Job: a Christmas meditation

The Book of Job is not a part of the Bible one usually associates with Christmas. This is not just because it is in the Old Testament; The Book of Isaiah figures very prominently in the Christmas story, and it is an Old Testament book. Nor is it because The Book of Job pretty thoroughly disabuses us of the notion that God is some sort of cosmic Santa Claus who materially rewards us when we’ve been good, and deprives us when we’ve been bad.

The Book of Job is considered one of the great masterpieces of world literature. It is easily the most philosophical book in the entire Bible, dealing as it does with the most fundamental questions of man’s existence and his relationship to his Creator. It is the earliest known work that deals with theodicy, the reconciliation of a perfect, good and all-powerful Creator with his imperfect creation.

Job was a pious and wealthy man who lived in a place called “the land of Uz” during the patriarchal age. He was a Semite, though probably not a Hebrew. According to the Bible (all quotations are from the New International Version),

This man was blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil. He had seven sons and three daughters, and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East. (Job 1:1-3)

Job was so pious that, whenever his children had a feast, he would offer sacrifices just in case one of them might have sinned.

One day, as God is presiding over an assembly of his angels, he asks Satan (one of the angels) where he has been. When he replies that he has been roaming the earth, God asks him if he has “considered my servant Job”, and proceeds to praise Job’s piety and righteousness. Satan replies that Job is only faithful and good because God has given him great wealth and asserts that Job will curse God if it is all taken away.

God agrees to Satan’s challenge, with the proviso that Job himself not be harmed. So Job’s children are killed and his livestock are all killed or run off. Job responds to these tragedies by tearing his robe, shaving his head, and falling to his knees in worship. At the next angelic assembly, God points out to Satan that Job “still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason” (Job 2:3).

So Satan demands that Job be tested again, this time physically. God agrees, and Job is afflicted with “painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head” (Job 2:7). When Job’s wife demands that he “curse God and die”, Job refuses and maintains his integrity: “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10)

At this point God steps out of the picture. Three of Job’s friends — Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite — come to sit with him and comfort him. For the next 29 chapters these comforters, in a series of lengthy speeches in verse, try to convince Job that he must have committed some sin to bring on his troubles. They have no idea what that sin might be, but to them it is self-evident that the events of a man’s life — good or bad — are a consequence of whether he has pleased God.

Job rejects this Santa Claus view of God. He protests his innocence, and argues that not only do the good suffer, but the evil prosper. But he has no explanation for why this is so. “Why do the wicked live on”, he asks in frustration, “growing old and increasing in power? (Job 21:7) The groans of the dying rise from the city, and the souls of the wounded cry out for help. But God charges no one with wrongdoing.” (Job 24:12)

As his “comforters” insist more and more vehemently that Job must acknowledge his sin, whatever it is, and repent, Job insists just as vehemently that he has not sinned. He expresses a desire to go before God and present his case:

Even today my complaint is bitter;
his hand is heavy in spite of my groaning.
If only I knew where to find him;
if only I could go to his dwelling!
I would state my case before him
and fill my mouth with arguments.
I would find out what he would answer me,
and consider what he would say.
Would he oppose me with great power?
No, he would not press charges against me.
There an upright man could present his case before him,
and I would be delivered forever from my judge.
(Job 23:2-7)

But he is frustrated because God won’t answer him.

By Chapter 32 Job’s companions have strained their friendship almost to the breaking point. Clearly, they are not going to change Job’s mind, and Job has made no headway in convincing them of his innocence. At this point, a fourth person enters the picture, a younger man named Elihu, “son of Barakel the Buzite”.

Elihu is critical of Job’s three friends. “Not one of you has proved Job wrong,” he says. “None of you has answered his arguments.” (Job 32:12) But he is equally critical of Job, because several times Job came very close to accusing God of being unjust. He says to Job, “It is unthinkable that God would do wrong, that the Almighty would pervert justice.” (Job 34:12) Job needs to repent, alright, but not for any sin that his three companions might be able to name. His sin is in presuming that he can argue with God.

