A Man in the Land of Uz

REYNOLDS RAP

October 2, 2010





BEFORE WORDS



Please stick with this one. If you are too busy to read it right now, I hope you may print it and set it aside to a time when you can read it (but not at the bottom of a pile of six books that you hope to read some day).





A MAN IN THE LAND OF UZ

Understanding Human Suffering

An Introduction to the Book of Job





Read Job 1:1-3, 6-21; 23:1-5; 38:1-7; 42:1-6



The most difficult part of the Apostles’ Creed to say (for me) is not the bit about “conceived by the holy Ghost,” nor “He descended into hell,” nor the part about the resurrection of the body. I think I’ve come to some understanding of what these mean – at least, what they mean to me. No, the part that bothers me the most, the part I find most difficult to accept, is the part where it says, “I believe in God the Father Almighty.”



How, in the face of the evil and suffering of the world, is it possible to say that God is both like a father, and at the same time that God is almighty? Must we not rather say that God may be, like a loving parent, unwilling to see us suffer, but lacking almightiness, unable to do anything about it – “He would if He could, but He can’t.” Or on the other hand, say that God is almighty but not like a father, able to do something about it but not willing to do anything – “He could if He would, but He won’t.”



Go to the street corner where the little girl, coming home from school, was struck and killed by a drunken driver. Visit the pioneer cemetery and read on the tombstones the mute testimony that half the community was wiped out in one winter through some disease, probably diphtheria or pneumonia. In parts of Latin America, seven out of ten children die before they reach their first birthday.



Walk into the cancer ward of one of our hospitals for sick children where you’ll see three and four year old children fighting the terrible and too-often hopeless battle against cancer, sometimes with great pain and the rather fearsome consequences of desperate treatments. Stand there and then say, `I believe in God, the Father Almighty!’



Of course, this is only a problem to the person who desires to believe in a God who is both good and all-powerful. It’s not the same problem for the person who denies the existence of God or the goodness of God. The problem then is even more difficult – how to explain the measure of meaning and goodness and love which we do experience.



But for the person who seeks to believe that God is good and God is just, and who knows that pain and evil are very real and very terrible, there is a conflict here which seems to defy human understanding. In the face of human suffering, perhaps in the midst of our pain, we cry, “If God is good, surely it is not God’s will that we should suffer so. But if God is God, He must be cause the suffering, or at least be willing for suffering to happen!”



I heard upon his dry dung heap

That man cry out who cannot sleep:

“If God is God, He is not good.

If God is good, He is not God.”

(From J.B., by Archibald MacLeish)



Here is the problem with which the book of Job wrestles – mightily.



“There was a man in the land of Uz. . .”



So it begins, what Thomas Carlyle called “one of the grandest things ever written with pen. . . . There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit” (Heroes And Hero Worship, p. 57). “A noble book,” he called it, “all men’s book. It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem – man’s destiny and God’s ways with him here in this earth.”



“. . . a man in the land of Uz.”



No one can be certain just where “Uz” may have been located. It was probably a desert region south-east of Palestine. (Note Jeremiah 25:19 ff. and Lamentations 4:21.) No matter where, really, for Uz is everywhere where people suffer and ask “Why?” -- looking out from tight and frightened souls to beseech heaven for an answer.



“There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job.”



No “wizard of Uz” this man, content with magic’s false tricks or any rational slight of hand; just a very human being looking for an honest answer to his questions. The fathers of piety around him spoke of the even-handed justice of God, who blessed the righteous and cursed the careless. It was part of the religious dogmatism of the time. “None but the most impious would dare to question it,” said Job’s friends, his “Comforters.” But Job smouldered at their words and protested that what they said just wasn’t true, didn’t stand up to the facts of life. He wouldn’t be content with the glib, easy answers they were always giving people when trouble came upon them.



And he stood up alone to do his battle, against a wide unanswering sky. Not for a moment will he truckle, let Omnipotence do what it will. He cannot prevail, but not an inch will he yield.

(Paul Scherer in The Interpreter’s Bible, on Job 1:1)



“There was a man . . . !” And so begins the book of Job.





You perhaps know something of the story – how this ancient sheik of the desert, a man of honour and wealth, in a series of what the insurance companies (before they went secular) used to call “acts of God,” lost his property, his family, and his health. He was left in poverty, childless, and sitting upon a dung-heap digging at his terrible, loathsome, itching, stinking sores with an old piece of pottery.



This book of Job, as we have it in our Bible, seems to have sprung from an ancient folk-tale of the desert. Into this primitive tale has been inserted, at a later date, a long and formal argument between Job and his “Comforters.” This part is poetry – and some of the greatest poetry and most powerful imagery ever penned. The prose story forms pretty much the first two and the last chapters.



The patience of Job


Well, what of this story of a man who has become a proverb, as we speak of “the patience of Job?”



That’s perhaps the most obvious thing to say – it’s not a lesson in patient endurance, in long-suffering. Read further than chapter two and you will see that Job was not at all a patient individual. He argued vehemently against the reasoning of his friends, demanding of heaven an accounting for the injustice done him.



And injustice it does seem to have been. This is the point of the story. Job was a righteous man! This his Comforters tried their best to deny. “All suffering is punishment for sin,” they said. “Job is suffering, therefore Job must have sinned.”



But Job protested that he had not sinned. He acknowledged his faults; he knew he had them as all people have faults. But he had done nothing that he should be singled out for torture in this manner. He knew that. He had been as good as other people, better than most. “If I had been unfaithful to my wife, unfair to my servants, lacking in concern for the poor and not caring for my heritage, a liar or a cheat, then I would deserve punishment,” said Job (chapter 21). But he hadn’t – and that’s what made it all so hard to understand.



