Job's Preservation in the Absurd (Job 15-21)

Call to Worship

We are called tonight to worship with reminders from the Psalms and Paul:

Ps. 89:14 Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne; Lovingkindness and truth go before You.

1 Cor. 2:1-5 And when I came to you, brethren, I did not come with superiority of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling, and my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith would not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God.

Lord’s Prayer and Absolution

Let us pray:

Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. We beseech you, merciful Lord, to your faithful people pardon and peace, that they may be cleansed from all their sins, and serve thee with a quiet mind; through Jesus Christ our Lord. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. In the name of the Father, who creates, and of the Son, who redeems, and of the Holy Spirit, who sanctifies and purifies us before You, Amen.

Sermon

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why did this happen? This doesn’t seem right.” Whether it be something happening to you, or someone else… you are, in essence, asking “What is justice?” Encompassed in this question has been the central question of Job, the “theodicy,” “Why do evil things happen to good people?” We begin to see this question formulate, that is, come into fruition, as Job becomes more and more disheartened by his conversation with his “friends.” His friends now insist more than ever that Job must have done something to deserve such brutal divine judgment.

But first, allow me to offer a historic example of these follies. In 1755 in Lisbon, Portugal, a major earthquake brought this question to the forefront. Destroying the city, killing around 45,000 people, its event led many Enlightenment (i.e., Rationalist) theologians to attempt to explain its event. The prevailing theological response was that it was a form of divine judgment. On one side, Roman Catholics (Alexander Pope) attributed the disaster to an influx of Protestants in Lisbon; on the other, Protestants (Gottfried Leibniz) attributed the disaster to Lisbon’s majority Roman Catholic population. Either way, there was an attempt to explain what could only be described to them as a cruel dictum of God. Reading from Job, we are beginning to see how these faulty views of God’s justice and providence lead to these conclusions. In response to these explanations, and especially the view that “the actual world is the best of all possible worlds,” or philosophical optimism, Voltaire wrote a beautiful, but scathing, critical poem titled, Poem on the Lisbon Disaster. In it, he responds to this concept of “what is, is right,” or that all actions—whether it be good-tidings or adversity—necessitate a logical explanation. You see, as philosophers were trying to explain away the disaster in light of their view of God, Voltaire wrote:

Was then more vice in fallen Lisbon found,

Than Paris, where voluptuous joys abound?

Was less debauchery to London known,

Where opulence luxurious holds the throne?

He rejects this hypothetical God who acts purely on a balanced scale of rights and wrongs to inflict judgment. He asks, is profligate Paris truly more virtuous than Lisbon?

Our Savior, Jesus, speaks on this issue himself. In Luke chapter 13, Christ Jesus is told of a report where Galilean’s were slaughtered unjustly by Pontius Pilate, blood spilled and shed along with their sacrifices. More than just the injustice of the murder of Galileans, human sacrifice was forbidden to the Israelites. Yet, listen to how Christ responds, seemingly similar to the questions Voltaire asks,

Luke 13:2-3 “Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

This message of repentance follows from the early maxim of Job that “Naked I came from the womb, and naked I shall return.” Our creations and demises are all the same. Ecclesiastes reminds us best that the wicked and the wise, the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, all fall to the same fate: death. Job even begins his poetic response in chapter 14 with “Man, who is born of woman, is short lived and full of turmoil.” (Job 14:1). But moreso Christ reminds us that certain results don’t predicate certain actions. That is, correlation is not causation. For all we have equal treatment under the covenant of grace, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus Our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).

More will be said on this later, but it can certainly be summed up when Voltaire prefaces his poem,

'If it be true,' they said, 'that whatever is, is right, it follows that human nature is not fallen. If the order of things requires that everything should be as it is, then human nature has not been corrupted, and consequently has no need for a Redeemer.

We turn again to the Middle Sections of Job, the poetic sections, the discursive section, the section of pleading with God and with company. One discovery I made in the last week is the Hebrew word typically translated as “friends” does not necessitate that these men are friends. In fact, in Job it is a lot more likely to mean “colleague” or even “another [other one].” This is significant as we’ve been reading through their apologetics of God’s essence to Job, but falling short describing that God as themselves.

