These are the devotionals that are taken from the book For the Love of God by D.A. Carson. It goes along with the church's bible reading plan
February 1 - Romans 4
History looks different in different cultures. I do not simply mean that different cultures interpret the same past differently (though that is often the case), but that the understanding of what history is may vary from culture to culture. Indeed, even within one culture there are often competing notions as to what history is.
This issue has become ever more complex during the past several decades, owing to the advance of postmodernism and its innovative ideas about what history is. As important as that debate is, I do not wish to explore it here. At the moment I am painting on a larger canvas.
Many ancient Greeks thought that history went around in circles. This does not mean that each cycle repeats itself exactly, but that there is an unending repetition of patterns, with no end, no ultimate climax, no telos. A great deal of contemporary naturalism thinks that our sun will finally burn out, and life on earth will come to an end. Some hold that the universe itself will eventually settle into a more or less even distribution of energy, and die; others think that somehow it will rejuvenate itself by collapsing and exploding again to repeat a cycle something like the present one. By contrast, in university history departments events on such a scale are irrelevant. History—whether this refers to what happened, or to our reconstruction of it—covers the period of human writing. Everything before that is “prehistoric.”
The Bible has its own perspectives on history, and some of them are nonnegotiable: if we lose sight of them or deny them, we can no longer understand the Bible on its own terms. Certainly the Bible sometimes retells “what happened” in parabolic categories (compare 2 Sam. 11 and 12), or in highly selective condensations (e.g., Acts 7), or in poetic form (Ps. 78). But more importantly, we cannot rightly understand the Bible unless we grasp several key elements of its sequence. On the largest scale, history begins at Creation and ends at the supreme telos, the final judgment and the new heaven and new earth. We are not simply going around in circles. In Galatians 3 (see vol. 1, meditation for September 27), Paul’s argument turns on the fact that the Mosaic Law came after the promises to Abraham. Somewhat similarly here (Romans 4), Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness before he was circumcised, so circumcision cannot be made a condition of righteousness. Under Semitic notions of sonship, Abraham becomes the father of all who believe, circumcised or not (Rom. 4:1–12). Something similar can be said of Abraham’s relation to the Law of Moses (Rom. 4:13–17). The sequence of the biblical history is critical.
February 2 - Job 1
The Bible deals with the reality of evil in many different ways. Sometimes justice is done, and is seen to be done, in this life. Especially in the New Testament, the final recompense for evil is bound up with judgment to come. Sometimes suffering has a humbling role, as it challenges our endless hubris. War, pestilence, and famine are sometimes God’s terrible weapons of judgment. These and many more themes are developed in the Bible.
But the book of Job is matchless for causing us to reflect on the question of innocent suffering. That is made clear in Job 1, which in some ways sets up the rest of the book. Job “was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1). Although Job was blessed with wealth and a large family, he took nothing for granted. He even engaged in what might be called preemptive intercession on behalf of his grown children: he prayed and offered sacrifices on their behalf, fearful that perhaps at an otherwise innocent gathering, one of his children had sinned and cursed God (Job 1:5).
Job does not know, as the reader knows, that another drama is playing out in the throne room of God. Little is said about these “sons of God,” these angels, who approach the Almighty; little is said about Satan, though transparently he is evil and lives up to his name, “Accuser.” The exchange between Satan and God accomplishes three things. First, it sets up the drama that unfolds in the rest of the book. Second, implicitly it establishes that even Satan himself has restraints on his power and cannot act outside God’s sanction. Third, it discloses that Satan’s intention is to prove that all human loyalty to God is nothing more than crass self-interest, while God’s intention is to demonstrate that a man like Job is loyal and faithful regardless of the blessings he receives or does not receive.
Job, of course, knows nothing of these arrangements. He couldn’t, for the drama that follows would be vitiated if he did. In short order Job loses his wealth and his children, all to “natural” causes that Job knows full well remain within God’s sway. When the last bit of bad news reaches him, Job tears his robe and shaves his head (both signs of abasement) and worships, uttering words that become famous: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised” (Job 1:21).
The narrator comments, “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing” (Job 1:22)—which of course means, in the context of this chapter, that God’s assessment of the man was right and Satan’s was wrong.
February 3 - Job 2
It’s one thing to endure with steadfast loyalty when the losses, however painful, are all external; it is quite another thing to endure when one loses one’s health (Job 2). Some reflections:
(1) We are still dealing with innocent suffering. God himself declares of Job, “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity” (Job 2:3).
(2) Up to this point, God has proved Satan wrong: Job’s loyalty to God is not conditioned by crass, self-serving bartering. Here is a man who is upright and faithful when all his wealth and even all his children are stripped away from him. That is what makes Satan up the ante: “Let me take away his health,” Satan says in effect, “and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 2:4–5). So a new level of entirely innocent suffering is introduced, and the stage is set for the rest of the book.