Elihu goes on for six chapters when God interrupts to give Job a final and definitive answer. His answer takes the form of a question:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone-
while the morning stars sang together
and all the angels shouted for joy?
(Job 38:4-7)

This is the beginning of a long poetic description of the wonders of Creation — wonders that man dimly perceives, but only God fully comprehends and controls. One by one, God asks Job if he understands these wonders and can make them do his bidding, as God can. He then asks Job the obvious question:

Would you discredit my justice?
Would you condemn me to justify yourself?
(Job 40:8)

The Book of Job is not about why bad things happen to “good” people. You will search it in vain for an answer to that question. God instead answers a different question, a question many of us are reluctant to ask because we are afraid of the answer. God is telling us that he, and he alone, is ultimately in charge. He is, quite literally, over everything. To try to argue with him, to accuse him of being unjust, is worse than futile: it is utterly irrational. “There is a difficulty about disagreeing with God,” said C. S. Lewis:

He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. (Mere Christianity)

Yes, bad things do happen to “good” people. But that doesn’t mean God isn’t aware of it, or that he is indifferent to their pain. And yes, he can stop bad things from happening, and he can take away pain; he is, after all, God. But what he does instead is something that is even more amazing: he takes all those bad things and turns them into something good.

Many Christians try to avoid laying on God the responsibility for the bad things that happened to Job. They note that inflicting all those misfortunes on Job was Satan’s idea. This is a distinction without a difference. In fact, it was God who brought up the subject of Job, who praised Job’s righteousness and piety to a being God knew was so consumed with pride that he wouldn’t be able to resist the implied challenge.

God is sovereign over everything — the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly. And this, not “why bad things happen to ‘good’ people”, is the central lesson of The Book of Job. While we humans have free will and are capable of choosing to do good or evil, for God the end is never in doubt. He is now, always has been, and always will be in complete control.

So, what does all this have to do with Christmas? Just this: Christmas commemorates a time when God gave up his rights as Creator and Ruler of the universe for a season in order to enter our world as a man — a man very much like Job, only more so, in both his righteousness and his suffering — so that we, his imperfect creation, might become reconciled to our perfect and all-powerful Creator.

And that has to be the best Christmas present anyone has ever received.

12 thoughts on “Job: a Christmas meditation”

  1. Please read Chapter 2 of “Civilization and Its Discontents”, by Sigmund Freud. You can download it.

    Here is a comment about god from a friend of mine:

    “When one considers the breadth, depth and age of the universe, and the likelihood that this is just one of many such, a truly colossal conceit is required to believe that the
    creator of all this cares deeply about each and every living thing therein — or even bothers to maintain ongoing knowledge thereof. And there certainly is no evidence hereabouts to support an abundance of caring or love. It doesn’t compute.”

    It can be argued that god is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, and therefore has the capability to keep track of everything. Perhaps god is outside of time; that is, for god, time does not exist because god comprehends all that ever was, is now, and will be, in an instant.

    I do agree with my friend about the absence of a god of “caring and love”. I see no evidence of that. Various religions provide sometimes elaborate rationalizations to explain how god takes care of each person: reincarnation, heavenly reward, etc.

    A couple of final thoughts: All religions are human constructions. They are the product of the human imagination. About prayer, it would seem to me that any attempt to influence the will of god, assuming that god is at all interested, is presumptuous. The actual function of prayer is to enable a person to verbalize his innermost thoughts. That alone is a sort of consolation.

    What do you think?

  2. J. H. deRaat,

    The point of God’s questioning of Job was to help him understand that God is God and that he, Job, is not. God is so far above us, so different from us, that we simply can’t see things from God’s perspective.

    Time and space are part of Creation, and we are bound by the limits they impose. God is the Creator, not the created, and he is not bound as we are. It is not at all conceited to believe that the Creator “cares deeply about each and every living thing therein”. Even within the space-time we occupy, time is not the same for every observer. For example, time is dilated in a massive gravitational field so that clocks there would appear to run more slowly.

    As for the absence of “caring and love”, C. S. Lewis has answered that objection far better than I could:


    My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet. Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too–for the argument depended on saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist–in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless -I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality–namely my idea of justice–was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

    Finally, prayer is a request, not a command. I don’t know about other religions, but for Christians prayer is a way for believers to align their will with God’s, not vice-versa. “Your will, not mine,” was Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane.

