Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of Suffering in this address from The Gospel Coalition Sermon Library
If you live long enough, you will suffer. These two talks go downhill from there. The only alternative is not to live long enough. If you live long enough, you will face bereavement, severe illness, loss, and disappointment. You and your children, or your children’s children, will face loss, death, war, and suffering.
Then you can put some hard face on this. In our faculty families, we have such things as Huntington’s chorea in one faculty wife, one of the most ghastly diseases on God’s green earth. We have had a faculty member die of heart disease in the last year and have two more with severe cancer.
That’s all the private stuff, of course. How do you talk about God after a tsunami? Couldn’t God have stopped it? A quarter of a million people wiped out. What about AIDS? When the AIDS pandemic first appeared, I came in contact with a family in southern Indiana: a Christian family with six sons. As it happened, all six were hemophiliacs. Before the blood supply was cleaned up, four of them contracted HIV, went clinical with AIDS, and died. The last two just didn’t want to get themselves tested, but they subsequently died too.
Then, of course, we could talk about the southern Sudan: not fewer than two million killed in the last 15 years. Or overtly, unambiguously Christian persecution: not fewer than 8,500 have lost their lives in the some of the islands of Indonesia in the last little while. How do we think about these things?
Of course, the questions about suffering and evil are asked by the Bible itself. It’s important not to enter this topic thinking that we have all the tough questions and the Bible is simplistic. There is Habakkuk, for example. He can quite understand how God can use a nation to chasten the covenant people of God (who themselves constituted a nation) because of their own idolatry. What he cannot figure out is how God can use a more wicked nation. On any judgment, the oppressors are more wicked than Israel itself. How can God do that?
What do we do with Job? Or Jeremiah, with his massive sense of injustice and betrayal? Or numerous psalms? What do we do with Elijah? He was living a hand-to-mouth existence, in isolation, courageously leading reformation and revival, and yet, after the great climax when God intervenes even with a miracle and Elijah thinks the turning point has come, he finds himself on the back end of a desert, running for his life. Nothing has changed.
What I shall do in these two sessions is to lay down five pillars from biblical theology on which any serious Christian thinking in this domain must be enmeshed. You must build your structures on these five pillars. It seems to me that a lot of Christian response to this sort of issue is either personal/helpful psychological in the crisis itself; or it is philosophical apologetic; or it turns on one particular aspect of Christian truth.
What I want to do instead is paint with a broad brush. This is not going to directly affect what you should do pastorally in the urgent crisis. I will say some things about that in the next session. What I want to do, rather, is establish a theological structure that enables you to think about these sorts of things holistically, in massive ways. Tonight, I will do what I prefer to do: namely to handle a particular text and work through a particular passage. But now, instead of working through one passage, I want to work through some large biblical themes.
1. Insights from the beginning of the Bible’s storyline.
In particular, I’m thinking of both creation and fall. We necessarily have a different way of looking at things from that of philosophical materialism.
If all that exists is matter and energy and time and space, and that’s it, then there’s a sense in which you might be tempted to say, “Well, you know, molecules bounce. That’s the way things happen.” The fact of the matter is, though, as soon as you get into that particular line of thought, you can’t live there for a long time. You can’t live there comfortably. There will always be something that triggers a sense of moral indignation.
About a year ago, I was asked to go on Larry King’s show for something or other. It was at the last minute, so they sent a car for me. It was one of those instances where they have somebody in a studio in Atlanta, somebody was in LA, and me in Chicago, and we’re all made to appear on the same screen. Because it was at the last moment, they sent up to the northern suburbs where I lived this car to take me down.
I was squashed into the back seat in the corner, reading some manuscripts and trying to think things through … sort of one-liners, because television is a sort of one-liner environment, isn’t it. I don’t think in one-liners; I think in books! So I had to think up some one-liners on this particular topic. I got down there, went through my little bit, and came back afterward. This time, I was relaxed, so I started talking to the driver.