(3) At this point believers must ask painful questions. Doesn’t this sound as if God is using Job in some fantastic experiment? Why should the poor chap have to lose his wealth, his family, his health, and (as we shall see) his reputation, merely to prove God right in a challenge God might well have ignored?
That question could call forth a very long book. I have no final, exhaustive answers. But some things should be borne in mind. (a) We belong to God. He may do with us as he wishes. There is something deep within us that rebels at being reminded of that elemental truth. But truth it is. Indeed, our rebellion in the face of it is a reminder of how much we still want to be at the center of the universe, with God serving us. That is the heart of all idolatry. (b) Suppose Job had known of the arrangement between God and Satan. A lesser man might have protested violently, but it is at least plausible to think that Job would have used such information to invest his suffering with profound significance, thus making it easier to endure. Indeed, he might have seen his suffering as bound up somehow in a larger cosmic struggle between good and evil. (c) Other factors to be borne in mind must await the conclusion of the book of Job—indeed, the conclusion of the Book, the Bible. But I shall return to some of these matters in the devotional for March 13.
(4) So Job now faces painful and degrading physical breakdown, emotional abandonment by his wife, and the arrival of the three miserable comforters. Innocent suffering is immeasurably difficult to endure; it is still worse when every emotional support proves to be a broken reed.
February 4 - Job 3
From Job 3 until the first part of the last chapter of the book, with a small exception at the beginning of chapter 32, the text is written in Hebrew poetry. The book is a giant drama, like a Shakespearean play. Speech follows speech, the movement of the drama carried forward on the sustained argument between Job and his three “friends.” Eventually another character is introduced, and finally God himself responds.
The opening speech belongs to Job. The burden of his utterance is unmistakable: he wishes he had never been born. He is not ready to curse God, but he is certainly prepared to curse the day that brought him to birth (Job 3:1, 3, 8). Everything about that day he wishes he could blot out. If he could not have been stillborn (Job 3:11, 16), then why couldn’t he have just starved to death (Job 3:12)?
Implicitly, of course, this is criticism of God, however indirect. “Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?” (Job 3:23). What Job is experiencing is what he feared throughout his years of plenty (Job 3:25). He has no peace, no quietness, no rest, but only turmoil (Job 3:26).
Four reflections will put this first address in perspective:
(1) This is the rhetoric of a man in deep anguish. So many of the things about which we complain are trivial. Even our most serious grounds for complaint are usually only some fraction of what Job faced.
(2) Before we condemn Job, therefore, we must listen attentively, even fearfully. When we come across those who for good reason are in terrible despair, we must cut them some slack. It would have been wonderful if one of the “friends” had put an arm around Job’s shoulder and wept with him, saying, “We love you, Job. We do not pretend to understand. But we love you, and we’ll do whatever we can for you.”
(3) Job is transparently honest. He does not don a front of feigned piety so that no one will think he is letting down the side. The man hurts so much he wishes he were dead, and says so.
(4) Both here and throughout the book, for all that Job is prepared to argue with God, he is not prepared to write God off. Job is not the modern agnostic or atheist who treats the problem of evil as if it provided intellectual evidence that God does not exist. Job knows that God exists and believes that he is powerful and good. That is one reason why (as we shall see) he is in such confusion. Job’s agonizings are the agonizings of a believer, not a skeptic.
February 5 - Job 4
The first speech of Eliphaz takes up two chapters. In the first part (Job 4), Eliphaz gives shape to his argument:
(1) The opening lines are seductive (Job 4:2-4). One might almost think that Eliphaz is respectfully pursuing permission to offer helpful counsel to Job, in the same way that Job in times past has offered helpful counsel to others. But that is not it at all. Eliphaz is not asking permission; rather, he is fixing blame on Job because he is discouraged. It turns out, Eliphaz says, that the great Job who has helped others cannot cope when he faces a bit of trouble himself (Job 4:5).
(2) The next verse transitions to the heart of Eliphaz’s argument: “Should not your piety be your confidence and your blameless ways your hope?” (Job 4:6). In other words, if Job were as pious and as blameless as many had believed, either he would not be in this fix, or else he would at least be able to live above discouragement. The disasters that have befallen Job, and Job’s reactions to them, prove that Job is hiding shame or guilt that must be confronted.
(3) In brief, Eliphaz holds that in God’s universe you get what you deserve (Job 4:7). God is in charge, and God is good, so you reap what you sow (Job 4:8).
(4) Eliphaz claims nothing less than revelation to ground his argument (Job 4:12-21). In some sort of night vision, he says, a spirit glided by his face (Job 4:15) and uttered words of supreme importance: “Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Maker?” (Job 4:17). God is so transcendently powerful and just that even the angels that surround him are tawdry and untrustworthy in his eyes. So human beings, “those who live in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust” (Job 4:19), are less significant, less reliable. The implication, then, is that a man like Job should simply admit his frailty, his error, his sin, and stop pretending that what has befallen him is anything other than what he deserves. The way Job is carrying on, Eliphaz implies, he is in danger of impugning the God whose justice is far beyond human assessment or comprehension.