  3. C.S. Lewis’ argument does not impress me. It’s not a question of whether or not god exists, or whether god is just, but rather whether god is a caring, loving, merciful, and forgiving god. I came across this:

    Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

    — Epicurus (c. 341-270 BC)

    Prayer as request: If god is omniscient, then god knows what each one of us seeks, and therefore prayer is unnecessary, except, as I suggested in my previous comment, as a way for the individual to verbalize his, as you put it, ‘request’, thus attempting to come to terms with whatever it is that concerns him.

  4. J. H. de Raat,

    And where did you get your assumption that God should be “caring”, “loving”, “merciful” and “forgiving”? Are these simply your personal prejudices, or are they part of some objective and universal standard? Are you saying that God is not caring, loving, merciful and forgiving? Then you must be comparing him with a God who is.

    Regarding the Epicurean argument, if God prevented every incidence of evil, then humans would have no free will. One can only choose to do good if there exists the possibility of doing evil. And since the possibility exists, it follows that some people will do evil.

    As I said in my article, God does something even more amazing: he takes evil acts and turns them into something good. See the story of Joseph, Genesis 37 and 39 – 50. Joseph tells his brothers, who had sold him into slavery, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.”

    God sees the whole picture. We don’t. God is in complete control. We aren’t.

    Finally, of course God knows what each one of us seeks, “for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” (Matt 6:8)

  5. The Christian god, we are taught, is a caring, loving, merciful, and forgiving god. (“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so . . . “) If god is not all of those things, then why bother with god? I am most certainly not comparing gods, one to another. I am proceeding on the notion that there is but one god. Of course, Christians believe that god has three persons: father, son, and holy spirit. This, by the way, Christianity has in common with Hinduism, which has thousands of aspects of god, a difference between the characterization of god in the two religions being the number of persons.

    As for free will and evil, the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands is an example of how arbitrary our human circumstances are. It was not the exercise of free will that caused this disaster. If god is in complete control, why do such natural disasters happen?

    I don’t think that it was god who took the evil act of Joseph’s brothers and turned it into good. Rather, it was Joseph who acted positively in the face of adversity. Attributing Joseph’s success to god may have been the pious thing to do, as far as the writer of Genesis was concerned, but it’s Joseph who deserves the credit.

    Joseph exercised his free will and, in the best sense of the expression, took full advantage of the possibilities to advance himself. Good for Joseph.

    Citing Matthew supports my point that prayer does not influence god, although it may provide solace to the person praying.

    Good and evil: Does evil exist as a separate power? I am referring here not to the behavior of human beings, but such things as disease, pestilence, accidents with innocent victims, or, generally, the arbitrariness of human existence.

    I do not see a basis for human relationship with god. God is unknowable. God is big enough to take care of god; humans are not, and so we should take care of none another. That is a simple morality that goes far beyond religion.

    I don’t think that you have read the chapter from Freud that I mentioned in my first post. I’ll copy it and post it for you.

    Again, all religions are human constructions. New religions, or variations on existing religions, are popping up all the time. If you would like an example, take a good look at Scientology, the invention of the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

  6. The Christian god, we are taught, is a caring, loving, merciful, and forgiving god. (“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so . . . “) If god is not all of those things, then why bother with god? I am most certainly not comparing gods, one to another. I am proceeding on the notion that there is but one god. Of course, Christians believe that god has three persons: father, son, and holy spirit. This, by the way, Christianity has in common with Hinduism, which has thousands of aspects of god, a difference between the characterization of god in the two religions being the number of persons.

    As for free will and evil, the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands is an example of how arbitrary our human circumstances are. It was not the exercise of free will that caused this disaster. If god is in complete control, why do such natural disasters happen?

    I don’t think that it was god who took the evil act of Joseph’s brothers and turned it into good. Rather, it was Joseph who acted positively in the face of adversity. Attributing Joseph’s success to god may have been the pious thing to do, as far as the writer of Genesis was concerned, but it’s Joseph who deserves the credit.

    Joseph exercised his free will and, in the best sense of the expression, took full advantage of the possibilities to advance himself. Good for Joseph.

    Citing Matthew supports my point that prayer does not influence god, although it may provide solace to the person praying.

    Good and evil: Does evil exist as a separate power? I am referring here not to the behavior of human beings, but such things as disease, pestilence, accidents with innocent victims, or, generally, the arbitrariness of human existence.