Eliphaz: The Rational Critique of Faith

Eliphaz the Temanite, who we categorized last week as living the archetypal “rational life” is again the first to respond to Job’s monologue. This time he's much more stringent in his critique of Job, now with a focus on Job’s wisdom. Focusing on his own wisdom, his own thought, he speaks against Job’s pleas,

Job 15:3-6 Should he argue with useless talk, / Or with words which are not profitable / Indeed, you do away with fear [reverence] / And hinder meditation before God / For your guilt teaches your own mouth / And you choose the language of the crafty. / Your own mouth condemns you, and not I; And your own lips testify against you.

You see, what Eliphaz is professing is an inversion of Job’s words. While Job speaks of reality, Eliphaz speak of rationality. He accuses Job of not being God-fearing enough (of course we know this not to be true from the opening prose, yet let us be reminded this information is not known by any of the men), and of uttering useless words that destroy God’s image and condemns him. We, however, see Eliphaz as vain, inadvertently describing himself here. Next, Eliphaz provides his view of the natural life and its connection to God, in explaining the plight of the wicked,

Job 16:20, 24-25 The wicked man writhes in pain all his days, / And numbered are the years stored up for the ruthless. Distress and anguish terrify him… / Because he has stretched out his hand against God.

Eliphaz reminds us of the philosophers and theologians on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Especially those that held that the earthquake was a form of divine judgment and had to struggle to determine what the judgment was for. Or, those that claim that what is, is right, ignoring God’s historical and covenantal plan, it’s visibility within us but invisibility in the “uncaring” world. Again, Eliphaz speaks of God as being the ultimate worldly judge, not the ultimate (spiritual + temporal) judge. By this I mean Eliphaz, in his rational mindset, sees God as no different than a municipal judge determining by a code what is right and wrong. One could then ask, “Is an action right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right?”

Let me end on Eliphaz with reality, with the words of the wise old King, who has seen power, wealth, and glory, and at the end of his life warns of the vanity of it all. It is all vanity and a striving after the wind. On the plight of the wicked, he laments,

I have seen everything during my lifetime of futility; there is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his wickedness.

This is where the real beauty is, the real method of finding meaning. That is, both in faith and in recognition of the absurd that Job continues to toil in. The beauty is in the realization that God is never in the wrong, and relative to God we always are. Such that his ways, out of our view, have us continually in mind. We will revisit these themes of justice as we return later to the ethical life.

Bildad: Aesthetic Imagery Over Faith

We turn again to Bildad, who offers one of the shortest speech of them all here. In short words, he continues in his highly sensual descriptions, this time in regard to the same issue put forth by Eliphaz: the plight of the wicked. Now, this question is somewhat discussed during their first round of speeches, but the main focus is on what Job is doing. They shift to a meta-ethical (“beyond ethical”) lens in response to Job’s admissions on God’s justice not perfectly aligning with human justice, critiquing the men's wisdom at the same time. Regardless, Bildad describes this visible imagery of what God should do with the wicked,

Job 18:5, 7, 19-21 Indeed, the light of the wicked goes out… His vigorous stride is shortened, And his own scheme brings him down… “He has no offspring or posterity among his people, / Nor any survivor where he sojourned. / “Those in the west are appalled at his fate, / And those in the east are seized with horror. / Surely such are the dwellings of the wicked, / And this is the place of him who does not know God.

Regarding human justice, that box these men try to fit God into, even on its face it works radically different than divine. For one, most human legal institutions have statute of limitations, that means they are bound by time—temporal. God does not work in that way. Meaning, him being outside of time, his justice works towards the greatest end, since the greatest end need not necessitate a great middle. To put in a way over-simplistic way, one must always break a few eggs to make an omelette, or that omelette would not exist as an omelette at all.

Bildad would be distressed to see God not working in the ways Bildad creatively illustrates. Again, God has become an image of man not man an image of God, this Bildad must think of him in these vivid images. Notice as well how Bildad’s description of the wicked man’s fate seems to coincide with Job’s suffering. In essence, he’s referring to not only his image of God, but his image of Job. God’s beauty is destroyed if the truth of Job comes to light. As Nietzsche would phrase this idea, “God is dead and we have killed him.”

