Job - Pt. 3

 

And the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil?” Then Satan answered the LORD and said, “Does Job fear God for no reason? Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.” (Job 1:8-10 ESV).

 

Let’s piggyback off yesterday’s thought and dive a bit deeper. The key to interpreting the book of Job is this first question of Satan: “Does Job fear God for no reason?” (v. 9). Satan is implying that Job is not faithful and obedient to God for nothing, but only because of secondary blessings which accrue in the relationship. Take those away, he says, and Job will openly curse God (v. 11). A curse does not, of course, refer to obscene speech in the Scripture. It is the act of abominating someone or something, regarding it as utterly ugly and worthless. The accusation is that a relationship with God is impossible, because Job loves the gifts more than the Giver. Once the gifts are taken away, the game of “bribery and payoffs” will stop, and Job will curse God by cutting off his relationship with God, by demeaning God as unworthy of love or trust.

 

This is the issue at stake in the book of Job: will human beings continue in a relationship with God in which all they gain from the relationship is God? Will we ever treat God as anything more than a vending machine or a means to an end? The opening chapters of Job show God putting his beloved servant in a position in which he loses every other reason to stay in a relationship with God except God himself. It starts to cost Job dearly to hold on to his relationship with God.

 

This is an issue of deep relevance for God’s people in our culture. While the outward form of the secondary blessings is not the same for us—faithful Christians are not promised wealth, cattle, and many slaves (1:2–3)—we all enjoy benefits in our relationship with God through Jesus Christ which are secondary to the ultimate blessing of the forgiveness of sins, eternal life, and communion with God. As I read Job 1–2, I must ask myself: if my family were suddenly killed, would I praise God any less as I grieved and mourned that very real loss? Without suppressing his pain, Job considers God no less worthy of worship when he takes than when he gives. In other words, Job’s relationship with God is entirely on terms of grace.  Since everything he enjoyed was a gift rather than reward for good behavior, God is not to be faulted when it is taken away. On the other hand, if God allows a Christian to suffer some great and painful loss, and if the Christian’s response is, “How dare you, Lord? You’ve betrayed me!,” then that Christian’s motives for faithfulness are certainly different than Job’s.

 

We are only at the first chapter of a long and complicated book, but already we are deep into the complexities of the book of Job. Part of what the prologue of Job teaches is that sometimes God temporarily interrupts his normal policy of giving earthly blessings to his saints (remember Job’s restoration in 42:10–17) and puts us in a position where we have every earthly reason to give up on God. Sometimes God will appear to act like an enemy (13:24), like someone who has betrayed us. Furthermore, there is a sense in which God must allow these temporary and tragic interruptions in his goodness if he is to prove the reality of our relationship with him. This is the case because a relationship with God for God’s sake is the only kind of relationship that will save us. The true character of our faith is exposed in this kind of crucible.