Why
By Rev. Dr.Fritz Ritsch
October 21, 2012
Job 38: 1-7, 34-41
Job is a righteous man of God whose children have been killed, whose wealth has been taken away, and whose health is shattered, and he wants to know WHY? Why, God, why is there suffering in the world?
After 37 chapters of listening both to Job’s complaints and his friends’ awful, unsatisfying answers, we come to Chapter 38 and the first sentence seems like a huge relief: “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” The Lord answered Job! An answer to the question of suffering and evil! An answer to the great “why” of life, the universe, and everything!
And so we read… “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”—ok, yeah, you’re God, we get it… “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?” –Ok, sure, I’m human, I can’t tie gigantic star systems in a knot and you can… “Do you know where the mountain goat gives birth…?” Well, no, honestly, and I don’t really want to know, and that wasn’t my question!
And what becomes clear is THAT GOD HAS NO INTENTION OF ANSWERING THAT QUESTION.
That’s right. The Book of Job doesn’t answer the question of suffering. Instead, it answers an entirely different question. And in that answer is the Gospel According to Job.
Remember how, in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a great computer was invented to find the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything? And the day comes when it’s announced, and the great computer pronounces the answer: Forty-two. And everybody’s like, What? What does that mean? And that’s when people realize that they have the answer, so they need to figure out what the question is!
This is what happens between God and Job. Job is asking one question, and God is answering a completely different question. Job’s question is, Why is there suffering? But the question God answers is, “What is the purpose of life? Why do human beings exist?”
The reason Job is asking the wrong question is because he’s starting from a wrong premise. He believes, rightly, that we and God have a covenant relationship—that is, that God has promised something, and human beings have promised something. But where Job goes wrong is he believes that the promise is this: We humans will worship God, and in return good things will happen to us.
That isn’t the promise.
That wasn’t the promise in the Old Testament, and it certainly isn’t the promise in the New Testament, where Jesus Himself promises His followers one clear thing, over and over again: He promises us a cross. He promises that faithfully following Him in this world will be troubling and difficult and sometimes even deadly. Contrary to the way those who promote the Prosperity Gospel think, there’s no promise to believers that faithfulness brings wealth and success and happiness. Humans have a purpose higher than success or happiness or wealth or fame.
Here’s what the Bible, consistently, Old and New Testaments, tells us is the promise. “I will be your God, and you will be my people.”
It is the promise of relationship—that God wants a relationship with us, and that we have a relationship with God.
And that’s also the reason humans exist: to be in a relationship with the God who loves us.
The Gospel according to the Book of Job is the Gospel of the whole Bible: the purpose of human existence is to be in relationship to God.
The promise of the relationship is never stated in The Book of Job, because it doesn’t have to be. It’s there from the moment Job starts demanding answers of God. It’s there in Job’s hurt and pain, not simply because he is suffering, but because he feels betrayed. It’s there in the very fact that Job questions God. That’s right. Job does the very thing that quite often, over and over again, people tell us we shouldn’t do. He questions God. He demands answers from God.
But you shouldn’t do that! Isn’t that a lack of faith?
Well, it’s a lack of faith if you believe that faith is a belief system–intellectual assent to a certain set of values. And too often, that is what we believe, maybe even what we unfortunately teach people in church—if you have faith, then you believe that God is loving and good, that Jesus is your savior, and that all good things come to followers of Jesus. And if you ever doubt those things, if you ever wonder, if you aren’t certain, then you don’t have faith and you’re in trouble with God.
But in the Bible, faith isn’t believing a bunch of doctrines. It’s a relationship. And relationships are built on trust.
Sometimes I have couples come in for counseling and on the surface everything is okay, but after the counseling session, maybe one will call me later and say, “Listen, there’s this terrible problem in our relationship. I think he’s doing something, or that she thinks something terrible about me.” And I’ll say, “Well, have you asked?” And they’ll say no—they’re afraid it will hurt the relationship. And I understand that all too well. The problem is that the relationship is already damaged, because there’s been an erosion of trust. It’s better to get it out in the open.
It’s the same with God.
The PCUSA’s most recent confessional document, A Brief Statement of Faith, changes the word “believe,” as in “I believe in God,” to the word “trust”: We trust God. We trust Jesus Christ. When you talk about God and Jesus in terms of trust you aren’t talking about a belief system anymore. You’re talking about a relationship.
When we bring, as we all do, our charges that God is unfair—that God has caused us harm and suffering or allowed suffering and evil to flourish without lifting a finger to help us—the implication of the charge is that God doesn’t love us—that God doesn’t care for us—that God has betrayed us. Trust has been damaged. You don’t resolve that by keeping it to yourself. You resolve it by bringing it out in the open.
That’s what Job does, and by doing so Job continues the great tradition of the founders of the Judeo-Christian faith.
Abraham questions God, when in Genesis 18, God decides to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham says, “Would you also destroy the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there would be fifty righteous in the city? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, far be it from you! Shall not the judge of the earth do right?” And gradually, persistently, Abraham negotiates God down to being willing to save the cities for the sake of just ten people.
Moses questioned God, when God was furious with the people of Israel because they had worshiped the Golden Calf. “Let me alone, Moses, that my wrath my burn hot against them and I may consume them, and I will make of you a great nation!” but “Moses pleaded with the Lord his God, and said, “This is your people that you personally brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand! What will the Egyptians say if you destroy them? What will the world say? Didn’t you promise to bless this people? Won’t you keep your promise?”
“And God relented from the harm God intended His people.” (Exodus 32: 9ff)
The psalmist questions God. “Why do you stand afar off, Lord?” He asks in Psalm 10. “Why do you keep silent?” he asks in Psalm 110. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He asks in Psalm 22—the very words Jesus Himself uses as He hangs on the cross.
In the Greek tragic tradition, it’s exactly this kind of questioning that gets the tragic hero into trouble, this kind of willingness to go toe-to-toe with Destiny. In tragedy it’s the tragic flaw, pride, over-reaching—hubris. The point of tragedy is that humans play a dangerous and likely self-destructive game when they dare to defy the gods.
But that is not the Biblical point of view. The biblical view is that God wants a relationship with us so badly that God will tolerate a lot of impertinence from us in order to have it. Impertinence in relationship is better than no relationship at all!
I am not convinced that Abraham changed God’s mind. Likely God always intended to saveSodomandGomorrahif He could find a mere handful of the righteous. Likewise, I don’t think Moses changed God’s mind. God probably never intended to destroy the Israelites for worshiping the Golden Calf. But Abraham and Moses were forced by a potentially dangerous situation to question God. And in the process, they came to new and extraordinary insight. They entered into a deeper and more profound relationship with God than they’d had before.
And it’s the same with Job. But it couldn’t have happened without Job’s boldness in asking the question.
Next week we’ll conclude our study of the book of Job with a look at the Biblical answer to the reality of our damaged world: Redemption.