We should pause to evaluate Eliphaz’s argument. At one level, Eliphaz is right: God is utterly just, transcendently holy. The Bible elsewhere avers that a man reaps what he sows (e.g., Prov. 22:8; Gal. 6:7). But these truths, by themselves, may overlook two factors. First, the time frame in which the wheels of God’s justice grind is sometimes very long. Eliphaz seems to hold to a rather rapid and obvious tit-for-tat system of recompense. Second, Eliphaz has no category for innocent suffering, so he is embarking on a course that condemns an innocent man.
February 6 - Job 5
In the second part of his speech (Job 5), Eliphaz presupposes the stance he adopts in the first part (see yesterday’s meditation), yet adds several new wrinkles to his impassioned presentation.
First, he says that Job’s approach to God in this crisis is fundamentally flawed. By all means call on God (Job 5:1)—but why imagine that someone as exalted as God will answer? Meanwhile, Job’s attitude is what is killing him: “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple” (Job 5:2). Eliphaz speaks out of his own observation: he has seen such fools prospering in the past, but suddenly they are uprooted. The implication is that Job’s former prosperity was the prosperity of a “fool,” and his current loss is nothing but his due. Somewhat inconsistently, Eliphaz adds that human suffering is a function of the human condition: “Man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7).
Second, rather self-righteously Eliphaz tells Job what he would do if he were in a similar situation (Job 5:8–16). He would appeal to God and lay his case before him—not with Job’s attitude, which Eliphaz finds insufferable, but with humility and contrition. After all, God reigns providentially and is committed to humbling the arrogant and the crafty and exalting the poor and the needy. So Eliphaz would approach God as a suppliant.
Third, Eliphaz insists that at least one of God’s aims in bringing about loss and disaster is discipline: “Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal” (Job 5:17–18). Those who recognize this point discover that God quickly restores their life and prosperity. They find themselves secure in every trial. Job cannot miss the implication: if he feels he has suffered unjustly, not only is he insufficiently humble, but he fails to recognize the gracious, chastening hand of God Almighty, and therefore he remains under God’s rod instead of finding mercy. “We have examined this,” Eliphaz concludes rather pompously, “and it is true. So hear it and apply it to yourself” (Job 5:27).
What Eliphaz says carries some measure of truth. God does indeed chasten his children (Prov. 3:11–12; Heb. 12:5–6). But this presupposes that they need it; God certainly does not chasten his children when they do not need it. Eliphaz thus presupposes that Job deserves God’s chastening; readers of chapter 1 know he is mistaken. True, God saves the humble and abases those whose eyes are haughty (Ps. 18:27); but Eliphaz mistakenly assumes that Job must be haughty, or he would not be suffering. So here is a lesson: false or improper application of genuine truth may be heartless and cruel—and, as here, it may say false things about God.
February 7 - Job 6
Job’s response to Eliphaz takes up two chapters. In Job 6 he argues as follows:
(1) In the opening verses (Job 6:1–7) Job insists he has every reason for bemoaning his situation: his anguish and misery are beyond calculation (Job 6:2–3). Nor does Job flinch from the obvious: in God’s universe, God himself must somehow be behind these calamities—“The arrows of the Almighty are in me … God’s terrors are marshaled against me” (Job 6:4). Not even a donkey brays without a reason (Job 6:5), so why should Job’s friends treat him as if he is complaining without a reason?
(2) Job utters his deepest request: that God would simply crush him, “let loose his hand and cut me off” (Job 6:9). This is more than a death wish: “Then I would still have this consolation—my joy in unrelenting pain—that I had not denied the words of the Holy One” (Job 6:10). From this, three things are clear. (a) Despite his agony, Job is still thinking from within the framework of a committed believer. His suffering is not driving him to agnosticism or naturalism. (b) More importantly, his primary desire is to remain faithful to God. He sees death not only as a release from his suffering but as a way of dying before the intensity of his suffering should drive him to say or do something that would dishonor God. (c) Implicitly, this is also a response to Eliphaz. A man with such a passionate commitment to remain faithful to “the words of the Holy One” (Job 6:10) should not be dismissed as a light and frivolous prevaricator.
(3) Eliphaz’s position depends on the assumption that if Job acts as Eliphaz advises, all his wealth and power will be restored to him. Job insists he is well beyond that point: he has no hope, no prospects. He cannot conduct himself in such a way as to finagle blessings from God (Job 6:11–13).
(4) Meanwhile, Job reproaches Eliphaz and his colleagues (Job 6:14–23). “A despairing man should have the devotion of his friends, even though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty” (Job 6:14); that is what real friendship is like. Job analyzes the real reason why his friends have proved “as undependable as intermittent streams” (Job 6:15): they have seen something dreadful and they are afraid (Job 6:21). Their neat theological categories have been blown away by Job’s suffering, since they had believed he was a righteous man. They must now prove him to be unrighteous, deserving of his sufferings, or they too are under threat.