It turned out he was a 58-year-old Jew whose parents had been killed in the Holocaust. He had divorced his first wife and was now married to a 29-year-old woman who was pursuing a PhD in comparative religion. He knew I was doing something religious on this program, and he wanted to know more about it.
It turns out that he had a 33-year-old daughter, and I said, “How is she doing?” “Well, in fact, we’re just waiting to pull the plug.” I said, “What happened?” “Well, she got married a couple of years ago and moved to Kansas. In an ice storm out there her vehicle went into a skid and flipped over. She’s brain-dead. It’s just deciding when to pull the plug.”
I said, “How are you coping?” He said, “Well, I’ve decided that the only way I can live with it is by recognizing that molecules bounce.” So I said to him, “Is that the way you view the Holocaust too? You know, molecules bounce.” Now I knew that was pushing his button; he was a Jew. “That was not just.… That was evil!” He was spluttering with indignation and outrage. I said, “You have a place for outrage, then, with respect to the Holocaust?”
“Well, yes, it was evil!”
“And you have no place for outrage with respect to your daughter’s death?”
“Are you saying that was evil?”
“Of course that’s what I’m saying. The Bible describes death as the last enemy. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be. The reason we feel outrage about these things is precisely because we were made for eternity. We were made in the image of God. We were made by God and for God. I’m not suggesting for a moment that because she will die young she is more evil than someone else. That’s not what the Bible says. But it does say that every death is a stamp of the way it’s not supposed to be, because of our own rebellion.”
I said, “Supposing for a moment, you really, really believed that instead of just molecules, there is a life after death. Wouldn’t that change your perspective?” “Oh,” he said, “I know just what you mean. She had a lovely garden. I’m sure she’d like to come back as a butterfly.” Do you have a lot of these conversations today, where you think you’re making progress and then at some point you realize that they’re on a different planet?
What you’re dealing with are worldview structures. That’s what you’re dealing with. How do you talk about evil and disaster and suffering if you don’t have some of the commons in place? From a Christian perspective, one of the things that you must have in place is that this is God’s world and that when he made it, he made it good, with incredible beauty and anticipation of the new heaven and the new earth. All that is ugly and dark and repulsive in it is directly or indirectly related to Genesis 3 and the fall. You have to begin there.
But that is precisely what non-Christian religions (with only minor exceptions) do not see. When they think of the question of the fall, they do not think in those categories. In Hinduism, there is one massive truth that embraces absolutely everything. Your karma dictates where you fit into this everything, but it is still one massive reality. That’s very different.
Instead, we see a place for sin, transgression, idolatry, rebellion, and evil that is bound up, in the first instance, with revolt against the God who made us, the God who sustains us, and the God who will be our judge. It is important that we think through the significance of this in many, many dimensions.
When we try to get across the notion of Christian sin to our contemporary culture, what are we most likely to do? Aren’t we very tempted to try to show the horizontal dimensions of sin? So we show the importance of Christianity for the well-being of the culture. If you have a whole lot of failed marriages, for example, then you will have increased social unrest, increased numbers of people in prison, and increased social pathologies of one sort or another.
Whereas, if you have stable families, you will have, proportionally speaking, better taxpayers, stronger cultural links, stable traditions, and so forth. The statistics are all there. Therefore, become a Christian, have a good family, and build America. Now we don’t put it quite as crassly as that, but when we are trying to think through the entailments of sin and trying to show the relevance of the Christian way to the outside world, isn’t that what we do?
But think through the Bible. What is it, above all, that narks God? What is it, above all, that attracts God’s wrath? Above all, it’s idolatry: the de-Godding of God. It’s the vertical dimension of sin. Not for a moment does the Bible want to suggest that the horizontal dimensions are insignificant. Think of the moral outrage at social injustice in Amos and parts of Isaiah and elsewhere.
Yet at the same time, these are seen, in the biblical sweep of things, as the entailments of rebelling against God, of each one trying to do that which is right in his or her own eyes. It is an entailment of anarchy, of idolatry, of the de-Godding of God, of us wanting to be God. That’s what it is.
