Year 2, Day 97: Job 3

The Rest of the Book

As we enter Job 3, we transition to a completely different style of writing than the first two chapters.  The first two chapters set up the cosmic battle between good and evil.  The first two chapters set up the conflict between a loyal God and a very destructive Satan.  The first two chapters show us a God who has confidence in His true believers and a Satan that wishes nothing more than to destroy the relationship between God and His true believers.

The rest of the book takes a look at how humanity deals with this conflict.  And we must be absolutely careful.  We must respect a very fine line as we go through these chapters.  Here’s the essence of the line:

• It is going to be easy to criticize Job and his three friends for their apparent lack of faith in God.  However, we must remember that we are human beings and we do not have an eternal mindset.  Thus, we must take things as they come, process them, deal with them, understand them, and move beyond them.  A great part of this process is talking and thinking things through.  It is human nature to need to process the stuff that happens to us in this world.  After all, if we never processed we would neither learn nor grow.  So we must not be harsh or critical about Job and his friends’ genuine need to process what is happening.
• On the other hand, we should never let any level of processing lead to questioning God’s relationship with us.  It is one thing to question how something can happen; it is entirely another thing to question if God really loves or if God really cares.  The former question is born out of the human need to understand and thus it is a good question to ask; the latter takes our need for understanding and pushes us into the realm of questioning God’s character.  We as human beings have every right to understand the things happening to us as best as we can and then grow from them.  The human being has no right to question the character and nature of God and thus establish himself as judge over God.  That doesn’t mean we don’t do it or can’t do it – it just means that when we do it we cross a line.

Job’s Processing

Keeping these things in mind, let’s go through this chapter of Job.  Here we get a chance to listen to Job speak.  This chapter is the very first essence of his thoughts.  As with most human beings, our first response to tragedy is born of pure emotion – and most of it is self-centered emotion.  Those of you who have read this blog for a while will be familiar with my concept of the self-monger.  This chapter is Job’s self-monger trying to come out and trying to gain control.  All Job can think about is his pain and his suffering.  The pain is so new that it is consuming his thoughts.  The self-monger rages and sets up a self-centered barrier that initially helps him learn to deal with this newfound pain.

At this moment in Job’s life all he wishes is that he would have died before this ever happened.  The new pain is so great that he genuinely believes that it would have been better for him to have never lived than to have to tolerate this present existence. 

You know what?  This is a pretty common human reaction.  Or, at least, it is pretty common within me.  I’ve been there.  I’ve been in a situation where life appeared so bleak that I asked God why I was even born.   In moments like these it seems as though it would have been easier to never have lived than to deal with what is currently happening.  What Job is experiencing here is completely normal for a human being.

Yet, let’s not lose sight of the fact that it is completely selfish.  Is a current experience of pain ever worth losing all the prior moments of joy?  Is there any experience of pain that is so great that it minimizes our relationship with God?  Yes, the suffering and the processing that Job is doing is completely natural and it is often the first step in pain management.  But if carried very far at all it will turn destructive within us.

Job Knows His Limitations

To this end, you will notice what Job does not do in this chapter.  Job does not question God.  Neither does Job give up.  Yes, Job wrestles with the pain.  He wrestles with what the rest of his life is going to be like now that his life has turned to tragedy.  But he does not turn it into questioning God or thinking that he can be a judge over God.  He is not willing to let the raging self-monger take this initial step of dealing with the pain into an unhealthy place.  Job contains the self-monger.

This brings us back to the balance we must remember throughout this book.  Job has to deal with the pain.  Life will be better if he gets the emotional crud that is inside of him out of him.  Ask any counselor or psychologist – they’ll tell you the truth in that sentence.  Job needs a moment of self-centered-barrier-construction in order to get a handle on the new circumstances of his life.  But what he does not need to do is bring about the dissolving of his relationship with God. 

I’d like to believe Job knows that it will be his relationship with God that will get him through the rest of his life.  So Job deals with the pain – admittedly selfishly for the time being.  But Job has done so in a way that leaves the door to God wide open so that eventually he will be able to move beyond the immediate self-centeredness in which he finds himself.

I think this is part of why God’s Word continues to call Job a righteous man.  Even though he is human and even though he does have to begin in a self-centered perspective just to cope with the pain of his new circumstances, he never closes the door on God or brings God’s character into question.  We can learn a lot from Job on this regard.

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