(5) Job ends with a wrenching plea (Job 6:24–30). As far as he is concerned, his own integrity is at stake; he will not fake repentance when he knows he does not deserve this suffering. “Relent, do not be unjust” (Job 6:29), he tells his friends.
February 8 - Job 7
In the second part of his response to Eliphaz, Job addresses God directly (Job 7), though we are meant to understand that this agonizing prayer is uttered in such a way that Eliphaz and his friends overhear it. In fact, as we shall see, there is a tight connection between chapters 6 and 7.
The first ten verses of moving complaint, full of descriptions of sleepless nights and festering sores, are focused on “reminding” God how brief human life is. “Life is hard, and then you die” is the contemporary expression; more prosaically, Job asks, “Does not man have hard service on earth? Are not his days like those of a hired man?” (Job 7:1). Physically, he will not last much longer.
“Therefore,” Job argues, “I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11). To God, Job says, in effect, I am not a monster—so why pick on me? My life is without meaning (Job 7:16); I would rather be strangled to death than continue to live as I am now living (Job 7:15).
Why should God make so much of a mere mortal as to pay him the attention God is obviously paying Job (Job 7:17–18)? Though he is unaware of any sin in his life that has attracted such suffering, Job knows he is not sinless. But why should that attract so much suffering? “If I have sinned, what have I done to you, O watcher of men? Why have you made me your target? Have I become a burden to you?” (Job 7:20).
Now it should be easier to see how this chapter is tied to the argument at the end of chapter 6. There Job protests to Eliphaz that his (Job’s) integrity is at stake. The thrust of Eliphaz’s argument was that Job must be suffering for wrongdoing he had never confessed; the way ahead is self-abnegation and confession. But Job replies to the effect that his friends should still be his friends; that they are condemning him because they themselves cannot bear the thought that an innocent person might suffer; that their rebuke calls into question his lifelong integrity. In chapter 7, when Job turns to address God, his stance is entirely in line with what he has just told Eliphaz. Far from confessing sin, he tells God that he is being picked on. Or if he has sinned, he has not done anything to deserve this sort of minute attention and painful judgment. Indeed, Job comes within a whisker of implying that God himself is not quite fair. Thus Job maintains his integrity.
So the drama of this book builds. The way ahead is still to be explored. Meanwhile, meditate on Job 42:7.
February 9 - Job 8
Bildad the Shuhite is scandalized by Job’s response to Eliphaz and offers his own searing rebuttal (Job 8).
“How long will you say such things?” Bildad asks. “Your words are a blustering wind” (Job 8:2). We would say they are nothing but hot air. From Bildad’s perspective, Job is charging God with perverting justice. “Does the Almighty pervert what is right?” (Job 8:3). But Bildad cannot let the point linger as a merely theoretical point to be debated by theologians. The implications of his rhetorical question Bildad now drives home in a shaft that must have pierced Job to the quick: “When your children sinned against him, he gave them over to the penalty of their sin” (Job 8:4). In other words, the proper explanation of the storm that killed all ten of Job’s children (Job 1:18–19) is that they deserved it. To say anything else would surely mean, according to Bildad, that God is unjust, that he perverts justice. So the way forward for Job is “to look to God and plead with the Almighty” (Job 8:5). If Job humbles himself and is truly pure and upright, God will restore him to his “rightful place.” Indeed, all the fabulous wealth Job formerly enjoyed will seem like a mere piffle compared with the rewards that will come to him (Job 8:6–7).
For his authority Bildad appeals to longstanding tradition, to “the former generations.” The opinions he and his friends express are not newfangled ideas but received tradition. Bildad and his friends, regardless of how old they are, can only have learned by experience what can be tasted in one lifetime. What they are appealing to, however, is not the experience of one lifetime, but accumulated tradition. That tradition says that the godless and those who forget God perish like reeds without water; they enjoy all the support of those who lean on spiders’ webs (Job 8:11–19). Conversely, “Surely God does not reject a blameless man or strengthen the hands of evildoers” (Job 8:20).
Of course, this is roughly the argument of Eliphaz, perhaps somewhat more bluntly expressed; and while Eliphaz appealed to visions of the night, Bildad appealed to received tradition. Once again, parts of the argument are not wrong. At one level, on an eternal scale, it is right to conclude that God vindicates righteousness and condemns wickedness. But as Bildad expresses the case, he claims to know more about God’s doings than he really does (neither he nor Job knows the behind-the-scenes setup in chapter 1). Worse, he applies his doctrine mechanically and shortsightedly, and ends up condemning a righteous man.
Can you think of instances where premature or unbalanced application of biblical truth has turned out to be fundamentally mistaken?