You can get at this in a lot of different ways. Let me come through the side door. Do you remember the remarkable scene in the Gospels where Jesus is speaking in a house, people are packed in like sardines, and a paralyzed man (whether he’s a paraplegic or a quadriplegic is not quite clear) is brought there by his mates. They can’t get through the crowd. “Wait your turn, wait your turn! The Master is speaking!”
So they take him up on the flat roof (so common in the day), listen carefully to where Jesus is, and start taking off the tiles. If the crowd won’t give way for compassion’s sake, they’ll give way because a bed is dropping on their heads! So they make way, the bed comes down, and there is Jesus. He says, “My son, your sins are forgiven.” The crowd is indignant. “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” It was a shrewd comment.
Supposing, God forbid, you were brutally mugged, viciously beaten up, and maybe gang-raped. As you’re lying an inch from death in the hospital, gradually making your recovery, I go in to you and say, “Be of good cheer. I have found your attackers, and I have forgiven them.”
What would you say to me? Through your wired jaw, you will splutter in outrage and indignation, “What right do you have to forgive someone? You’re not the one who was gang-raped! You’re not the one who was beaten up! It’s only the victim who can do the forgiving.” Isn’t that what you would say?
That lies at the heart of the best of the post-Holocaust literature. Read Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower. Wiesenthal lost his entire extended family in the ovens of Auschwitz and Birkenau. Then in the closing days of the war, when he was in a work gang, he was suddenly pulled out and shoved into this closed room where there was a young German lad, maybe 19, dying of wounds that he had received.
He wasn’t going to make it, and he had asked to speak to a Jew before he died. In the peculiar providence of God, Wiesenthal was pulled out and shoved in this room. The German then asked for forgiveness, not only for things that Nazis had done against the Jews but for things that he himself had personally done against the Jews.
Wiesenthal, in his book The Sunflower, depicts page after page of the almost instantaneous reasoning that runs through his mind, the fruit of living years in the camps: “Only the victims can forgive. Most of the victims of the Nazis are dead. Those who are not dead are not the most severe victims, so they do not have right to pronounce forgiveness. If the victims of the Nazis are dead, then there is no forgiveness for the Nazis.” Without saying a word, he simply stared at the young man and then turned and walked out of the room.
Once again, he almost had it right. The only person who can forgive, finally, is the offended party, but in the Bible, God is always the most offended party. David understands that. He seduces Bathsheba, arranges the execution of her husband through a military device, eventually is found out, and then has the cheek to pray, “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”
In one sense, that’s blatantly untrue. He sinned against Bathsheba, he sinned against Uriah, he sinned against the high command of the military, he sinned against his own family, he sinned against the baby in Bathsheba’s womb, and he sinned against the covenant people. It’s just difficult to think of anybody he hasn’t sinned against. Yet he says, “Against you only, have I sinned and done this evil in your sight.”
David understands that the person most offended is always God. What makes sin so heinous, so odious, so wicked, and so vile is precisely that it is against God. In that sense, it is always against God; it is only against God. So when you cheat on your income tax, the party most offended is God. When you lust, the party most offended is God. When you nurture bitterness, the party most offended is God. When you hate, the party most offended is God. Always.
And all the entailments of disaster and suffering spring finally from God’s pronouncement, “Thus far shall you go and no farther.” Unless you see that, you are not even beginning to think in a Christian way about suffering and evil. In that sense, then, even when we face death, it is important to see that from a Christian perspective, this is the inevitable result of our fallenness and rebellion.
Do you remember what Jesus says in Luke 13 when he is asked the question, “Those who were killed by the falling tower, were they more evil than others?” Hmm? How about those who were killed by the falling towers in New York? Were they more evil than others? Hmm? Or those who died in the tsunami, were they more evil than others? Hmm? There is a lot of literature on this subject on the web already.
There were significant Muslim countries there (not all of them, but a significant number); maybe God was saying something. Of course, that doesn’t quite work for the towers in New York. But now we hear there’s a theory from Colorado that answers that one too. What does Jesus answer? “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” This is not saying that you will all die in tsunamis or towers, but that we are all under the sentence of perishing. We are all guilty. That changes the way we are likely to think about death itself.