In contrast, this God is not a dead God, but alive and thriving. We see very vividly in Job’s response of his focus on true divine justice, i.e., focusing on the end goal (telos), not the intermediary,

Job 19:25-26 As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, / And at the last He will take His stand on the earth. / “Even after my skin is destroyed, / Yet from my flesh I shall see God;

Moreso than just the Christ imagery, a beautiful counter to Bildad’s moving but vain images, the Redeemer lives, even after human death. Yet from Job’s flesh, or rather, the flesh of humans, we shall see God if we emulate Job’s piety. And, of course, in salvation history Christ came to redeem us, the Emmanuel (God with us), tearing down that infinite distinction, revealing himself, self-emptying himself, for our benefit.

But for now, Job professes the truth of the fallen human nature. Not in spite of his “pure and blameless” life, but because of it. He realizes, as Voltaire had against those that see every particular instance as God inflicting “human justice,” that without this knowledge, there would be no need for a Redeemer. As such, the true Redeemer is present only in and through Job’s suffering. So that, when Paul proclaims our goal “that [we] may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His suffering, being conformed to His death,” (Phil 3.10) we are understanding it as the wise and pious Job does, and not as his foolish and fleshly “friends” do. In Scripture, that is, piety and wisdom (Christ as the wisdom [and power] of God cf. 1 Cor 1) are mutually interlinked, inseparable.

Zophar: The Anti-Ethical Man is the One who Suffers

Zophar’s last speech occurs in chapter 20. It is unknown why he only had two chances to speak but I have a hypothesis. Zophar has been the seemingly least harmful of the “friends,” focusing on an abstract “ethicality” rather than Job’s actions. He doesn’t indict Job in his first speech, just says he deserves more punishment. It would seem, and we will focus on this in two weeks, that the man Elihu—beneficiary of the religious life—acts as that woken-up Zophar. That the ethical is tied to the religious in some way, as Kierkegaard would phrase it as the ethico-religious, that acting as a median stage between the two. Yet we don’t get there yet, Zophar, like the others, focuses on his own epistemology (“thinking about thinking”). In essence, he approaches Job with an approach to the wicked focused on inner cleanliness (or one might say, sanctification). One could even make a connection with the law of the flesh (Zophar) compared to the law of grace (Job). But let’s hear him in full,

Job 20:3–5, 27-29 I listened to the reproof [instruction] which insults me, / And the spirit of my understanding makes me answer. / Do you know this from of old, / From the establishment of man on earth, / That the triumphing of the wicked is short, / And the joy of the godless momentary? / The heavens will reveal his iniquity, / And the earth will rise up against him. / The increase of his house will depart; His possessions will flow away in the day of His anger. / This is the wicked man’s portion from God, / Even the heritage decreed to him by God.”

Zophar seems on the right path, listening to instruction, hoping the Spirit will guide, but his insistence on these human establishments, that human justice, prevents him, ironically, from that joy of the God.

Zophar’s downfall, then, is not in his silence but in his speech. His words are lofty, even poetic—he speaks of the heavens revealing iniquity and the earth rising up in judgment—but they echo the hollow certainty of someone who has not yet encountered the terror of grace. He too is convinced that wickedness always reaps visible consequence, that suffering is the currency of guilt, and in doing so, he becomes the very embodiment of the anti-ethical man: one who reduces the mysteries of God’s justice to a moral formula. This being that living the true ethical life is in God (hence the Elihu figure speaking in his place after the third oratory sequence). There is no room in Zophar’s system for a righteous sufferer; thus, Job must be wicked. But Zophar, unlike Job, has never wrestled with the hiddenness of God. He speaks, not from the whirlwind, but from the comfort of coherence. And that is precisely why he fails. He is not evil, but he is too sure. And in Scripture, it is often the sure man—not the sinful one—who misses the heart of God.

Job Responds

Job begins by adressing them to pay attention, not to their ways, but the ways of a pious soldier (Christ-figure)

Job 21:1, 4 Listen carefully to my speech, As for me, is my complaint to man? / And why should I not be impatient.

His appeals are not to them, but God. While his speeches certainly address the futility of their words—its vanity—his audience is God. In one way, he’s speaking to God, praying, pleading. Listen as he does so, asking the same question that has been on all their minds (re-asking as if he’s oriented to God’s ears unlike the others),

Job 21:7 Why do the wicked still live, / Continue on, also become very powerful?