February 1 - Romans 4
History looks different in different cultures. I do not simply mean that different cultures interpret the same past differently (though that is often the case), but that the understanding of what history is may vary from culture to culture. Indeed, even within one culture there are often competing notions as to what history is.
This issue has become ever more complex during the past several decades, owing to the advance of postmodernism and its innovative ideas about what history is. As important as that debate is, I do not wish to explore it here. At the moment I am painting on a larger canvas.
Many ancient Greeks thought that history went around in circles. This does not mean that each cycle repeats itself exactly, but that there is an unending repetition of patterns, with no end, no ultimate climax, no telos. A great deal of contemporary naturalism thinks that our sun will finally burn out, and life on earth will come to an end. Some hold that the universe itself will eventually settle into a more or less even distribution of energy, and die; others think that somehow it will rejuvenate itself by collapsing and exploding again to repeat a cycle something like the present one. By contrast, in university history departments events on such a scale are irrelevant. History—whether this refers to what happened, or to our reconstruction of it—covers the period of human writing. Everything before that is “prehistoric.”
The Bible has its own perspectives on history, and some of them are nonnegotiable: if we lose sight of them or deny them, we can no longer understand the Bible on its own terms. Certainly the Bible sometimes retells “what happened” in parabolic categories (compare 2 Sam. 11 and 12), or in highly selective condensations (e.g., Acts 7), or in poetic form (Ps. 78). But more importantly, we cannot rightly understand the Bible unless we grasp several key elements of its sequence. On the largest scale, history begins at Creation and ends at the supreme telos, the final judgment and the new heaven and new earth. We are not simply going around in circles. In Galatians 3 (see vol. 1, meditation for September 27), Paul’s argument turns on the fact that the Mosaic Law came after the promises to Abraham. Somewhat similarly here (Romans 4), Abraham’s faith was credited to him as righteousness before he was circumcised, so circumcision cannot be made a condition of righteousness. Under Semitic notions of sonship, Abraham becomes the father of all who believe, circumcised or not (Rom. 4:1–12). Something similar can be said of Abraham’s relation to the Law of Moses (Rom. 4:13–17). The sequence of the biblical history is critical.
February 2 - Job 1
The Bible deals with the reality of evil in many different ways. Sometimes justice is done, and is seen to be done, in this life. Especially in the New Testament, the final recompense for evil is bound up with judgment to come. Sometimes suffering has a humbling role, as it challenges our endless hubris. War, pestilence, and famine are sometimes God’s terrible weapons of judgment. These and many more themes are developed in the Bible.
But the book of Job is matchless for causing us to reflect on the question of innocent suffering. That is made clear in Job 1, which in some ways sets up the rest of the book. Job “was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil” (Job 1:1). Although Job was blessed with wealth and a large family, he took nothing for granted. He even engaged in what might be called preemptive intercession on behalf of his grown children: he prayed and offered sacrifices on their behalf, fearful that perhaps at an otherwise innocent gathering, one of his children had sinned and cursed God (Job 1:5).
Job does not know, as the reader knows, that another drama is playing out in the throne room of God. Little is said about these “sons of God,” these angels, who approach the Almighty; little is said about Satan, though transparently he is evil and lives up to his name, “Accuser.” The exchange between Satan and God accomplishes three things. First, it sets up the drama that unfolds in the rest of the book. Second, implicitly it establishes that even Satan himself has restraints on his power and cannot act outside God’s sanction. Third, it discloses that Satan’s intention is to prove that all human loyalty to God is nothing more than crass self-interest, while God’s intention is to demonstrate that a man like Job is loyal and faithful regardless of the blessings he receives or does not receive.
Job, of course, knows nothing of these arrangements. He couldn’t, for the drama that follows would be vitiated if he did. In short order Job loses his wealth and his children, all to “natural” causes that Job knows full well remain within God’s sway. When the last bit of bad news reaches him, Job tears his robe and shaves his head (both signs of abasement) and worships, uttering words that become famous: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised” (Job 1:21).
The narrator comments, “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing” (Job 1:22)—which of course means, in the context of this chapter, that God’s assessment of the man was right and Satan’s was wrong.
February 3 - Job 2
It’s one thing to endure with steadfast loyalty when the losses, however painful, are all external; it is quite another thing to endure when one loses one’s health (Job 2). Some reflections:
(1) We are still dealing with innocent suffering. God himself declares of Job, “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And he still maintains his integrity” (Job 2:3).
(2) Up to this point, God has proved Satan wrong: Job’s loyalty to God is not conditioned by crass, self-serving bartering. Here is a man who is upright and faithful when all his wealth and even all his children are stripped away from him. That is what makes Satan up the ante: “Let me take away his health,” Satan says in effect, “and he will surely curse you to your face” (Job 2:4–5). So a new level of entirely innocent suffering is introduced, and the stage is set for the rest of the book.
(3) At this point believers must ask painful questions. Doesn’t this sound as if God is using Job in some fantastic experiment? Why should the poor chap have to lose his wealth, his family, his health, and (as we shall see) his reputation, merely to prove God right in a challenge God might well have ignored?