About two years ago in our church, there was a woman (we’ll call her Paula) who had had cancer seven years ago, but it was such a light case that they thought they had got it with no problem. The cancer came back in her and this time, with a vengeance. She was diagnosed in May. This woman, Paula, was a remarkable woman. She had the energy of any 10. She organized a lot of our church’s overseas short-term mission trips, for example. At one point, she started a business on the side and then got volunteer people from the surrounding churches to people the business so that all of the profits went into mission.
She and her husband started a service for returning missionaries. They would collect stuff. You know, when missionaries come back, they need a new pop-up toaster and some new linens and some basics all over again. Often, they’re sort of accorded everybody else’s castaways and junk. Nope, nope. We’ll store them here in advance, and our rule is no junk. Missionaries deserve better than junk. Pretty soon, two-thirds of their basement was taken up with goods for returning missionaries.
This was Paula. She was known everywhere. But the cancer came back. By September, she was already very ill. Our church had a special prayer day just for her, to which 285 people showed up from miles around. I was out of town, but my wife showed up. We weren’t all that close with this couple. It’s a large enough church that you don’t get to know everybody really well. We’d known them for 25 years, but we weren’t intimate. But my wife went.
The prayers became more and more enthusiastic as the day began and rolled on. “Lord, you know what things that Paula has done, how important her services is to the church of God worldwide. Lord, isn’t Jesus himself the Great Physician? Will you not have mercy upon her? Lord, we name your grace. We agree together, two or three of us together, that this is what must be done. We claim it in Jesus’ name. Is not healing …?” It went on and on and got more and more enthusiastic.
My wife almost died of cancer five years ago. When it was her time to pray, she said, “Heavenly Father, we really would love it if you would heal dear Paula, and maybe in your mercy, you will. But if not, then teach her to die well. Give her a legacy of faith for her husband and children. Give her an anticipation of glory, so that she’s hungry to see the Master’s face. Free her up from the links that tie her here so that she’s homesick for heaven. Give her the kind of testimony that exalts Christ. Teach her to die well.” Well, you could have cut the air with a knife.
You’re not supposed to say stuff like that, you know. The Puritans said it, but we’re not supposed to say stuff like that. Nowadays, we can talk about almost anything in our churches except death. Even in conservative churches, I can spend a Sunday evening distinguishing anal from vaginal intercourse, because I’m talking about AIDS, and nobody will bat an eye. But start talking about death, and everything goes deathly quiet. It’s the last taboo in our culture. We were told afterward that some of Paula’s relatives were ready to assist my wife into glory first.
In November, her husband phoned me: “I have to talk to you!” We went out and started talking. What it turned out to be was that he basically wanted permission to talk about dying. They were still “naming it and claiming it,” and they did not want to admit that she was dying. It felt an awful lot like letting down the side. But don’t you see? The death rate is 100 percent. The only question is when. Get used to it. It’s a fallen, damned world. It’s beautiful in all kinds of ways, but it’s a damned world, and justly so.
Until you get those sorts of pieces, you’re not even beginning to be in an environment where you’re thinking Christianly about suffering, sin, death, and disaster. There’s a lot more to be said about innocent suffering and all that. I’ll come to that, but you must get this pillar down in place first.
2. Insights from the end of the Bible’s storyline.
There is a heaven to be gained and a hell to be shunned. Everything that we undergo here is not the last word. Death may be the last enemy, but it is not the last word. So Christians look forward to a new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. When you read through the descriptions in Revelation 21 and 22, they are of shatteringly glorious transcendence.
First of all, they’re couched in negations: what it’s not like. There’s no more death, no more crying, no more sorrows, and no more tears. A little farther on in the chapter, nothing impure shall enter there, no injustice, no sin, no selfishness, no deceit, no theft, and no corruption. Nothing. That is just the negative side of things.
