Bible Challenge Day 191: Job’s Challenge (Job 31)

Job and his “friends” have been going at it for several days now. Job’s friends keep insisting that Job must have done something to deserve his sufferings. Job keeps responding that he is innocent. Based on chapter one, we know that Job is more right than they are.

What we see in chapter 31 (not only here, but especially here), is that Job and his friends agree on one thing anyway: the world is supposed to be fair. They have been saying that the world is fair because anything else would imply that God, the governor of the world, is unjust. Job says that the world is supposed to be fair, but is not. That is the basis of his protest. So, in chapter 31, Job says over and over again, “if I had sinned, my suffering would be acceptable” (verse 5, 7, 9, 13, 16, 19, 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 33, 38, 39). But because he has not committed those sins, his suffering is NOT acceptable.

Job therefore issues a challenge to God: “Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me! O that I had the indictment written against me by my adversary! Surely I would carry it on my shoulder; I would bind it on me like a crown; I would give him an account of all my steps; like a prince I would approach him” (31:35-37).

Like his friends, Job assumes the world is supposed to be fair. Unlike them, Job believes he is innocent of any wrong-doing. So Job calls God to account. He demands the right to prove his innocence. Then, presumably, God will correct the injustice done to Job.

Job turns out to be wrong, as we will read in a few days. But the power of the book depends on us taking seriously Job’s challenge, and the assumption on which it is based: the assumption that the world is supposed to be fair and God is supposed to make sure that it stays that way. It is an assumption that Job shares with the friends he has been battling for nearly thirty chapters! It is also an assumption that most of us make most of the time.

Fr. Harvey

Bible Challenge Day 180: God’s Justice? (Job 4-6)

Job has always been one of my favorite books in the Old Testament. And today we get into the central question of the entire book: is suffering always fair or just?

Job has just cursed the day of his birth (3:1-3). His friend Eliphaz feels obligated to challenge Job. Job has often counselled others who were suffering, says Eliphaz, but now he seems unable to benefit from the very lessons he has previously taught (4:3-5). And the most basic lesson of all is that God is not unjust. “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same” (4:7-8).

Eliphaz does not make the obvious conclusion explicit. He leaves that for the other friends later in the book. But the implication is clear enough. Job is suffering. God is too just to impose suffering on innocent people. Therefore, Job deserves what he is getting; Job must have sinned somehow.

For now, Eliphaz accentuates the positive. He says “How happy is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up” (5:17-18). That is, Job should learn his lesson, do right, and experience God’s forgiveness and blessing.

Job will have none of it! He reminds his friends that he did not ask for their help (6:22-23). He accuses them of withholding kindness and becoming treacherous (6:14-15, 21). And he ends with bitter sarcasm: “Teach me, and I will be silent; make me understand how I have gone wrong. How forceful are honest words!” (Wait for it . . . . ) “But your reproof, what does it reprove? . . .  You would even cast lots over the orphan, and bargain over your friend” (6:24-25, 27). With his very last words, at least in this chapter, Job again asserts his innocence (6:29-30).

So the positions are taken, and will only harden for the rest of the book. Job’s friends claim that God is just, so Job must deserve his suffering. Job responds that they are jerks and that he is guiltless. At stake are competing theologies and competing visions of our world. Is God just and our world ultimately fair? Or is the world sometimes unfair and—one must say this with caution—therefore God not always just? The seemingly pious answer is the first. And yet we know from chapters one and two that Job is in fact innocent and that his suffering comes from a kind of bet between Satan and God. That certainly challenges easy and conventional pieties!

Fr. Harvey