That question could call forth a very long book. I have no final, exhaustive answers. But some things should be borne in mind. (a) We belong to God. He may do with us as he wishes. There is something deep within us that rebels at being reminded of that elemental truth. But truth it is. Indeed, our rebellion in the face of it is a reminder of how much we still want to be at the center of the universe, with God serving us. That is the heart of all idolatry. (b) Suppose Job had known of the arrangement between God and Satan. A lesser man might have protested violently, but it is at least plausible to think that Job would have used such information to invest his suffering with profound significance, thus making it easier to endure. Indeed, he might have seen his suffering as bound up somehow in a larger cosmic struggle between good and evil. (c) Other factors to be borne in mind must await the conclusion of the book of Job—indeed, the conclusion of the Book, the Bible. But I shall return to some of these matters in the devotional for March 13.
(4) So Job now faces painful and degrading physical breakdown, emotional abandonment by his wife, and the arrival of the three miserable comforters. Innocent suffering is immeasurably difficult to endure; it is still worse when every emotional support proves to be a broken reed.
February 4 - Job 3
From Job 3 until the first part of the last chapter of the book, with a small exception at the beginning of chapter 32, the text is written in Hebrew poetry. The book is a giant drama, like a Shakespearean play. Speech follows speech, the movement of the drama carried forward on the sustained argument between Job and his three “friends.” Eventually another character is introduced, and finally God himself responds.
The opening speech belongs to Job. The burden of his utterance is unmistakable: he wishes he had never been born. He is not ready to curse God, but he is certainly prepared to curse the day that brought him to birth (Job 3:1, 3, 8). Everything about that day he wishes he could blot out. If he could not have been stillborn (Job 3:11, 16), then why couldn’t he have just starved to death (Job 3:12)?
Implicitly, of course, this is criticism of God, however indirect. “Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?” (Job 3:23). What Job is experiencing is what he feared throughout his years of plenty (Job 3:25). He has no peace, no quietness, no rest, but only turmoil (Job 3:26).
Four reflections will put this first address in perspective:
(1) This is the rhetoric of a man in deep anguish. So many of the things about which we complain are trivial. Even our most serious grounds for complaint are usually only some fraction of what Job faced.
(2) Before we condemn Job, therefore, we must listen attentively, even fearfully. When we come across those who for good reason are in terrible despair, we must cut them some slack. It would have been wonderful if one of the “friends” had put an arm around Job’s shoulder and wept with him, saying, “We love you, Job. We do not pretend to understand. But we love you, and we’ll do whatever we can for you.”
(3) Job is transparently honest. He does not don a front of feigned piety so that no one will think he is letting down the side. The man hurts so much he wishes he were dead, and says so.
(4) Both here and throughout the book, for all that Job is prepared to argue with God, he is not prepared to write God off. Job is not the modern agnostic or atheist who treats the problem of evil as if it provided intellectual evidence that God does not exist. Job knows that God exists and believes that he is powerful and good. That is one reason why (as we shall see) he is in such confusion. Job’s agonizings are the agonizings of a believer, not a skeptic.
February 5 - Job 4
The first speech of Eliphaz takes up two chapters. In the first part (Job 4), Eliphaz gives shape to his argument:
(1) The opening lines are seductive (Job 4:2-4). One might almost think that Eliphaz is respectfully pursuing permission to offer helpful counsel to Job, in the same way that Job in times past has offered helpful counsel to others. But that is not it at all. Eliphaz is not asking permission; rather, he is fixing blame on Job because he is discouraged. It turns out, Eliphaz says, that the great Job who has helped others cannot cope when he faces a bit of trouble himself (Job 4:5).
(2) The next verse transitions to the heart of Eliphaz’s argument: “Should not your piety be your confidence and your blameless ways your hope?” (Job 4:6). In other words, if Job were as pious and as blameless as many had believed, either he would not be in this fix, or else he would at least be able to live above discouragement. The disasters that have befallen Job, and Job’s reactions to them, prove that Job is hiding shame or guilt that must be confronted.
(3) In brief, Eliphaz holds that in God’s universe you get what you deserve (Job 4:7). God is in charge, and God is good, so you reap what you sow (Job 4:8).
(4) Eliphaz claims nothing less than revelation to ground his argument (Job 4:12-21). In some sort of night vision, he says, a spirit glided by his face (Job 4:15) and uttered words of supreme importance: “Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can a man be more pure than his Maker?” (Job 4:17). God is so transcendently powerful and just that even the angels that surround him are tawdry and untrustworthy in his eyes. So human beings, “those who live in houses of clay, whose foundations are in the dust” (Job 4:19), are less significant, less reliable. The implication, then, is that a man like Job should simply admit his frailty, his error, his sin, and stop pretending that what has befallen him is anything other than what he deserves. The way Job is carrying on, Eliphaz implies, he is in danger of impugning the God whose justice is far beyond human assessment or comprehension.
