Job

The book of Job teaches us two things--one, that we are never to consider God obligated to protect us from evil; and two, that people, like Job’s comforters, can and do loose favor with God for making the mistake of thinking God would be unjust to abandon us to evil.  No one should fail to understand, as Job’s false comforters had, that a righteous person, for all his righteousness is still at God’s mercy.  Job’s so-called friends, who thought Job must have been guilty of something before the catastrophes struck—guilty of something that would explain the catastrophes as a judgment of God, missed the point that God can do whatever he wants with us and we just have to accept that we are at his mercy.  A person can and should thank God for his providence but not with a mind that says, “I deserve all these good things because of how good I am.”  The idea that God is just is not false but we have to understand that he is no less just if he abandons us to evil.  He doesn’t have to save anyone.

People have to accept whatever God does and just be grateful when nothing bad happens to them. Job himself made this point in his response to his wife who told him to curse God and die.  In the end, both Job’s comforters and his wife got what they deserved.  God himself put them to shame.  His wife, in particular, had to bear him ten more children.

The truly righteous person, like Job, might not be guilty of anything and God could still abandon him to evil.  People who can’t understand that would only have this difficulty if they were self-righteously deluded about their standing before God.  They would only think this way if they thought God has to or is obligated to show them favor. 

If we want to be like Job, and not like his wife or his comforters, we will be careful not to take anyone’s success or lack of success in life as a basis for judging their integrity.  We even have to be careful of Job’s mistake.  We must admit the problem of evil is a problem even for us.  Regardless of how people might otherwise express themselves, no one is in so much control of their thoughts and emotions that they wouldn’t, at least, think and feel, that God is guilty or be angry with him after suffering emotional or physical pain or witnessing an injustice or tragedy.

Was Job perfect?  One has to be careful how to answer that.  The evidence is confusing.  Readers have to reconcile the fact that, even though God rhetorically asked Job, “Who is this who darkens counsel?”  he declared Job’s words about him to be correct. In fact, while job repented, there is no place where we actually read of Job saying anything false.  But what Job confessed to was having declared things he didn’t know.  So apparently, even correct statements can confuse one’s listeners if the one speaking does not actually know his words are true.  And Job did not know!  God was NOT rebuking Job for saying anything false so much as for claiming to know more than he did.  One basically has to conclude that while Job was careful not to blame God, he would have been more prudent not to declare himself a victim.  He was a victim, but he thought there was no reason why.  He didn’t know, anymore than anyone else ever does, that God would redeem his situation.  He wasn’t a victim for long.  And his life story became a lesson for the whole world to learn from.  Again, we are to be careful never to consider God obligated to protect us from evil or to save us at all.

Forgiveness, which no one deserves, receives an appropriate or ordinate response in God’s eye’s when the forgiven acknowledge that they are at God’s mercy—that God is under no obligation to forgive them or protect them from evil.  To get this wrong is to run the danger of seriously annoying God.  To Job’s comforters, God said: “My wrath is kindled against you because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has.”

God seeks to instill an understanding in sinners that they shall be forgiven if they accept that they deserve to be punished.  The person who merely pays lip-service to God about his own unworthiness but considers God nonetheless obligated to protect him from evil and even bless him really secretly expects God to tolerate his sin. 

God is not obligated to forgive and in fact often does not.  The person he forgives is the person with humility who doesn’t just claim to know he is a sinner but who really knows he is and is sorry about that.