Then, in symbol-laden categories, it’s a New Jerusalem, a Holy City. But what a strange set of dimensions! Like a cube. There’s only one cube in the Old Testament: the Most Holy Place. It’s a way of saying that this social reality, this New Jerusalem, is always and forever. The whole thing is always and forever the Most Holy Place.
That’s why at the end of chapter 21, the seer can say, “I saw no temple in that city, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” Always and forever in the presence of God, in transformed radiance and glory, in social perfection, with God and the Lamb at the center receiving our praise, and all of life-sustaining power coming from the throne itself.
Fifty billion trillion years into eternity, our three score years and ten here will not seem all that bad. That’s why the apostle Paul can say things like he does in 2 Corinthians 4: “These light and momentary afflictions are not to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed.” It’s eschatology.
I’ve become more and more convinced that it is impossible long to sustain in the Christian church genuine ethics, genuine spirituality, genuine doctrine, genuine right priorities, and genuine God-centeredness unless you’re planning is for 50 billion years from now. It just can’t be done.
Doesn’t Jesus himself say the same thing? “Do not lay up for yourself treasures on earth, where moth and rust corrode, where thieves dig through and steal. But lay up for yourself treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not corrode, where thieves do not dig through and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Understand that last bit. It’s not guard your heart but choose your treasure. There are other parts in the Bible that say, “Guard your heart, for out of it are the wellsprings of life,” but that’s not the point here. The point here is that what you cherish the most is where your heart goes. So if you cherish most the glorious resurrection and the culmination of all things in the new heaven and the new earth, then it shapes everything that you do and think and choose here.
Whereas, if, in fact, a new heaven and the new earth is a creedal point and no more … if your real treasure is becoming pastor of a super-church, having the biggest library this side of Cambridge, becoming known for your brilliance as an essayist, for your talent as a charmer, or whatever … then suddenly, your goals are too small and your disappointments will be correspondingly large.
Then, to make things more interesting, the fact of the matter is that New Testament eschatology is not simply futurist. It’s inaugurated. It’s partially realized. We live in the famous period between the already and the not yet. I’m sure that has been explained to you in many different ways and times in this seminary.
Part of Christian maturity is figuring out, in biblical categories, how much has already been realized, how much has been inaugurated, and what is still not yet. I wish I could take a lot more time in that regard. Nevertheless, it is precisely that sort of tension that generates a certain kind of Christian maturity.
That means that we will look at disasters a bit differently than anybody else. Do you remember what Jesus says, for example, in Luke 21? “Watch out that you will not be deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am he,’ and, ‘The time is near.’ Do not follow them. When you hear of wars and revolutions, do not be frightened. These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away.
Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes …’ ” Read: tsunamis. “… famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven. Before all this, they will lay hands on you and persecute you. Make up your mind in advance not do worry about how you will defend yourselves.” That’s what the text says.
There is a sense in which every tsunami, every disaster, every piece of war, every piece of plague, every death … every single bit of it … is part of God’s “thus far shall you go and no farther.” What is striking in the Bible is what Paul calls God’s forbearance. Because if heaven has been put off until the consummation, so also has hell.
There is a sense in which every death and every judgment is an anticipation of the final judgment, just as every converted person, every taste of glory to come, and every work of the Spirit in our lives is an anticipation of heaven. There’s a kind of inaugurated damnation as there’s a kind of inaugurated salvation. John’s gospel makes that very clear. We’re already under death. We don’t have to wait for the end.
C.S. Lewis understood that. He fought in World War I, in that vast, despicable trench right across Europe: 2,000 miles of trench, with 10 million Germans on one side and 10 million Allies on the other side, basically shooting machine guns and Howitzers back and forth until they killed literally 20 million people. It was back and forth for the gain of a few yards one way or the other. That’s how the war went on for three and a half years. Mud and lice and savagery and noise and confusion and death and vomit: that was World War I. There was no glory anywhere.
When World War II broke out 20 years later, in a country where longer memories could still remember World War I, where so much pain had been taken to try to appease Hitler, and where it looked like another whole generation would be wiped out again, Lewis was asked by the chaplain at Oxford University (where he was then a lecturer) to speak in chapel. How do you study in wartime, with such cataclysmic awfulness on every hand?
