THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: Part 3 Job July 17, 2016 Rev. David S. Cooney

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY: Part 3 Job July 17, 2016 Rev. David S. Cooney For those who have been with us the past few weeks, I will give a quick recap of what we have covered in the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. For those just joining us, I ll try to catch you up. The series is about what is called wisdom literature, biblical books designed to help us understand how God works and how the world works, in other words, trying to make some sense of life. The three books that fall into this category are Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. We are considering each successively, in broad strokes. The first week I said that Proverbs is a collection of short sayings and lessons providing precepts for wise living. It is full of really good advice and we would be wise, indeed, to pay attention. The underlying premise is that if we follow the precepts and fear God, that is, live righteously and wisely, we will be rewarded with health, wealth, happiness, and long life. Ecclesiastes agrees that we should fear God and live righteously and wisely, but if we think that living that way will assure health, wealth, happiness, and long life, we are badly mistaken. It doesn t work that way, Ecclesiastes says. Sometimes the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer, and no matter how we live, there is the great equalizer, death, putting an end to everything we have done. So, the best we can do is enjoy our labor and eat, drink and be merry. Job, our main character today, agrees with Ecclesiastes, saying finally someone gets it, the whole system of rewards and punishments is whacked out. But while Ecclesiastes essentially puts up his hands saying it is what it is, and do the best you can with it, Job refuses to accept that it is what it is and demands an explanation from God, essentially that God explain why God is so unjust. The good, the bad, and the ugly. Today, is the ugly. Let s take a look at Job. This wisdom book takes on multiple big questions such as why should we, why do we worship God, and what is the meaning of suffering, and what is the place of justice in the world, and how do order and chaos fit into God s design of creation. We could spend hours on any one of these. Job spends forty-two chapters, mostly raising the questions and providing very few answers. The question that sets up the story is why should we, why do we worship or reverence God? Is it to receive some blessing, expecting to get something out of it, or do we worship and reverence God no matter our circumstances? It begins with God meeting with the heavenly beings, kind of a heavenly Administrative Board. Present is Satan. In this time period Satan is considered a heavenly being whose role is essentially to play the devil s advocate this is where the expression comes from, the one to bring a contrary view. God asked Satan what he had been up to and Satan answered, you know, just roaming around, walking and traveling around earth checking things out. Well, God asked, in your travels did you notice my man Job? He is amazingly righteous and pious. Duh, Satan responded. Of course he is. The man is richer than everyone

but you. He has a great family, all ten of his children are wonderful kids. He has good health and is well respected in the community. He has it all. Of course he is devoted to you. Take that away from him and his story will change. Did you hear the implied question? Do we worship God, do we reverence God, in return for God s blessing, in order to get something out of it, or do we reverence God no matter our circumstance? Satan said it is to get something out of it. To test his hypothesis, Job has everything taken from him. In one day all of his livestock are lost to invaders or fire, all of his servants are murdered, and all of his children die in a tragic accident. Job s response? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. God said to Satan, see? He lost everything and still he is upright in living. Satan said, well he has not yet been personally hurt. That will put him over the edge. With that Job s body became covered with sores painful, disgusting, and debilitating. We are told he sat in ashes scraping his sores with a broken piece of pottery. It was so bad his wife said to him, Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die. Nothing quite so comforting as support from your spouse! Still, Job responded, Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad? This is why to this day we use the expression the patience of Job and lift him up as the model of faithful endurance even in the face of terrible suffering. Lesson learned. This is what Job teaches. We should accept whatever life brings, no matter how terrible and praise God and persevere. Right? Sorry, that would be wrong. But thanks for playing. Please stop by the welcome station on the way out. We have a nice parting gift for you. Job was initially patient and enduring. But everything we have talked about happens in the first one and a half chapters. The book still has over forty chapters to go, and Job is far from the patient sufferer in them. The rubber hits the road when three of his friends show up to supposedly comfort him. Instead, they set him off. Why? Because they explain his situation with traditional interpretations and essentially blame him for his condition. You see, the traditional interpretations are very close to Proverbs. Live wisely and fear God and all will go well for you. Live foolishly and unrighteously and bad things will happen. If Job was truly righteous, good things would happen for him. The fact that so many bad things happened had to mean that he had sinned, had been unrighteous, and thus was being punished. It was all so obvious to them. Following tradition, they assumed the goodness of God, and that there is moral order to the world, and that there is purpose in suffering. What purpose can there be? Well, it is either judgement for unrighteousness, a warning if you are teetering, or discipline if you are morally immature. His friends concluded that Job had sinned so he should humble himself, repent, and beg for God s mercy. This is when Job went off. His suffering was not his fault. He had been completely righteous. He was not the one in the wrong. God was. God was being unjust. He did not agree that there is moral order to the world, but instead moral chaos, agreeing with Ecclesiastes, and he did not accept his suffering as just punishment. He believed he was being victimized. Job wants to meet God in court, to let God present God s case and for Job to present his. If proven guilty, Job would gladly accept the penalty of death. But he was convinced God would be the one to be found guilty of injustice.