We should pause to evaluate Eliphaz’s argument. At one level, Eliphaz is right: God is utterly just, transcendently holy. The Bible elsewhere avers that a man reaps what he sows (e.g., Prov. 22:8; Gal. 6:7). But these truths, by themselves, may overlook two factors. First, the time frame in which the wheels of God’s justice grind is sometimes very long. Eliphaz seems to hold to a rather rapid and obvious tit-for-tat system of recompense. Second, Eliphaz has no category for innocent suffering, so he is embarking on a course that condemns an innocent man.
February 6 - Job 5
In the second part of his speech (Job 5), Eliphaz presupposes the stance he adopts in the first part (see yesterday’s meditation), yet adds several new wrinkles to his impassioned presentation.
First, he says that Job’s approach to God in this crisis is fundamentally flawed. By all means call on God (Job 5:1)—but why imagine that someone as exalted as God will answer? Meanwhile, Job’s attitude is what is killing him: “Resentment kills a fool, and envy slays the simple” (Job 5:2). Eliphaz speaks out of his own observation: he has seen such fools prospering in the past, but suddenly they are uprooted. The implication is that Job’s former prosperity was the prosperity of a “fool,” and his current loss is nothing but his due. Somewhat inconsistently, Eliphaz adds that human suffering is a function of the human condition: “Man is born to trouble as surely as sparks fly upward” (Job 5:7).
Second, rather self-righteously Eliphaz tells Job what he would do if he were in a similar situation (Job 5:8–16). He would appeal to God and lay his case before him—not with Job’s attitude, which Eliphaz finds insufferable, but with humility and contrition. After all, God reigns providentially and is committed to humbling the arrogant and the crafty and exalting the poor and the needy. So Eliphaz would approach God as a suppliant.
Third, Eliphaz insists that at least one of God’s aims in bringing about loss and disaster is discipline: “Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he also binds up; he injures, but his hands also heal” (Job 5:17–18). Those who recognize this point discover that God quickly restores their life and prosperity. They find themselves secure in every trial. Job cannot miss the implication: if he feels he has suffered unjustly, not only is he insufficiently humble, but he fails to recognize the gracious, chastening hand of God Almighty, and therefore he remains under God’s rod instead of finding mercy. “We have examined this,” Eliphaz concludes rather pompously, “and it is true. So hear it and apply it to yourself” (Job 5:27).
What Eliphaz says carries some measure of truth. God does indeed chasten his children (Prov. 3:11–12; Heb. 12:5–6). But this presupposes that they need it; God certainly does not chasten his children when they do not need it. Eliphaz thus presupposes that Job deserves God’s chastening; readers of chapter 1 know he is mistaken. True, God saves the humble and abases those whose eyes are haughty (Ps. 18:27); but Eliphaz mistakenly assumes that Job must be haughty, or he would not be suffering. So here is a lesson: false or improper application of genuine truth may be heartless and cruel—and, as here, it may say false things about God.
February 7 - Job 6
Job’s response to Eliphaz takes up two chapters. In Job 6 he argues as follows:
(1) In the opening verses (Job 6:1–7) Job insists he has every reason for bemoaning his situation: his anguish and misery are beyond calculation (Job 6:2–3). Nor does Job flinch from the obvious: in God’s universe, God himself must somehow be behind these calamities—“The arrows of the Almighty are in me … God’s terrors are marshaled against me” (Job 6:4). Not even a donkey brays without a reason (Job 6:5), so why should Job’s friends treat him as if he is complaining without a reason?
(2) Job utters his deepest request: that God would simply crush him, “let loose his hand and cut me off” (Job 6:9). This is more than a death wish: “Then I would still have this consolation—my joy in unrelenting pain—that I had not denied the words of the Holy One” (Job 6:10). From this, three things are clear. (a) Despite his agony, Job is still thinking from within the framework of a committed believer. His suffering is not driving him to agnosticism or naturalism. (b) More importantly, his primary desire is to remain faithful to God. He sees death not only as a release from his suffering but as a way of dying before the intensity of his suffering should drive him to say or do something that would dishonor God. (c) Implicitly, this is also a response to Eliphaz. A man with such a passionate commitment to remain faithful to “the words of the Holy One” (Job 6:10) should not be dismissed as a light and frivolous prevaricator.
(3) Eliphaz’s position depends on the assumption that if Job acts as Eliphaz advises, all his wealth and power will be restored to him. Job insists he is well beyond that point: he has no hope, no prospects. He cannot conduct himself in such a way as to finagle blessings from God (Job 6:11–13).
(4) Meanwhile, Job reproaches Eliphaz and his colleagues (Job 6:14–23). “A despairing man should have the devotion of his friends, even though he forsakes the fear of the Almighty” (Job 6:14); that is what real friendship is like. Job analyzes the real reason why his friends have proved “as undependable as intermittent streams” (Job 6:15): they have seen something dreadful and they are afraid (Job 6:21). Their neat theological categories have been blown away by Job’s suffering, since they had believed he was a righteous man. They must now prove him to be unrighteous, deserving of his sufferings, or they too are under threat.
