Ship of Fools: Job: I really don't care about your petty problems

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Posted by Anglican_Brat (# 12349) on :

Right now, I'm reading parts of the Book of Job. In Job 7:17-20, Job satirizes Psalm 8 by complaining that God is too fixated on human beings.

Switch to Job 38 to 40 and we have God's majestic response to Job, where God ignores his complaint, and pronounces a majestic speech about the beauty of creation.

Reflecting on this, I'm wondering if God's answer to Job is basically, I really don't care about your sins or your problems, suffering has nothing to do with your moral character, the good suffer, and the evil prosper. God is not measuring every little good deed or misdeed because he has a whole universe to run.

With this interpretation, I wonder if this challenges the idea that God counts the hair of our head and that he deeply cares about our personal lives, and our personal actions, the God of Israel who is in relationship to us.

Any thoughts?

[ 30. August 2016, 02:14: Message edited by: Anglican_Brat ]

Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on :

God's answer looks to me like it has more to do with the vastness of God's perspective than the beauty of creation. I don't see much in there about what God does or doesn't care about. So I'd be inclined to think instead that the idea that God counts the hair of our head challenges the interpretation you're pondering.

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

To me, God's response is saying, "You wouldn't understand the answer if I told you."

Moo

Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :

To me God is saying, "You need the long view, which only I have."

A good example was in the news yesterday. They did an analysis of Lucy's skeleton -- she's the hominid fossil. They discovered that Lucy probably died by falling out of a tree, as many chimpanzees and apes do.

We could imagine Lucy (or more likely her mate or troop) complaining to God about this. She was a righteous hominid! Why did You strike her down in her prime? And God could not possibly explain to them that (a) Lucy was sure to die at some point, being mortal and (b) if she dies in this way at this point in time she'll enlighten millions of people and supply vast scientific information.

Posted by Belle Ringer (# 13379) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
To me God is saying, "You need the long view, which only I have."
...
(b) if she dies in this way at this point in time she'll enlighten millions of people and supply vast scientific information.

Yup, longer view, or bigger picture. Our problems are real and God cares about every hair but there's more going on than our here today forgotten tomorrow problems. Paul speaks with surprising contentment about his soon death but he's seen a glimpse of what's coming that dwarfs all our complaints, even the most real, serious, deeply felt, painful, and prolonged ones. (Hard to remember when in deep pain and discouragement.)

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Moo:
To me, God's response is saying, "You wouldn't understand the answer if I told you."

Moo

This. I'm sure this is the primary point of God's speech.

But there's something else to pick up out of it too. Re "too fixated on human beings," I think Job's point was rather "Why do you sweat the small stuff? Give us a break, we're mere dust to you, why do you care so much?" which is entirely consistent with the God of Israel who is in relationship to us and cares deeply about even our pettiest problems.

Job is not asking for more attention but for less. God's speech at the end of the book says (among other things), "Sorry, sucker, I obsess like this over ALL my creation. I even know the length of a deer's pregnancy!"

Posted by mr cheesy (# 3330) on :

OK, this is going to sound contrary, so hold onto your hats.

One of the interesting things about Job is that it offers several different pictures of the deity, none of which are really consistent with the God we see in Jesus Christ.

At the beginning of the book, we have a God essentially playing dice with the life of Job in a way that is a bit reminiscent of the gods of Olympus, setting up a series of Herculean disasters to see if his resolve would break.

In the middle we have something of a Greek dialogue and God as a character standing at the sidelines waiting for his cue, then leaping out to squash the errors of the interlocators.

At the end we have another picture of the deity - the unknowable one who stands far above the petty dealings and lives of men, who is engaged in the orbits of planets and the colour of leopard skins but who isn't very interested in engaging with the problems of men.

The problem is that the latter deity in Job is not consistent with the other two. The answer to the question of "why did this happen to me" given by the cosmological deity at the end is not the same one given by the olympian god at the beginning. Indeed, the real honest answer to Job at the end - if the story is indeed supposed to be considered to be a narrative - is that his afflictions are because the deity was conducting an experiment to see what happened to his faith under severe pressure.

