the magnitude of God.
Where does legalism come in? It comes in the theological perspective that led to his problems. Not just Job, but Bildad, Zophar, and Eliphaz all had the same highly legalistic theology. In fact, the entire thesis of the book hangs on that background. As we will see, the connection between legal righteousness and material well-being forms the basis of the whole drama. We will also see in Job a prefiguring of the Apostle Paul, who also learned to eschew his legalistic righteousness.
Assuming the historicity of Job
While we assume Job was a real historical person, the setting of the book itself demands we understand it as a dramatization. People don’t converse in the poetic language of Job and his three friends. The language of the three reads as drama, not actual human discourse. Another aspect of “unreality” comes right in the opening words: the description of Job as “blameless and upright.” This is counter to what we know about human nature. However, to get the theological import of the book, we must take the descriptions of Job, and his own accounts of his righteousness, at face value. If we, like Job’s friends, go fishing for sin on his part, we fall into the same legalistic trap of “exact retribution.” It demeans the whole point of Job’s suffering.
So, while accepting the historical reality of the book, we read it as a poetic parable of a blameless man who suffers greatly, yet fails to find reason for his devastation.
Blameless Job suffers
We meet Job with the description of a “blameless and upright man, who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). This is the narrator’s voice, not Job himself— at this point. The calamities that befall this blameless individual cover everything but his wife. Successive losses take away his wealth, his children, his health. By implication, and from evidence later in the book, he also loses his reputation and community standing (30:1, 9-10). Worst of all, Job loses his understanding of God. Later, of course, that will become a blessing. For the moment, it is his utter devastation. “A man’s spirit will endure sickness, but a broken spirit, who can bear?” (Prov. 18:14).
Anyone who has gone through a crisis of faith, when nothing about God seemed to make sense anymore, can appreciate Job’s misery. Of all his multitudinous ills, the worst, and therefore the focus of the book, is his desperate attempt to regain his understanding of God. Job cannot explain what has happened to him. He knows that God has struck him down without cause. This simply cannot be. Job’s theological wrestlings displace much of his mourning and physical suffering.
Three of his friends come quickly to help. Appalled to the point of speechlessness at his misery (2:13), for a week they give the best of their ministrations—silent empathy. Then, unfortunately, they start to talk. Unskilled helpers that they are, they make the fatal pastoral error of offering advice and theological explanation to one in great suffering. Not ones to offer verbal compassion and support, they attempt to solve Job’s misery by setting him straight concerning providence and sin. They think “correct theology” will enlighten Job, and thus remove his misery. (If this sounds familiar, learn, and don’t do likewise!)
Their strategy exacerbated rather than alleviated Job’s suffering. Now he had another grief to suffer — no one understood his plight. It was enough to lose his wealth, his health, and his family; now he had to endure it without any compassion or support. Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar had only one agenda, and it had no therapeutic value.
Exact retribution
The three friends understood the theology of suffering at the level Job did. All four believed in the classic legalistic paradigm of rules, rituals, and rewards. They all believed that if one did right, then God owed that person blessing — now, in this life for God rewards the upright and punishes the wicked. Wealth and well-being surely marked the upright.
Jesus’ disciples believed this way also. That’s why the gospels record the disciples’ “exceeding astonishment” at Jesus’ teaching about the difficulty of a rich man entering the Kingdom (Mark 10:23-26). If a rich man — obviously blessed for his piety — could hardly enter the Kingdom, who could? Before his calamities, Job fit that description ideally. Here we had the blameless and upright Job, who enjoyed the blessings of God beyond any of his comrades, with his vast wealth, family, and prestige. He had it all because he earned it all, so they thought.
While all four would have agreed on how God works, and why Job had previously accrued great temporal blessing, the three disagreed with Job as to the nature of his current circumstance. Driven by the inevitable logic of their legalist theology of reward and punishment, they readily concluded the obvious explanation: Job had sinned. They hardly needed to marshal any direct evidence; would not any one of Job’s multiple calamities suffice for a guilty verdict?
Job, however, seeing the whole drama from the inside, refuses to admit culpability. He maintains Almighty God has smitten him without cause (e.g. 9:21). The three friends find this untenable. “You must have sinned,” they repeatedly aver. Job continues in his denials, saying that he is totally at a loss to come up with any explanation of the Almighty’s blast.
We can simplify the first three-quarters of the book of Job as follows:
Three friends: Job, you sinned and God is punishing you.
Job: No I didn’t; I don’t know why He’s punishing me.
Three friends: Yes you did.