    I do not see a basis for human relationship with god. God is unknowable. God is big enough to take care of god; humans are not, and so we should take care of one another. That is a simple morality that goes far beyond religion.

    I don’t think that you have read the chapter from Freud that I mentioned in my first post. I’ll copy it and post it for you.

    Again, all religions are human constructions. New religions, or variations on existing religions, are popping up all the time. If you would like an example, take a good look at Scientology, the invention of the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

  7. Sorry; a typing error in the first version of my most recent post. Please reject it in favor of the second version. Thanks.

  8. As for free will and evil, the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands is an example of how arbitrary our human circumstances are. It was not the exercise of free will that caused this disaster. If god is in complete control, why do such natural disasters happen?

    Good and evil: Does evil exist as a separate power? I am referring here not to the behavior of human beings, but such things as disease, pestilence, accidents with innocent victims, or, generally, the arbitrariness of human existence.

    You can’t call natural disasters good or evil. Evil is the flouting of the moral law. What God does may be unpleasant and even deadly for humans, but it is not evil because God is the source of the moral law. Richard Nixon once said, “if the President does it, it’s not illegal”. For a human, a statement like that is pure arrogance. But if God were to say, “if God does it, it’s not evil”, he’d be completely within his rights.

    But we get back to what I asked you before. Your ideas of “good” and “evil” — where do you get them? Are they just your personal prejudices? If they are, then how can you argue that the existence of what you call “evil” disproves the existence of a loving, caring God? You might as well argue, “God doesn’t exist because I like apple pie and hate spinach. A loving God would never create spinach.” What is the source of the moral law? If it is not your own prejudices, then what is it? And don’t argue that it’s the consensus of the human race or whatever, because then you get into the problem of infinite regress. At some point there must be a source, and I contend that source is God, not your personal prejudices.

    I do not see a basis for human relationship with god. God is unknowable.

    I have a relationship with God, and so do hundreds of millions of other people.

    Again, all religions are human constructions.

    And you’ve thoroughly investigated this? Then I assume I can go to a university library and find the books and journal articles you’ve written on the subject.

    BTW, it is customary to capitalize the first letter of a proper name. You capitalize your own name, but spell “God” with a lowercase “g”. That tells me all I need to know about you.

  9. I see that your arguments have degenerated to ad hominem remarks and sarcasm. Too bad; I thought that we might have an interesting discussion going on.

    As for capitalizing the word ‘god’, what is god’s proper name? God is a common noun, not a name. Jews have given us the tetragrammaton, transliterated as YHWH or JHVH (from whence comes the name Jehovah) as the proper name of god.

    I don’t see god as the source of moral law. Morality, like justice, is a human concept. One man in a wilderness can do as he pleases; introduce others to the scene, and some understandings and agreements have to be made, or else we have Hobbes’ ‘man in a state of nature’, in which life is nasty, brutish, and short.

    The Bible as the source of moral law? The Old Testament includes many rules for believers to follow. It is the source, for example, of the dietary laws that some Jews observe. Check out all of the rules laid down in the Old Testament, including those about how sacrifices should be made.

    Morality – In Exodus 20-13, and again in Deuteronomy 5-17, we find the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.” You were in combat; so was I, but in a different war. The commandment does not say, “Thou shalt not kill unless . . . “, or “Thous shalt not kill except . . . “. It just says, plainly and unequivocally, “Thou shalt not kill.” And yet, in our ‘moral’ society, killing in combat and the death penalty are acceptable. That I find repugnant.

    Jesus was a reformer; he simplified the law, the best parts of which, in my opinion, are the golden rule and loving one’s neighbor.

    Note that I have not, in this exchange, questioned the existence of god.

    If all religions are not human constructions, then what is the source of religions, and why are there so many of them? Muslims would argue that the angel Gabriel transmitted god’s word directly to Mohammed. I’m not convinced. By the way, a nicely written account of his life is Washington Irving’s “Mahomet (sic) and His Successors”. According to the Old Testament, god spoke directly to Moses; no intermediary.

    An interesting book about god is Jack Miles’ “God – A Biography”, ISBN 0-679-74368-5. Miles is a former Jesuit. The book won him a Pulitzer prize.

    I think that one’s relationships with one’s fellow human beings is more of an immediate concern than one’s relationship with an unknowable god. We’re all in this together.

