Sometimes I really do not like certain chapters of the Bible. Two of the worst chapters for me have always been Job 1-2.
They tell the story of a good and righteous man who becomes the pawn in a little game of Russian Roulette between God and Satan. Job is the unwitting butt of a cosmic wager.
While I do not believe that good and righteous people who love God will always have life turn out peachy keen, I nevertheless have a big problem with a God who uses humans the way that God uses Job in these two chapters. This is divine entrapment!
What would you think of a parent who conspired with a drug dealer to sell drugs to the child and threaten them with killing their parents and siblings to see if the child will stay true the parent’s instruction to “Say no to drugs”? What kind of a sick parent would do that? (See my previous posts about this here, here, here, and here.)
What would you think of a husband who conspired with a friend to try to seduce his wife just to see if she really loved him? What kind of a husband would do this?
Yet this is what God and Satan conspire to do with Job.
I’m sorry. I really do not like these chapters of the Bible.
Which is why I fell out my seat when I recently read this in Unmasking the Powers by Walter Wink (p. 13-14):
What kind of God is this, that trifles with the lives and flesh of human beings in order to win a bet? This God is too bent on sheer power to mark the sufferings of mere people. The author seems to be deliberately lifting up the God of a degenerated Deuteronomic theology to ridicule.
That God, who rewards the wealthy landed aristocrats with riches and long lives and curses the poor, is the butt of a merciless lampoon that issues from the outraged sensitivities of a writer who has acutely observed how the oppressed and infirm suffer undeserved evil at the hands of the powerful and rich.
Those God has not blessed, who have no such vast herds and spacious homes, but barely subsist on the land, must relish seeing this rich man stripped of his props and reduced to their level. And they must have chuckled with delight at the storyteller’s artful repetition in 2:1-3 where God behaves like a forgetful potentate unable to recall the job description of his own appointee!
If one reads the Prologue of Job without awareness of the author’s intent to polemicize against a perennial but perverse notion of God, the picture that emerges is precisely the one the author attempted to confute!
In other words, Job 1-2 is a parody of a false view of God. It shows a forgetful God. A power-hungry God. A God who is so desirous of proving Himself right, that He plays around with humans lives, which mean nothing to Him, just to make a point. The author of the Book of Job is making fun of this popular and pervasive (but perverted) view of God in order to show us that our God, the God of the Bible, is not like this at all.
I must say, I find this view highly attractive. The problem is that I cannot make it fit well with the rest of the Book of Job.
So has anyone out there come across this view before? Have you ever heard of it? If so, do you have any books, resources, articles, or commentaries that talk about it? I really want to study this view more. Why? Because Jesus is my interpretive grid for reading the Bible, and I have always struggled to fit the “God of Job” with the “Jesus of the Gospels.”
Even if you have never heard of this view before, and don’t know of any further resources, what do you think of this view? What are your initial questions or reactions?
I am suddenly completely in love with this idea. I need to think about it some more, but it has real merit. I’ve never liked this book either.
David,
Yes, I am going to start reading Job again today with this idea in mind to see what it does for the book. Like you, I have always struggled with Job.
the difference being, in Job, that we do know the reasons…that’s the disturbing part. I don’t know that I would use “parody” as my term of choice.
The sovereignty of God is of course a trump card… God does what he wills, no argument there. However, it would be far more comforting in the absence of any reason at all (the position we find more normal), rather than the overt, and shall we say incomplete reasons that we are given in Job.
I believe that he is way off base there. The passages that come to mind are Hebrews 12:4-12 and Romans 8:28. God sometimes puts us through trials that we do not understand for reasons that are really only known to Him. That point is really brought home near the end of Job and are echoed throughout scripture. But we can rest on the promise of Romans 8:28 — all things are ultimately done for the good of those who place their trust in Him. Job learned a valuable lesson about faith, and his faith emerged as solid, purified gold. His friends were left to marvel as they watched God work in and through him.
I think we can get off when we consider too greatly upon the financial status of a man. It is the spiritual status that is ultimately what God looks at. Riches enter into it in the sense that wealth has a great strength to lead us from God, but we would probably be best served to live in light of Proverbs 30:7-9 which is a picture of complete dependence upon God.
Yet, even there we do not know all of the reasons. We know immediate reason why the trials came, but we do not know why God decided to start this course for Job. There is a bigger picture behind the story that we cannot really discern from the text that touches on the sovereignty of God — He does what He wills for reasons only He fully knows. But we can draw comfort and hope from the fact that in the end, Job was the better for having gone through the trial — both in his strengthened and renewed faith and in the material blessings in his earthly life.
I can comment “My take on Job is that it is historical fact woven together with the writer’s interpretation of the backstory, which reflected the writer’s and most likely his contemporaries’ understanding of God.”
Or my wife’s comment: “The book of Job proves that the church is based on God’s model of having board meetings to decide things. Satan always shows up and God lets Satan mess with people.” (That would explain a lot!)
I read your previous posts and comments on them. We can only speculate. Perhaps Job is a parable or fictional story. Perhaps it is one hundred percent historically accurate. However, I look at it as most likely a recounting of something that really happened, with “interpretation” woven in with fact.