Let it be of note that God, at the end of Job, shows himself most openly to Job only, his humble servant and pious follower. Yet, he then turns to respond to them, the Spirit aspirating from his mouth,

Job 21:13 They spend their days in prosperity, And suddenly they go down to Sheol. / Can anyone teach God knowledge, / In that He judges those on high?

We find our answer, as has been suggested throughout each response. These men only know flesh, they only know temporality. They have not been able to disconnect Sein und Zeit (Heidegger reference)—Being and Time—God is inescapable from their limited worldview. In the same way, God’s proof of his omnibenevolence (all-goodness) to Job is parading Job through all of life’s intricacies and showing all that Job misses by being temporal… finite… mortal. But, God’s justice nonetheless, shines forth in these wicked men’s end—Sheol, the place of eternal suffering for the damned. If only we could see the consequences, as well as the glory, in their right placement before us. But we cannot, thus we serve that which is mysterious, that sacramental God which reveals Himself to us as he pleases and re-presents Himself in the Bread and Wine, asking for us to be reborn in baptism, to repent. It’s the same message Christ gave in Luke 13, that ‘you men are too focused on the now, repent or you will be just like those that reject me.’ Let us be ever-present under that almighty High Priest, High Judge, Almighty and Redeemer.

Conclusion

Let’s finish with a quote from that great philosopher of existence Søren Kierkegaard, who described that knight of faith Job is and becomes,

The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen but, if one will, are to be lived.

Job has continued to live, continued to strive, all because of his assurance that the most high and beautiful (divine justice) is not heard about, read about, or seen, but lived. In contrast, all three of these “friends” have led their accusations from Job’s supposed unintended wrong to a deliberate wrong. They all hold to a view of God’s justice that lacks God’s omniscient providence, i.e., ignorant of his final plan of reconciliation through the Messiah, Our Redeemer Jesus. They all have in mind an alien justice, a human justice, where God’s providence must be visibly seen, heard, and read about. They put no trust in God, only in themselves.

Take for instance the testimony of Clamence in Albert Camus’ The Fall, a great title fitting for the book of Job. The main character, a lapsed lawyer, speaks of justice as such:

If pimps and thieves were invariably [perfectly] sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent, cher monsieur [dear sir]. And in my opinion… that’s what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything would be just a joke.

Job’s “friends”—which we see are becoming less patient with Job and more adversarial—believe in the invariable sentencing of God. Job, however, in his pious nature, holds to this same idea, that that must be avoided. These men see themselves as innocent, expressing their self-righteousness as they tarnish Job’s “pure and blameless” life. That is, they, in reality, also know the truth about Job, but their human “wisdom” prevents them from accepting it. If Job, as that “innocent” man is suffering despite his adherence to God, what punishment is in store for these three men? They must turn him into a devil, claim he’s signed a Faustian bargain, in order to feel better about themselves.

There’s no question here: what Job has to say in the dialogues looks nothing like praise, certainly not by any conventional standard. In fact, Job begins by cursing the day of his birth, which amounts to nothing less (if we pay attention to the images in this curse) than a curse upon creation itself, a re-invocation of primordial chaos, a revoking of God’s good creation. Then, in subsequent chapters, Job proceeds to challenge God himself—God’s care, compassion, and justice—using language so direct and confrontational that the three theologian friends take it as blasphemy. But as the Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez describes Job’s attitude,

“[it is] not a rejection of God. In fact, it might well be claimed that this manifestation of irrepressible feeling expresses, even if in an unconventional form, a profound act of self-surrender and hope in God.”

However, by the very directness of his speech, Job is really only continuing to demonstrate what was affirmed in his proverb, namely, that in all these matters he knows that he is dealing directly with God. The man is God-intoxicated, we might say, theocentrically obsessed. Indeed, what he seeks most is to see God and to have God recognize and acknowledge him. This would be his badge of honor. In sum, we see in our readings today a move from the folly of theodicy (problem of evil/plight of the wicked) to doxology (praising God/lit. word of glory). Let us set our minds on the future, the end, always with that vision death that drives us. Let us spend it praising God for his good, and not speaking ill of him when our will does not conform with is will. For speak in the same prayer as Christ did, “Your kingdom come, your will be done.” Now, let us pray to the I AM, to our creator, to existence in itself. To You from Your people.

Benediction

The Lord bless you, and keep you; The Lord make His face shine on you, And be gracious to you; The Lord lift up His countenance on you, And give you peace.’