Job: No I didn’t.
Three friends: Yes you did!
Job: No I didn’t!
All four, enmeshed in the same paradigm of exact retribution, differ only on the issue of Job’s culpability. For the three friends, the answer to the dilemma lies in Job’s admitting he sinned. Job dismisses this option, having no sin to admit. For Job, the solution to the dilemma must come with an explanation of why the Almighty would reduce Job to the dust heap for no reason (9:17-24).
As Job nears the end of his self-vindication, he lists all his good deeds (ch. 29) and all the sins that he eschewed (ch. 31). In chapter 29, Job describes the esteem he had in the community, and enumerates his righteous deeds: “I delivered the poor when he cried…I was eyes to the blind and feet to the lame, a father to the poor.” Then, after an interlude bemoaning his current blighted state, he categorically denies having done any sin (ch. 31). In these two sections, he covers both sins of omission and commission; he’s innocent of both. He never mistreated his servants, coveted someone else’s wife, or walked with falsehood. He upholds his sexual morality, honesty, benevolence, truthfulness, single-minded worship of God, and generosity. He eschews adultery, idolatry, greed, covetousness, lying, vengeance, penury, and harshness.
We take these self-reports at face value regarding their accuracy. The story requires this perspective, as Job’s entire dilemma comes from God’s breaking him without cause. If Job has a flaw or a misdeed, then he has the explanation for his troubles. However, he is a righteous man, and he can prove it.
Therein lies the problem — Job’s measuring system. Nothing in his catalogue of chapters 29 & 31 mentions faith. Nowhere does he trust in the Almighty for his justification. Nowhere does he regard his deeds as just his reasonable service, with no obligation put on his Maker. Nowhere does he even hint at the possibility of some imperfection or limitation or need for improvement. He does not recognize his inherent dependence on God and plea for his Maker’s mercy. In other words, Job’s self-report, while accurate, reflects a mindset of self-justification by works. If anyone could boast in the law, it was Job. It is precisely this character that Almighty God must use to prove to all of us that “by works of the law shall no man be justified.” His criteria for righteousness is entirely self-created; he had become his own God. Job’s dilemma therefore displays the weakness of the legalistic system: even a righteous man cannot bring his own salvation. He can’t even make this present life a blessing. Fully righteous, and fully devastated, Job sat in the ash-heap of his theology.
The resolution
The resolution of Job’s theological vexation would not come in the uncovering of some secret sin to explain why God smote him. Neither would it come in the attribution of a general state of sin, or sin nature. It would not come in some mystical explanation of God’s nature that repaid good with evil. It would come in the reversing of Job’s model of rules and rewards. Job had to learn that ritualistic righteousness, even moral righteousness, as he proclaimed for himself, could never suffice to guarantee a life of blessing.
Why not? Why can’t we expect God to bless us when we do right?
What’s the point of doing right if eventually God blasts us anyway? Even sinners of basest rank never had it so bad as Job. What’s the deal?
Three major reasons teach us why legalism cannot suffice for salvation or guarantee temporal blessing:
- Legalism reverses the roles of judging and blessing. Instead of God judging and giving us blessing, we become the controllers of our blessing, and God gets judged. This happened precisely in Job’s case. Job felt God owed him blessing, and when God delivered evil, Job judged God! (e.g., Job 10:2-7).
- Legalism takes love out of the equation. When we introduce the expectancy of reward for doing right, we remove the possibility of love. We can no longer do good simply because it’s the right thing to do; we have the reward factor ever lurking to sully our motives.
- Legalism would create an impossible world. Just take Job’s theology and run it out. Suppose that all blessing accrued to the holy, and the sinners received swift and certain punishment. So someone falls sick — you know they sinned. Someone cuts their finger making dinner; perhaps they just sinned a little. Someone’s house burns — big, bad sin. At least this sort of world would make it easy to know who sinned! If someone in your ecclesia got cancer, you would disfellowship him, rather than support him, because he had to be a horrible sinner.
So all good Christadelphians would always come to meeting on Sunday, for fear of what might happen if they didn’t. What if they took a Sunday off because they felt a little bad? What if God thought they should have gone to meeting? Zap. Flu for sure, for missing meeting.
Your friends at work would ask you to travel with them, because they knew that good Christadelphians never got in accidents. Others would want to go to your church — not because they believed God’s promises, but because they knew it was a safe bet. Eventually they would ostracize you for being someone possessed of a magical spirit, because nothing bad ever happened to you.