The cosmological god claims that he has better things to be doing than to worry about answering Job, dismissing the games played by the olympian god and the answer given by the answering god.

Another way to read Job is to consider him as the central character. In Act 1, he experiences a series of great disasters but refuses to curse God. In Act 2, the long discussion with friends where Job in the main remains silent whilst they suggest he must have done something wrong. At the end, the deity appears to shut up the friends but Job finally cracks. In Act 3, Job shakes his fist as God - and presumably fate - which has shaken his life so much, and is poetically led through the wonders of nature, which somehow gives him some relief. At the end of Act 3 his fortunes are restored.

As a work of poetry it is quite beautiful. But as as theology is it pretty mixed up and confusing and liable to be used for abuse, in my opinion.

Posted by leo (# 1458) on :

Maybe that's why some see Job as a combination of different sources edited together.

Posted by Nigel M (# 11256) on :

One way I found useful in reading Job is to note the following when asking, Why is that there?:

[1] The use of the divine names. It’s noticeable that during the discussions between Job and his friends (and wife), the main subject of their conversations is God as Elohim – the supreme creator El – who is absent from the conversation. It is talk about El, not with El. Once we get to the thunder and lightning in chapter 38, however, the actor is LORD – Yahweh as owner of Israel – who makes himself very present in the conversation.

[2] Job and his friends/family are not Jews. They are placed outside of Israel, somewhere not too far off in the East. For an Israelite listening to this story Job would be a fine upstanding foreign worshipper of the supreme deity in the ancient near east (ANE), the creator, but also effectively the absentee landlord. El didn’t concern himself much with human affairs, he sat far off and engagement with creation was the work of the divine council, consisting of the national gods. This explains why the conversation during the ‘El’ chapters is about God, not with him. El is almighty, and outside of human reach (Job 37:23). Humans would have had regard for him, but across the ANE the tendency was to engage more regularly with the national god.

[3] Israel’s trick was to identify their God – Yahweh – with this supreme El. They were one and the same. So Job, from the point of view of the Jewish listener, would probably be seen as a worshipper of Yahweh without knowing it. Job’s worldview, and that of his friends, was based around the idea that his God could be talked about only in that God’s absence. God was not ‘with him’ in the sense that Yahweh was with Israel. It is a more powerful punch, then, when Yahweh/El bursts on the scene to actually with ‘with’ Job and to speak to him. Job gets a taste of what it is like for the Israelite.

All this could be applied today to the situation where there is a tendency is to view God as an absentee landlord (something of a Deist viewpoint), where God-talk takes place in the expected absence of God himself. For the loyal member of God’s family, however, God is Yahweh: the one who is with ‘Israel’, the El-with-us (Immanuel).

Posted by Anselm (# 4499) on :

I think Job is a book about wisdom, and how our experience of suffering challenges our ideas of wisdom.
In this context, there is a poem in the middle of Job about wisdom - Job 28.
Humanity has investigated this world, mined this world for wisdom, with great success (beyond anything else in creation). But this investigation still has not reached the heart of wisdom, indeed that is beyond creation - even beyond Death.
Only God has this wisdom.
So, for humans, (v.28) "Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding."

Job never finds out why he suffered, though we the reader see that there was reason and purpose behind it. The wise course of action in suffering is to trust God - the God who is holy, powerful, righteous and wise beyond all things - even when we can't discern the purpose.
I take the speech of God to be saying this - his ways are beyond us.

Or, as Moo so succinctly put it,

quote:
God's response is saying, "You wouldn't understand the answer if I told you."

Posted by DonLogan2 (# 15608) on :

No-one mentioning Elihu and how he is not chastised by God? Did youth get it right?

#youthworkerperspective

Posted by Lamb Chopped (# 5528) on :

I take it that Elihu was SO far off the mark that God finally decided he'd better step in before it got any worse. [Cool]

Posted by DonLogan2 (# 15608) on :

"The ear tastes words..."

Posted by agingjb (# 16555) on :

There's a lot of collateral damage in the testing of Job.

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