Many bad things happened to Job. He did not understand why. Everyone encouraged Job to believe that God had done these things to punish Job for some supposed “sin”, so he should curse God. Job was really upset with God. He thought he shouldn’t be punished for something he hadn’t done. But he still trusted God. Later, his misfortune turned to fortune and he became wealthier and greater than before. Those parts are most likely historical.
Since the book of Job is most assuredly ancient, most of the rest of the book probably reveals the ancient “theology” of the writer, and perhaps/probably of his God-fearing contemporaries. In summary, God allowed Satan to mess with Job to prove Job’s faithfulness, and God is not required to answer why He did it. The writer’s “back story” was his interpretation. (Who was there at the big council meeting with God and Satan to report to the writer of the book of Job?)
In later writings in what we refer to as the Old Testament we find the ancients attributing victory in battle to God telling them to slay their enemies. Failure in battle meant that God had not told Israel to slay that particular enemy at that time or that Israel or some one in the camp had sinned.
God has not changed, but presumably our understanding of God has changed. Did not God take on flesh and become the object of unspeakable physical suffering at the hands of His created beings, all because of His love for those very beings? This is the Jesus who loves, heals and says “neither do I condemn you”. (I know it’s not in a couple of the earliest mss.)
And yet…and yet…when I sit at the bedside of those I love as they lie there dying, the question still lingers in the minds of many of them. “What did I do to deserve this? Why are you letting Satan do this to me, oh my God?” Supposedly we have progressed beyond the understanding of the ancients, and yet we too have the same questions.
Ancient history, parable, parody or a mix of historical fact and interpretation, the book of Job still speaks to us, especially when we face pain, suffering and trouble.
The remaining sixty five books of the Bible in some measure or the other also struggle with understanding who this God is and why He allows bad things/evil in our lives. Do they succeed in answering the question? Is Jesus the ultimate solution to the problem? In the face of all the bad, do we choose to still trust God, or curse Him (or perhaps curse the very concept of God – perhaps we are an accident, a random occurrence in the cosmos)?
I really like what your wife had to say! It reminded me of a lot of board meetings I sat through.
I do believe that Job is historical. I believe that the events recorded did actually happen to Job. I am unsure what to make of the author’s intent in writing the book. I definitely think it reflects either his theology, or the theology of some of his contemporaries. I read through the book again today, and am developing a hypothesis about the nature of the book, but will need to think on it for quite some time, and read through the book several more times to test it.
But whatever the case may be, you are absolutely right that the book of Job still speaks to all people today. It gives voice to the same questions and frustrations we all have about life and God’s actions in this world.
Jumpin Jehosaphat! I never saw it that way. I’m not sure if I agree with it, but it’s a lot easier to swallow! I’m going to have to reflect on it. Since Job was the first book of the Bible written, it may have even been pre-Noahic.You said “God is the same, yesterday and today”, while that is true, I never took it to mean he does the same exact things in every situation. If someone said to me “You’re just like you were 20 years ago”, did they mean I make the same decisions? 20 years ago I wasn’t married, so I’m obviously not the same..but is that what he means? I think it’s the same way with God. If he’s the same, how come we are under grace and not law? That’s not how he was during Joshua’s time, for example.
I have read through Job once already this week with this idea in mind and am having trouble making this idea fit with the rest of the book. But it is quite a paradigm shift, so will keep pondering it.
I’d really like to see what the Mishnah has to say about Job. While the Talmud is not authorative to Christians, it shows what early Jews thought of the texts. Gamaliel must have stuff to say about it.
Yes, I was wondering the same thing, and I don’t have any Jewish commentaries on Job. I will look this weekend at work, though.
Ask the Leprechaun 🙂
Oh, I will!
Doing s little research finds that the talmud says that Job was Abrahams brother…
Did you ever read Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis? He writes a very good exposition of Job
Yes, I love the Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis. I love everything by CS Lewis.
Check out this book, it’ll set you free http://www.wlmi.org/utboj.html
Clint,
I put it on my list at Amazon.
Cool, let me know how you like it.
What is the title of this book you are talks my about?
Thanks for sharing this. I was thinking exactly the same thing. As a matter of fact, I am now studying about the inerrancy of the OT, because there are passages that don’t go along with Jesus either – and that he rebukes. Specially being a woman, the OT is terrible sometimes. The opposite of the NT, in relation to women. The horrible subject of unjust polygamy aroused in a group and I started to study because I know God is just.
I now don’t believe that Moses wrote the the pentateuch and the OT is far from inerrant.
I believe that Satan really desires for people to believe that God is unjust (not in the sense of judging sin, wich is good, but in the sense of causing suffering to the innocent and being a respecter of persons – like the treatment of women and sick in the pentateuch).
As I prayed and thought, I remembered Job (that I obviously didn’t like for your same reasons) and thought – as it’s considered the oldest book of the bible, could it be a parable of warning from God that satan would corrupt the OT
for people to believe that God is not just?
Hi Jeremy, I am chasing up information on the image of the naked man on your Job blog. I like it a lot and would like to use it for a book. Do you know the source of it?
I don’t. Sorry. I pulled it from Google Images…