Does that sound like patient, enduring, Job? He curses the day he was born and tells God to just let him die, since he is going to kill him anyway. He defiantly accuses God of injustice, not just in his case but across the board, and he calls his friends fools for thinking otherwise. He goes from the passive, pious accepter of his fate to the angry, red-faced man, looking at the heavens and shaking his fist, asking why are you doing this to me. Biblical scholar Carol Newsom calls him the patron saint of religious rebellion. I call him Ecclesiastes on steroids. In the final chapters, God answers Job letting him know how little he knows and how much greater God is. God says, Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. Job ultimately says that he should have kept his mouth shut and repented of his hubris and God restored everything and more to him. I guess you could say, in that respect, that the story has a happy ending, but not necessarily a satisfactory ending. Oh, things got better for Job, for sure, but that doesn t make everything all right. And maybe Job crossed a line, but I do not fault him for being angry and deeply disturbed. A lot happened to him terrible things, an excessive amount with one thing right after the other. I would worry about him if he was not angry. How do you lose ten children, even one child, and say casually say the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away? Is that great faith or repressed emotion? And, ultimately, for all the questions the book raises, it does not provide many answers. Well, it actually provides multiple answers, each with some validity, but none holding the whole truth, and we are left to piece it together the best we can. If Job teaches anything, it is that there are some unanswerable questions, at least fully and definitively answerable. Also, as with all wisdom literature, there are a few problems. I said Proverbs has invaluable insight about how to live but has the problem of being overly simplistic. I said that Ecclesiastes is a good counterbalance to Proverbs, letting us know that life is not nearly so neat and tidy as Proverbs suggests, but has the problem of not knowing Jesus and the promise of eternal life, making it far too focused on death, particularly death as a final ending to all. Job is equally valuable, taking on big questions such as injustice and suffering. But it too has some problems. One is that both Job and his friends assume that justice, specifically retributive justice, should be the central guiding principle of reality. That is a mouthful. What do I mean? This is the idea that life works in an appropriate balance that actions yield appropriate and just responses. Look at the arguments in the book. His friends say Job is getting what he deserves. He sinned. Consequently, he was being punished and his suffering was appropriate - just. Job says I am not getting what I deserve, so God is unjust and thus wrong. They all believe retributive justice is the guiding principle of reality. But notice that when answering Job, God never speaks of justice. God speaks of created order. Why is this important? For one thing, there is no pure system of justice getting what is deserved. What would that be? What would that look like? I know that when I hear people talking about God being unfair, it is around the issue of lifespan. Some get to live 80, 90, even 100 years while others die