And so, with great impatience, he demanded of heaven an accounting. “Oh if I knew where I might find God, that I might lay my case before Him.” In fact, it appears to have been Job’s very impatience which led to his moment of truth, in eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the Almighty.



No Neat Answer


See this too, in this strange and subtle story, so difficult to grasp and deal with – here is no facile answer to the problem of human suffering; no neat intellectual answer which knows nothing of the pain. Here it is Job’s comforters who come giving facile answers to the great problems of human existence – and their answers are each refuted because of their inadequacies. “Miserable comforters, all of you,” Job cried, “Why do you think you must speak to me with endless windy words? I could speak as you do too if I was in your place and you were in mine” (chapter 16:1-4).



How often a minister sits with those in grief and hears them ask “Why?” – and wishes that he could give an answer. But in such situations, one must beware above all else, I believe, of the easy, the facile, answer. I remember visiting an old man, an old Scot, whose only son had recently been killed. He was literally buried alive in a construction accident. The old man was as filled with wrath as any one I have ever seen. He had just come from a neighbour’s house, and the neighbour had told him, “It was God’s will.” “What does she know?” he kept saying. “What does she know?”



When the blow comes, it’s not the philosophical answer, not the neat intellectual explanation of the problem, which we seek and need.



In fact, in one sense, there’s no answer given in the book of Job to the question “Why do the righteous suffer?” The argument breaks down, no one seems to have an answer; and then, like the deus ex machina of Greek drama, God comes storming in, flexing His (sic) muscles and shouting “out of the whirlwind” about `His’ greatness and power. On a superficial reading, God seems to be trying to frighten Job into shutting up, to overawe or overwhelm him because even God doesn’t have the answer.



The Answer Which Seems Like No Answer!


Yet there seems to be more to it than that. Job doesn’t just shut up. The strange thing is that Job seems finally somehow content. Something in that tumultuous experience, face to face with the Almighty, quieted his questions and somehow gave him his answer – and Job seems to have come to understand something he had never understood before.



Perhaps it was just that through this experience he came to a first-hand experience of God’s greatness and grace. “I had heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear,” he cried, “but now my eye sees Thee” (chapter 42:4). And Job realized that the most important thing in life is that a person know the living God. For then you’re lifted out of yourself to find Life.



Martin Buber wrote,



The only answer Job receives is God’s nearness, that He knows God again. Nothing is explained, nothing adjusted, wrong has not become right, nor cruelty kindness, but God is near!



And when Job demanded, “Let the Almighty answer me!” (Chapter 31:35), the answer of the Almighty was far different than what Job had expected.



(For) the divine answer is always different from human expectations. From the whirlwind Yahweh does not answer questions; He asks them.

(Samuel Terrien on “Job,” in The Interpreter’s Bible, p. 902)



There is something that comes, out of our agony, our suffering, our grief, there face to face with the Almighty. It’s not an answer; it’s more a challenge and a demand. But through our suffering, we are lifted out of our self and come to see life as we have never seen it before – almost as if with a cosmic vision. As from a great height, you look down upon the ages of human history, the travail and the injustice, the momentary triumph and the short-lived joy.



But it’s not meaningless. In it all you sense beating a great heart, an infinite Spirit, sharing the suffering, knowing the pain, labouring, working, brooding, yearning, agonizing to bring forth the reality of righteousness and truth and love.



And you lay your hand on your lips, for across it all – the spot where the little girl was killed, the pioneer cemetery with its grim tally, the sick child crying in agony – across it all there falls the shadow of a cross. And you see things in a new light – the light of God’s eternal love. And through your suffering, your grief, you know – as you have never known anything before. And nothing can separate you from that love, ever again.



And Job, who had been asserting his own righteousness with so much vehemence to his friends, now, before God, lays his hand on his mouth and says, “Therefore, I repent!”



Here is simply the story of a good and righteous man who, through his own suffering and sorrow, came to a knowledge of God and an understanding of life not given him before. He was raised out of the prison of his own provincial narrowness onto the windy heights from which he could see the panorama of the universe; torn out of himself to discover the world of God. It begins with “a man in the land of Uz,” it ends with a man in the world of God. That’s the difference.



As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod,

Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God!

I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies,

In the freedom that fills all the space `twixt the marsh and the skies.

By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends into the sod,

I will heartily lay me a-hold of the greatness of God.

(From “The Marshes of Glynn,” by Sidney Lanier)





AFTER WORDS



You can find a fuller treatment in my book, A Troubled Faith, Chp. 5, “Can God Be Good,” especially pp 98-103. The book recognizes the decline in the influence of Christian faith in our western culture through the 20th century, but seeks to affirm the reasonableness of Christian faith for the 21st century. To order the book, send $10 (Can) or equivalent to cover my cost – 8280 Mirabel Court, Richmond, BC, Canada V7C 4Y2.



Re “When Bad Things Happen,” a question from Anne Graham:

“If God does not cause our suffering and it happens for some reason other than the will of God, does it not follow that good things happening to people or the absence of bad things, happen for some reason other than the will of God and are not necessarily evidence of God's mercy?”







LAST GASP



When our daughter, Keili, said her bedtime prayers, she would bless every family member, every friend, and every animal. Then, after she had finished the nightly prayer, Keili would add, “And all girls.” This soon became part of her nightly routine. My curiosity got the best me and I asked her, “Keili, why do you always add the part about all girls?”

She replied, “Because everybody finishes their prayers by saying ‘All men.’”





Live simply. Love generously. Care deeply. Speak kindly.
Leave the rest to God.



It’s a Rap. Grace and peace. Alan