Well, we’re back here mourning the death of another school family member, this time a former student with siblings still in our school. As I’ve told you before, I travel around the country frequently and, in so doing, I’m exposed to a lot of Christian schools. I can tell you that our school appears to experience a disproportionately high number of tragedies like this.
Our school community—its teachers, administrators, parents, and even students– also seems to love better and more purely than most of these other schools, so much so that accreditation teams and people who have worked at other schools have commented on this phenomenon when they come here. I doubt that’s a coincidence. I believe that walking through grief and suffering together and loving well are inextricably intertwined. It isn’t inevitably that way; a community can choose anger and bitterness instead of love. But love, once chosen, is a muscle that must be exercised to become strong. And when it’s exercised as often as it is in this community, it’s strong indeed.
It’s also no coincidence that, even before we lost our former student this week, the Lord had me in the book of Job. Job, like Ecclesiastes, is not a book I appreciated when I was younger. I didn’t get it, and I didn’t like it. It didn’t fit within my notions of how the world should work. The longer I live with the trials of this world, however, and the more I’ve read it, the more I see that Job is a story of hope in pain and agony, actually providing more answers than I once thought.
Job is an uncomfortable story for us, because in it God gives Satan permission to attack Job. The reality inherent in God’s consent is that Satan doesn’t control the world and can’t affect the affairs of men without God’s allowance. As powerful as Satan is, he’s not powerful enough.
God is love, and He created us with the capacity to love. Love is the greatest power in the universe, the force that makes all life worth living and holds all things together. It’s the decision to be sacrificially all for another. Gospel love, God’s love, includes a commitment to see the other become all God has for them. But love, using this definition, requires a choice. Love can’t be compelled, or it’s not love. It must always be chosen. Where there’s an ability to choose to love, there’s also the ability to choose to hate, to rebel, to choose ourselves instead of the other. This is the cause of our original sin, and the source of sin every day.
Because God gave us control and stewardship over the earth, our sin relinquished control to Satan. It now became possible for him to have some degree of agency over the earth. God is good; He hasn’t changed. He’s also still sovereign. That hasn’t changed, either. What’s changed is that, instead of only using good in the earth to accomplish his purposes, he now uses broken and evil things to accomplish them, as well. He works with what’s there, what exists, what WE have chosen. As Tish Harrison Warren has said, for us to complain to God that we live in a broken world and are affected by its brokenness is like a child breaking a toy and criticizing a loving parent for the fact it’s damaged.
Job serves as a timeless example of the collateral damage that comes with living in a fallen world. You know the story. Job is, according to Scripture, an “upright and blameless man, ” declared righteous by God, and provided with a good life. Satan asks God for permission to test Job, and God consents. Satan then takes away everything Job has: his possessions, his family, and his way of life. In his destitution, Job is surrounded by a group of “frenemies”, who come to comfort Job but instead accuse him of what to them seems like hidden, unconfessed sin.
In this story, the friends are the villains. But if we look closely, we’ll see too much of ourselves in them. Each of these guys feel like they have to represent God in the midst of the tragedy. They are God’s PR men, which means they believe that because God is good, Job must have done something to deserve his suffering. In their economy, prosperity equals God’s blessing and turmoil equals punishment for sin. They cannot accept the possibility that bad things happen to good people, as doing so would mean those same misfortunes could also befall them someday.
We always want an explanation, don’t we? We constantly look for someone to blame, a first cause, whether it’s cancer, yet another school shooting, girls getting washed away in a flood, or another student dying. Our minds and hearts, predisposed toward justice, can’t get around the idea that things that seem so unjust can happen to people who don’t seem to have done anything wrong.
In a very real way, these notions are good; they are evidence of the Imago Dei in us. Our hearts are wired for justice to be done, and for mercy to be given, and we expect God to be good. And so it offends us when things happen that don’t comport with our sense of justice, or mercy, or goodness.