(5) Job ends with a wrenching plea (Job 6:24–30). As far as he is concerned, his own integrity is at stake; he will not fake repentance when he knows he does not deserve this suffering. “Relent, do not be unjust” (Job 6:29), he tells his friends.
February 8 - Job 7
In the second part of his response to Eliphaz, Job addresses God directly (Job 7), though we are meant to understand that this agonizing prayer is uttered in such a way that Eliphaz and his friends overhear it. In fact, as we shall see, there is a tight connection between chapters 6 and 7.
The first ten verses of moving complaint, full of descriptions of sleepless nights and festering sores, are focused on “reminding” God how brief human life is. “Life is hard, and then you die” is the contemporary expression; more prosaically, Job asks, “Does not man have hard service on earth? Are not his days like those of a hired man?” (Job 7:1). Physically, he will not last much longer.
“Therefore,” Job argues, “I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11). To God, Job says, in effect, I am not a monster—so why pick on me? My life is without meaning (Job 7:16); I would rather be strangled to death than continue to live as I am now living (Job 7:15).
Why should God make so much of a mere mortal as to pay him the attention God is obviously paying Job (Job 7:17–18)? Though he is unaware of any sin in his life that has attracted such suffering, Job knows he is not sinless. But why should that attract so much suffering? “If I have sinned, what have I done to you, O watcher of men? Why have you made me your target? Have I become a burden to you?” (Job 7:20).
Now it should be easier to see how this chapter is tied to the argument at the end of chapter 6. There Job protests to Eliphaz that his (Job’s) integrity is at stake. The thrust of Eliphaz’s argument was that Job must be suffering for wrongdoing he had never confessed; the way ahead is self-abnegation and confession. But Job replies to the effect that his friends should still be his friends; that they are condemning him because they themselves cannot bear the thought that an innocent person might suffer; that their rebuke calls into question his lifelong integrity. In chapter 7, when Job turns to address God, his stance is entirely in line with what he has just told Eliphaz. Far from confessing sin, he tells God that he is being picked on. Or if he has sinned, he has not done anything to deserve this sort of minute attention and painful judgment. Indeed, Job comes within a whisker of implying that God himself is not quite fair. Thus Job maintains his integrity.
So the drama of this book builds. The way ahead is still to be explored. Meanwhile, meditate on Job 42:7.
February 9 - Job 8
Bildad the Shuhite is scandalized by Job’s response to Eliphaz and offers his own searing rebuttal (Job 8).
“How long will you say such things?” Bildad asks. “Your words are a blustering wind” (Job 8:2). We would say they are nothing but hot air. From Bildad’s perspective, Job is charging God with perverting justice. “Does the Almighty pervert what is right?” (Job 8:3). But Bildad cannot let the point linger as a merely theoretical point to be debated by theologians. The implications of his rhetorical question Bildad now drives home in a shaft that must have pierced Job to the quick: “When your children sinned against him, he gave them over to the penalty of their sin” (Job 8:4). In other words, the proper explanation of the storm that killed all ten of Job’s children (Job 1:18–19) is that they deserved it. To say anything else would surely mean, according to Bildad, that God is unjust, that he perverts justice. So the way forward for Job is “to look to God and plead with the Almighty” (Job 8:5). If Job humbles himself and is truly pure and upright, God will restore him to his “rightful place.” Indeed, all the fabulous wealth Job formerly enjoyed will seem like a mere piffle compared with the rewards that will come to him (Job 8:6–7).
For his authority Bildad appeals to longstanding tradition, to “the former generations.” The opinions he and his friends express are not newfangled ideas but received tradition. Bildad and his friends, regardless of how old they are, can only have learned by experience what can be tasted in one lifetime. What they are appealing to, however, is not the experience of one lifetime, but accumulated tradition. That tradition says that the godless and those who forget God perish like reeds without water; they enjoy all the support of those who lean on spiders’ webs (Job 8:11–19). Conversely, “Surely God does not reject a blameless man or strengthen the hands of evildoers” (Job 8:20).
Of course, this is roughly the argument of Eliphaz, perhaps somewhat more bluntly expressed; and while Eliphaz appealed to visions of the night, Bildad appealed to received tradition. Once again, parts of the argument are not wrong. At one level, on an eternal scale, it is right to conclude that God vindicates righteousness and condemns wickedness. But as Bildad expresses the case, he claims to know more about God’s doings than he really does (neither he nor Job knows the behind-the-scenes setup in chapter 1). Worse, he applies his doctrine mechanically and shortsightedly, and ends up condemning a righteous man.
Can you think of instances where premature or unbalanced application of biblical truth has turned out to be fundamentally mistaken?