Finally, how could God chasten those whom He loves? He would have to wait until they sinned big, so the teaching would come on their schedule, not His. Keep going with this line of thinking and you’ll eventually realize how utterly absurd a world we would live in if, in fact, Almighty God did employ exact retribution.
We could go on, but by now the point should stand as obvious. A world based on the exact retribution postulated by Job and friends would be an impossibility. All we have to do is extend their model to see that it cannot possibly work. Curiously, this does not stop people from believing in it, as exact retribution abides to this day in various forms. Every time you think a person’s suffering directly relates to a sin, you keep this form of legalism alive.
We don’t mean to preach randomness and happenstance occurrences. All things come under God’s control. Job did not suffer randomly or maliciously. He suffered to show that life cannot hold any one-to-one correlation between sin and suffering, or rules and rewards.
So Job, Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar needed a new model to explain the suffering of the righteous. They needed a new model to understand providential interventions. They needed to learn a lesson in God’s supremacy and wisdom. God can punish sin directly, and He also can have the righteous — notably His own son — suffer. God works with each of us according to His good will for our learning. This message would come from a fifth player in the drama, Elihu.
Elihu speaks
After three cycles of vain arguing, another voice comes in, that of Elihu. The three friends speak no more, and Job only briefly. The last act of the drama focuses on Elihu and God. Elihu has apparently listened to the entire debate, though we don’t know when he entered. Elihu faults all four men, and, in a lengthy speech, gets to the central issue. Unsheathing his theological sword upon the Gordian knot of legalistic retribution, he, for the first time, states that God’s visiting evil upon men does not come because of their wickedness. Evil has a preventive, not punitive function. The purpose of calamity is not to send men to the pit, but to keep them from the pit (33:22, 28,30). Elihu preaches a God who does not repay evil with evil, but forgives sin. The kernel of Elihu’s argument, in 33:26-30, addresses God’s forgiveness, His chastening, and His good will toward sinners who confess. This contrasts starkly with Job’s statement that God does not remit iniquity, but repays sin with evil (Job 10:14).
Although much of what Elihu says sounds like the same rhetoric as the others, his key points show that he saw into the realm of the spiritual regarding sin and suffering. Elihu correctly asserts that God respects the prayer of confession with forgiveness. He establishes the basis of salvation as confession, not legalistic righteousness (33:26-28).
Job and his friends lived with the working principle that suffering is the punishment for sin. Elihu says the purpose of suffering is to prevent sin, not punish sin. It has a didactic rather than adversarial origin. It shows God not as one who metes out punishment in accord with one’s transgression, but a God who lovingly wounds us for our learning.
Learning from suffering
What are we to learn from suffering? First, we learn dependence on God, and we see our life as completely in His hands. We learn that by works of the law shall no man be justified. We learn patience as we wait for the resolution, which may only come in the Kingdom. We learn to overcome adversity, and to increase the limits of our capabilities. We learn compassion for others who have calamities in life. We learn priorities, what’s really important in life. Most important, we see suffering as a symbol for the dispensation of mortality, and thus place our hope in perfection of the Kingdom of God on earth.
All the above learning constitutes spirit-mindedness, and it doesn’t come from following any set of codes or rituals. Spiritual growth comes only from spiritual activity, and, alas, suffering is a primary spiritual activity, as it completely counters the flesh. Job’s spiritual development would have ceased had God not intervened in his life. To be sure, he was blameless and upright. He was full of charity and concern for others. However, he thought that because of these virtues, God owed him something. God was dependent on him, not vice versa. To demolish this erroneous concept, the Almighty almost had to demolish Job.
Job and Paul
Paul’s autobiographical notes in Philippians 3 lead us to an inevitable comparison with Job. Paul uses the very same word of himself, “blameless” (v.6). Like Job, he thought God owed him something, and God had to dismantle this perspective so Paul could serve him. Paul also suffered the “loss of all things” (v.8). Paul’s losses compare with Job, even if they didn’t come in quickly successive acts. Paul’s conversion cost him his standing as Pharisee, his income, his health, and a family life. Eventually, it probably cost him his life. But Paul acknowledged that suffering, not rules and rituals, led to Christ-likeness; “…that I may share in his sufferings, become like him in his death, that if possible, I may attain the resurrection of the dead” (vv. 10-11). God brought great suffering on Paul: “I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name” (Acts 9:16). Through suffering the loss of all things, Paul learned to reject the “righteousness of my own” (v. 9; cp. Job 29, 31, and 32:2) in favor of the only true righteousness, that which comes from faith in the saving work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One