much younger, even very young. Well, to be fair then, maybe everyone should receive the same amount of time, say seventy years, not one day less or one day more. That would be fair. Except does that mean the loving, kind, generous get exactly the same lifespan as thieves, murderers, and tyrants? What about the quality of life? Does everyone also get the same amount of wealth, the same health, the same level of happiness, the same experiences and opportunities, or is that on a sliding scale? Talk with and ask any teachers who have to grade subjectively, such as essays, and ask what happens when students compare grades. There is shock. My paper was longer and had more facts and she got an A and I got an A-, and he wrote his at the last minute and got a B. His parents helped him and he got a B+. Ask siblings who all think mom and dad love the others more because of what was said or not said, given or not given, perceived or not perceived. We should get what we deserve? What we deserve changes by the day; no, the hour; no, the minute. There will never be a time when everything is or seems fair, at least to us. Justice or fairness cannot be the central guiding principle of reality. Besides, we should be careful what we ask for or want. My experience is that those who want justice to be the guiding reality are those who believe they are rightfully in line for good things. Put that mentality up against Paul s teaching that we all sin and fall short of the glory of God. If Paul is right, do we really want God to give us what we deserve? I do not. Please God, do not treat me justly. Do not treat me fairly. Treat me gracefully. This is a big part of the good news of the gospel, is it not that God loves us anyway, not because we have somehow earned it or deserve it. When God speaks of order instead of justice, God is speaking to the bigger issue of the well-being and sustainability of all creation, which is necessary for all life. For God to sustain creation many things will, to us, seem out of order. For instance, what we call natural disasters, such as fires, floods, and hurricanes, are only disasters because we are in the way. Each in their own way is necessary for replenishing and restoring earth which is necessary to all living things. Seen in that way, they are not natural disasters, they are just natural. Our great challenge, greatest fear, greatest source of sorrow, greatest enemy is death. But there cannot be ongoing birth if there is not also death, if earth is to be sustained. God has to order all of this and much, much, more for the sustainability of earth and life and we can never make sense of how it all has to work, but mercifully God can. So what God is telling us at the end of the book is that we should not be telling God what to do or not to do, or what is fair or not fair. God does not have to meet us in court to explain God s actions. The other problem is the ongoing, persistent, popular belief that God directly causes everything. We see this throughout the book. If Job lost his herds, God caused it. If his children were killed, God caused it. If he lost his health, God caused it. Many theologians far more brilliant than I have said this is true, but I humbly submit this just is not so. Besides being illogical and contrary to the gospel, it is a belief that can put us at odds with God. Consider this. God has created necessary physical laws to which everything and everybody is all subject. This is part of the created order of which I was just speaking. This means that, if we slip or trip, gravity will bring us to the ground and as a result, our bones or muscles may

suffer. This does not mean God wanted us to have a broken hip or a twisted back and thus caused us to fall. If anything, we were probably careless or clumsy. We also have free will, lest we be automatons. In freedom we can and do act against God s guidance and will. Often we reap what we sow and, the hard truth is, we reap what others sow, too. Did God will or cause someone to go into a nightclub in Orlando to murder as many as possible, or for police officers at a rally to be shot, or a maniac to drive a truck through a crowd watching fireworks in Nice? Nothing in the gospel even suggests this matches the mind and will of God, and everything suggests it is a human distortion of the mind and will of God. If a plane goes down, are we to believe God orchestrated the ticketing of every passenger for that flight because they all were chosen to die that day? I cannot fathom that. Maybe you are doing great work at your job, but an advancement in technology makes your product less marketable, so profits go down, so executives in another city decide to downsize, so you get laid off. Did God initiate that chain of events to cause you to lose your job? Of course not. God is not the master manipulator controlling us like marionettes on strings, but is rather the one who loves us enough to come to dwell among us and to suffer for and with us. Rabbi Harold Kushner some years back wrote in his very popular book Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help. Our question will not be Job s question, God why are you doing this to me? but rather, God, see what is happening to me. Can you help me? We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted. If God causes our suffering, how can we turn to God for relief? How can we ask God for help? This is what Job missed. Wisdom literature gives us some wonderful insights into life the good, the bad, and the ugly. We should spend time with it. We are blessed because we also have the gospel, we also have Jesus, and so we have an enhanced perspective. Here is that perspective. If you are suffering, if you are hurting, if you are confused, you do not have to keep a stiff upper lip and just endure. You do not have to abandon God believing you have been treated unjustly. You do not have to try to make sense of it all. You certainly do not have to believe that God has singled you out for punishment. What you can do is to turn to God as one who suffers with you and wishes to wipe away your tears. Turn to God who sees the depth of your pain and wants to heal you. Turn to God to ask for help, ask for strength, ask for redemption. Turn to God who does not lead you into trouble, but can lead you out. Help us with life, O Lord, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Amen.