Lewis wrote a little essay that has often been reprinted. My copy is in a book called Fern-Seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity, but it’s been reprinted many times. The essay is simply called “Learning in Wartime.” Let me read you just a few of his paragraphs. This he preached to Oxford students in the autumn of 1939 after the war had begun.
“It seems to me that we shall not be able to answer these questions …” That is, these questions about how to think about these things and how to even continue studying in the light of such awful disasters. “… until we have put them by the side of certain other questions which every Christian ought to have asked himself in peacetime.
I spoke just now of fiddling while Rome burns. But to a Christian, the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddled while the city was on fire but that he fiddled on the brink of hell. You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention heaven and hell even in a pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source is our Lord himself. People will tell you it is St. Paul, but that is untrue.
These overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of his church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometimes overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them. The moment we do, we can see that every Christian who comes to a university must at all times face a question compared with which the questions raised by the war are relatively unimportant.
He must ask himself how it is right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology.
If human culture can stand up to that, it can stand up to anything. To admit that we can retain our interest in learning under the shadow of these eternal issues, but not under the shadow of a European war, would be to admit that our ears are closed to the voice of reason and very wide open to the voice of our nerves and our mass emotions.” And he starts working it out from there.
I urge you to go and read what he has to say. I don’t think that every part of his argument is equally as convincing as all the other parts, but that is surely a right place to begin, isn’t it? The big structures must be in place before you can answer these (dare I say it?) relatively small disasters. For all of the media attention on the tsunami … which was horrific, I don’t want to downplay that in the slightest … the equivalent of three tsunami disasters takes place in the AIDS population of Africa every year.
3. Insights from the place of innocent suffering.
However you understand the book of Job, you have to face the fact that there is innocent suffering going on here. Oh, not in the cosmic sense, as if Job is being proclaimed as sinlessly perfect. That’s not quite right. Yet the book goes out of its way to insist that Job is tam (the Hebrew word sometimes rendered perfect).
When you think of all the things that are said about Job … he puts a guard on his eyes so that he never looks at any woman to lust after her and he’s praying preemptively for his own children, lest they should ever fall into sin … the man is a paragon of virtue. We know (because we’ve read chapters 1 and 2, which Job hasn’t done) that he doesn’t deserve this in any case.
What’s going on is a kind of wager between Satan and God. “I know why Job is so faithful to you, God. He’s a fat cat. Take away his blessings; then we’ll see where his loyalties lie.” “Go ahead, take it all away.” So the Sabeans and other bands of marauding riffs come in, and Job loses his herds and his cattle. A windstorm comes, the house goes down, and his 10 children are gone all in one day.
“Oh yeah, but he has his health. If you take away a person’s health, then you find out what they’re really made of, and you’ll discover that he’ll turn around and curse God. He’ll curse you to your very face.” “Do whatever you want. Just save his life.” Job doesn’t know about any of that. He didn’t deserve it. Then the three miserable friends come in. They have their theology all sorted out. “Job, do you believe that God is just?”
“Yes.”
“So he punishes those who are unjust?”
“Yes.”
“So why would you say he’s punishing you?”
“I know that God is just and his ways are transcendent and he’s perfect and all of that, but I have to tell you quite frankly that I don’t deserve this.”
“Job, if you don’t deserve this, do you believe that God is sovereign?”
“Yes.”
“So nothing happens outside the sweep of his control?”
“Yes.”
“And this is happening to you?”
“Yes.”
“And it’s punishment in some way?”
“Well, it can’t be punishment.”
“But it’s happening to you and God is sanctioning it.”
“Yes.”
“Would God do anything unjust?”
“No!”
“Well, it follows then that …”
“But I’m not guilty! I don’t deserve this! Don’t you see? I wish I could argue with God face to face. I wish I had some sort of lawyer who would broker things for me.”
“Job, this is shocking! Are you challenging God?”