    Again, I suggest that you read Chapter 2 of “Civilization and Its Discontents”; it’s illuminating.

    I do not question your belief; it’s your choice to make.

  10. Following on what I wrote about killing, here is a much better expression of the thought:

    “Again war. Again sufferings, necessary to nobody, utterly uncalled for. Again fraud, again the universal stupefaction and brutalization of men.

    Men who are separated from each other by thousands of miles … are seeking out one another, in order to kill, torture, and mutilate each other in the cruelest way possible. What can this be? Is it a dream or a reality? Something is taking place which should not, cannot be; one longs to believe that it is a dream and to wake from it.

    But no, it is not a dream, it is a dreadful reality!

    …How can so-called enlightened men preach war, support it, participate in it, and worst of all, without suffering the dangers of war themselves, incite others to it, sending their unfortunate defrauded brothers to fight? These so-called enlightened men cannot possibly ignore … all that has and is being written about the cruelty, futility and senselessness of war. They are regarded as enlightened men precisely because they know all this. The majority of them have themselves written and spoken about it. … No enlightened man can help knowing that the universal competition in the armament of states must inevitably lead them to endless wars or to a general bankruptcy, or else to both the one and the other. …

    Everyone knows and cannot help but knowing that, above all, war, calling forth the lowest animal passions, deprave and brutalize men. … All so-called enlightened men know this. Then suddenly war begins and all this is instantly forgotten, and the same men who but yesterday were proving the cruelty, futility, the senselessness of wars, now think, speak and write only about killing as many men as possible, about ruining and destroying the greatest possible amounts of human labor, and about exciting as much as possible the passion of hatred in those peaceful, harmless, industrious men who by their labour feed, clothe, maintain these same pseudo-enlightened men who compel them to commit those dreadful deeds contrary to their conscience, welfare or faith.

    Something is taking place incomprehensible and impossible in its cruelty, falsehood and stupidity …. Stupefied by prayers, sermons, exhortations, by processions, pictures and newspapers, the cannon-fodder — hundreds of thousands of men, uniformly dressed, carrying divers deadly weapons, leaving their parents, wives, children, with hearts of agony but with artificial bravado — go where they, risking their own lives, will commit the most dreadful act of killing men whom they do not know and who have done them no harm. And they are followed by doctors and nurses who somehow imagine that at home they cannot serve simple peaceful suffering people but can only serve those who are engaged in slaughtering each other. Those who remain at home are gladdened by news of the murder of men, and when they learn that many [enemies] have been killed, they thank someone whom they call God.

    All this is not only regarded as the manifestation of elevated feeling, but those who refrain from such manifestations, if they endeavour to disabuse men, are deemed traitors and betrayers, and are in danger of being abused and beaten by a brutalized crowd, which in defense of its insanity and cruelty can possess no other weapon than brute force.”

    Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, 1904 (trans. by Evgeny Lampert, in Essays From Tula, Sheppard Press 1948)

  11. I don’t like war, although I acknowledge that sometimes nations have to defend themselves. This obviously wasn’t the case with Iraq, and I was opposed to invading that country. In my first post on Wikileaks I stated that World War I (and World War II) could have been avoided if Wikileaks or something like it had been around in 1914. For example, it is doubtful Germany would have invaded France if the Germans had known that Italy had secretly signaled to the allies its willingness to switch sides in exchange for Austrian territory.

    However, God isn’t responsible for wars, although he permits them to happen. Why he permits them, I don’t pretend to know. I don’t see what God sees, but I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. Maybe he allows wars and allows them to become so horrible in order to give us an incentive to find other ways of working out our differences. There was an old Star Trek episode that hinted at that.

    I also don’t support the death penalty. But only because today we can remove dangerous criminals from society without killing them. Ancient peoples, who were living at the subsistence level, did not have this luxury. They did not produce the social surplus necessary for housing and guarding criminals for long periods of time. The only way to remove a dangerous criminal from society was to kill him or exile him. That is my guess as to why God prescribed the death penalty for certain crimes in ancient Israel. But it’s only a guess.

    As for the spelling of “God”, orthodox Jews consider it to be a proper name. That’s why they spell it “G-d”, so they won’t risk misusing his name.

Comments are closed.