Lavender & Lace

The things I have learned recently in my study of the Book of Job is that the question this book posed to its original audience is very different from the question raised by its modern one today.

When looking to answer the “problem of evil” many people think this book holds the answer, when in fact, the question it actually raises pertains to the justice of God.

The book is framed by the opening two chapters in which we learn both that “The Satan” is the source of Jobs problem and that God has given him permission to do what he has done (nothing happens without God). We are invited to look at Jobs torment and his questions with the privileged knowledge that Satan is trying to get Job in his power, to demonstrate that humans are not worth Gods trouble.

Our modern system of ideas, which historians and philosophers call “humanism”, is based on the belief that human happiness constitutes the highest value and therefore the highest good (since goodness is related to value). Happiness in turn is generally defined in terms of an absence of pain (physical, psychological, or existential), such that our word evil (the opposite of good) is synonymous with human suffering. Everyone who participates in the environment of the modern West, both Christian and non-Christian, share this idea, although Christians and non-Christians differ in the idea of the means by which the greatest happiness might be achieved (power, pleasure, and material wealth versus charity, simplicity, etc.).

The people of the ancient Near East, however, did not hold human happiness as the highest ideal. Their highest ideal is probably best described by our English word order. For the ancients, a thing was good not based on the extent to which it produced human pleasure or eased human suffering, but the extent to which it was functioning as it was intended to.

In the ancient perspective, failing to harm or destroy a people who were behaving contrary to order would be bad no matter how happy they are; likewise, harming or destroying people would be good no matter how much they suffer. This was part of the cognitive environment of the ancient world and was what ancient writers meant when they used the word that translators render in English as “good”.

The Bible was not written to teach the ancient Israelites how to value human happiness instead of order. Neither was it written to teach Americans that they should value order instead of human happiness. But because the Bible was written in Hebrew to an ancient audience, its language and imagery are expressed in terms of their conceptions and their ideology, not ours.

The Bible exists to tell us what God is doing, and it describes what God is doing in terms of the language, logic, and values of the culture to which it was originally written.

The book of Job wants to transform how we think about God’s work in the world and about our responses to suffering. Job suffered terribly, but his friends were nonetheless wrong to assume that his suffering was earned through evil. This is what theologians today refer to as the Retribution Principle. It is the belief that righteous people will prosper and wicked people will suffer, both in proportion to the degree of righteousness and wickedness. This is sometimes applied to the idea that those prospering must be righteous, and those suffering must be wicked.

Hebrew Bible scholar John Walton puts it this way in his commentary on Job:

“God’s answer to Job does not explain why righteous people suffer, because the cosmos is not designed to prevent righteous people from suffering. Job questioned God’s design, and God responded that Job had insufficient knowledge to do so. Job questioned God’s justice, and God responded that Job needs to trust him, and that he should not arrogantly think that God can be domesticated to conform to Job’s feeble perceptions of how the cosmos should run. God asks for trust, not understanding.”

Human pain and suffering does not always happen as a clear consequence of anyone’s sin. Despite what any “prosperity gospel” peddler tells you from the pulpit. God himself said that Job’s suffering was not warranted for “any reason”. The conversation with the Satan certainly did not provide a reason. That dialogue simply set the stage for the real question of the book: Does God operate the universe according to the principle of retribution?

And the answer we find upon examination is, no.

So back to the big question of Job’s or anyone’s suffering: why is there suffering in the world? Whether from earthquakes, or wild animals, or from one another? God doesn’t explain why. He says we live in an incredibly complex, amazing world that at this stage at least, is not designed to prevent suffering.

This world is wonderful, but it’s not always safe.

That’s God’s response. Job challenged God’s justice, and God responded that Job doesn’t have sufficient knowledge about our complex universe to make such a claim. Job demanded a full explanation from God, and what God asks Job for is trust in his wisdom and character. So Job responds with humility and repentance. He apologizes for accusing God of injustice and acknowledges that he’s overstepped his bounds.

I like how N.T. Wright put it in his book, Evil and the Justice of God;

“If you want to understand God’s justice in an unjust world, this is where you must look. Gods justice is not simply a blind dispensing of rewards for the virtuous and punishment for the wicked, though plenty of those are to be found on the way. Gods justice is a saving, healthy, restorative justice, because the God to whom justice belongs is the Creator God who has yet to complete his original plan for creation and whose justice is designed not simply to restore balance to a world out of kilter but to bring to glorious completion and fruition the creation, teeming with life and possibility, that he made in the first place.”

Now, let’s talk about monsters.