“No, no, no, no. I don’t want to challenge God, but at the same time, I have a few questions to ask him, because this really isn’t quite fair.”
The tension builds up and builds up and builds up. You feel it in the whole book, until finally, God speaks out of the wind, and he says, “Job, have you designed a snowflake recently? Where were you when I created the hippopotamus? Hmm? Did you cast Orion or Pleiades across the universe? Did you do that, Job? Hmm?” There are two or three chapters of these rhetorical questions.
Job says, “I’m sorry, I spoke too soon. I’m sorry.” God says, “I’m not finished yet. Stand up like a man! I have three more chapters of rhetorical questions!” At the end of it all, Job says not, “Ah-ha, I understand.” He says, “I repent.” Now it’s very important to understand what he’s repenting of. He’s not repenting for some sins that he now admits actually did bring this judgment on him in the first place.
In fact, his whole argument has said that if he had repented of things that he hadn’t done, if he had somehow squeezed blessings out of God (“Oh, if only I repent. I don’t know what I’ve done, but I’ll repent anyway. I’ll just repent somehow to get some blessings”), then that would be a defiance of God; it would be manipulating God. It would be untrue. He won’t do that. He’s not going to repent of something that he doesn’t think that he’s done.
He’s repenting of his attitude that is questioning God. Soon, God says that he’s the one whose words have basically been right and true, and it’s the other chaps who have their theology all mixed up because they’ve left no place for transcendence. They’ve left no place for God’s mysteriousness. They’ve condemned Job without really understanding how God does things.
It’s important to say two final things about Job. A number of years ago when I was writing something on Job, I read a lot of the commentaries and the literature and the essays. I’ve discovered that almost all the modern ones say the following: “Oh, Job is a great book! It has deep conflict and debate of moral irresolution. The good guy looks like the bad guy, and the bad guy looks like the good guy.”
You never give an Academy Award to a film with white hats and black hats. You just don’t do that. There has to be moral conflict of some sort. Even Spiderman has to be conflicted, for goodness’ sake! So what is praised in our culture in advanced literature is the literature where the protagonist turns out to be deeply flawed, and the nasty elements have redeeming features.
Now there are lots and lots of books and films that don’t do it that way, but then they’re sort of cartoonish. The Rambo-style stuff makes a lot of money, but it never wins an Academy Award, because you just sort of shoot at each other. You have to have bad guys to shoot at, so they’re made out to be very bad, and the heroes have to be very good. Their stories are pretty good, but it’s not literature. It’s just Rambo. It’s moneymaking.
But if it’s going to be literature, it has to be morally conflicted, and Job is morally conflicted. It’s a great book, and then chapter 42 spoils the whole thing. Disgusting! God comes in; Job gets more sheep and cows than ever. His wife has 10 more children (nobody asked what she thought about that, but she had 10 more children). Everything has a happy ending, sort of like an Eisenhower cowboy film. It has to be added by some idiotic redactor, centuries later, who doesn’t really understand what’s going on.
No, no, no, no. Don’t you see? Despite all of the moral ambiguity, Job insists, at the end, that justice is not only done but seen to be done. Job 42 is the Old Testament equivalent to Revelation 21 and 22. If you don’t see that, then you don’t understand God. Contemporary literature is right to point out the moral complexities and ambiguities of all human nature, but contemporary literature wants to see that as an end in itself.
The rest of the Bible is realistic enough to see that there is moral ambiguity and there are flawed characters, all right, God help us, but that’s not the end. The end is still the final resolution to come, and before the end, we put our hands on our mouths and acknowledge that there are some things we do not understand. That’s what the book of Job is about. That’s the third pillar. There will be two more and some pastoral reflections in the next session. Let’s pray.
Forbid, Lord God, that we should so domesticate our thinking to the categories of this lost and broken world that we cannot learn from your most Holy Word in these regards. Reform our thinking so that we walk with some deep understanding of what you have revealed, in a genuine and childlike faith in you, our Maker and Redeemer, where you have still kept silent but where you have shown yourself trustworthy. For Jesus’ sake, amen.