These inclinations of our hearts to seek blame for evil are apparent in every generation. In Luke 13, Jesus talks to his disciples and the crowd about two then-current events–a massacre of Galileans by Pilate after a public disturbance, and a tower at Siloam falling and killing 18 people. Jesus cautions them not to think that the dead were worse sinners than those present. In doing so, Jesus corrects four basic assumptions they had, and that we all have:
- I suffer in the measure that I sin (so, if I don’t sin, I don’t suffer)
- Tragedy is a sure sign of God’s judgment (someone must have done something wrong and needs to be blamed)
- Bad things only happen to bad people
- As humans, we have the right to make all of these judgments
The intriguing thing about Job was, even though God had declared him righteous, Job actually believed all of these things to be true. In the midst of dialogue between Job and these fair-weather friends, Job speaks the classic words of faith that we know, or what we thought we knew: “Though He slay me, yet I will hope in Him.”
I read an article in Christianity Today years ago that noted that this passage doesn’t read the way we think it does in the original Hebrew. We often interpret this as Job exhibiting superhuman faith, suggesting that he will trust God regardless of what happens to him. According to the article, however, the original Hebrew actually translates the passage as Job angrily addressing his criticizing friends, saying, “Keep quiet; I will have my say. Let whatever may come upon me come. How long! I will take my flesh in my teeth; I will take my life in my hands. He may well slay me; I may have no hope; Yet I will argue my case before Him.”
Job is demanding an accounting from God, based upon his perspective of how the world works. This is consistent with Job’s declaration in 13:3 that, “I would speak directly to the Almighty. I want to argue my case with God himself.” He knows that appearing before a holy God might mean his obliteration, but Job wants God to explain to him why He would allow Job to suffer despite being a righteous guy. Even if it means his destruction, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style, in the process, Job is saying he will seek an accounting from God.
The amazing thing is that God enters Job’s presence, “like a whirlwind” and doesn’t obliterate him. Instead, God actually answers Job! God answers Job in the only way Job’s human-sized brain will understand- by explaining through a series of unanswerable questions about God’s creation. God instills in Job a sense of awe by giving him just a glimpse of God’s majesty. Sometimes we criticize God here, saying He doesn’t really give an answer, but He actually provides the only answer Job or we can understand. He tells Job (and us) that:
- We serve an omnipotent God, so powerful that we can’t even get our pea-sized brains around it
- God has a far, far greater understanding about how His creation works than I could ever imagine
- He is working a plan that is so complex that there’s no way to possibly explain it to me, because I wouldn’t get it if He did. It involves layers, and realms, and beings, and eons, and concepts that I don’t even know about
- He is good
God gives us children to show us His Fatherheart, how much He deeply loves us. When He doesn’t give us the full explanation of why things are happening, it’s because He can’t, any more than an adult can explain particle physics to an infant, and because He wants and needs us to trust Him. We’re put in positions throughout our lives where we don’t have the answers, but where we have nothing else but trust and faith. It’s in the fire that faith is best developed.
In the face of God’s overwhelming, yet loving response, Job says, “I had only heard about you before, but now I have seen you with my own eyes. I take back everything I said, and I sit in dust and ashes to show my repentance.” Job repents and accepts God’s sovereignty.
There’s a famous story you’ve probably heard before, about The London Times at the turn of the 20th century asking its readers to send it letters commenting on this question: “What’s Wrong with the World?” The famous Christian writer, G.K. Chesterton, in August, 1905, responded simply:
“Dear Sir,
I am.
Yours,
G.K. Chesterton”
Sometimes in our desire to demand an accounting from God for why terrible things happen, we forget to acknowledge our role in the world’s brokenness. We are part of the problem, part of the brokenness caused by the selfish, sinful choices we make every single day. Like raindrops falling in a flooding river, we contribute to the problem, and healing, revival, and hope always begin with personal repentance.
God commends Job for coming to Him, for crying out to Him, even for demanding an account from Him. God rebukes the other guys, saying they have not spoken of God rightly, as has Job. God affirms Job, not them.
Yet another rarely told piece of the story is that Job is healed. Job receives back his prosperity, but that’s less important than his true healing. Job needs restoration from feelings of entitlement and believing that through his self-righteousness, he can manipulate God into personal prosperity. We all need this healing, and God uses the cauldron of suffering to heal Job, as He must for all of us.
There’s so much more to say about suffering: about how God uses it to glorify Himself and to mold, shape, and form us into His image. It’s truly one of His most powerful and effective tools for making us look like the people He’s justified us in being. It hurts and it stinks, and we’re not supposed to love it. We’re just called to step into it, ask God to deliver us either from or through it, and use it to make us all we can be.
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