Job 40 "Not All Bad" Scott Hoezee

A year ago, a lot of people faced the smoldering ruins at Ground Zero in New York and asked the ultimate "why" question: Why did this happen? Why didn't God prevent this? In more recent weeks, a highly skilled, perhaps professionally trained, sniper has been shooting the unsuspecting at gas pumps and in parking lots and on playgrounds near Washington D.C. And again we wonder where God is in all this. Why can't such evil be thwarted? But really the same question gets asked all the time far from the glare of the TV camera's klieg lights. A child dies, a good person is killed, a freak accident takes the life of someone who was unspeakably precious to us, and we are left to wonder why.

It seems to be a legitimate question to ask, and surely the biblical Book of Psalms gives us sanction to pose just such queries to God. Jesus himself asked a "why" question from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!?" That may be history's most shattering plea for a divine explanation in the face of suffering. But even if so, the person who remains history's most famous poser of the question must be the man called Job.

Having quite literally lost everything in a series of calamities that befell Job from out of the blue, Job famously sits on his ash heap and scrapes the pus out of the boils that afflict his body and he bawls out his why to God. None of the answers stemming from conventional wisdom satisfies Job. His friends assure Job that there is a reason for everything and that, in Job's case, the reason for all this suffering is obvious: Job had sinned. Job had, wittingly or unwittingly, done something really lousy, and this was the result.

But Job wasn't buying the pop theology these various friends were peddling. He was convinced that there was nothing in his past that could even begin to warrant the misery of his present moment. In fact, at times he says that he was "blameless." On the other hand, he admits at one point that compared to the upright splendor and superior holiness of God, no person would come off looking very good. Compared to God we may all look at least a little shabby. But relatively speaking, Job was quite sure he was more than just a pretty good person--he was just about perfect, at least in human terms.

In the past I have sometimes made reference to the recently published Pennyroyal Caxton Bible illustrated by the outstanding artist Barry Moser. Moser often displays an uncanny insight into biblical stories through how he draws his art. In the Book of Job, Moser drew three portraits of Job. The first is before the disasters struck and the caption is "Job, Perfect and Upright." It shows a well-groomed, well-dressed older man, yet his chin is tucked in a bit and there is something in the way Job's eyes are set that hints ever-so-slightly of condescension. He looks like a man who has it all, and he knows it. He's looking down on you almost. He looks like a good man but also a comfortable and self-satisfied man.

By contrast the next picture shows Job naked and covered with sores. This time he is not looking down but is looking up, with a searching look in his eyes and yet with his jaw set. He looks not just destitute but determined, not just bereft but in search of an explanation for what has happened. The final portrait is sub-titled "Job, Old and Full of Days." He has clearly been restored here and is once again well dressed. Once more he is looking down but this time without a hint of arrogance or superiority. Instead he looks consternated, maybe confused, and certainly chastened. He's looking down now but he's not looking down on anyone but is instead bowed down in humility.

Those three portraits nicely capture the progression of this book. Job moves from the heights of this life down into the depths before getting re-elevated back to the heights. But it's not as though Job moves from Point A, down to Point B, and then right back to Point A all over again. Job winds up in the end at a different spot, a Point C. Point C bears resemblance to the original Point A in that Job receives back his wealth and is able to start a new family, but Job clearly changes through what he experienced, encountered, and learned down at the low point of his life. How could he not be a changed man?

But aside from the obvious changes that come whenever we personally confront great suffering, what else accounts for the changes in Job? What was it finally that settled the matter for Job? Was it that he had been vindicated as a perfect and righteous man after all? Was it that God had stepped in, refuted the arguments of Job's would-be comforters, and so demonstrated once and for all that Job had been right all along? Was it that God fully and completely and clearly answered the many questions that get posed in this book? In other words, does the Book of Job, perhaps history's single most famous example of the so-called "problem of evil," provide us with a theodicy, a way to explain the relationship between a good God and the bad things that nevertheless happen in this world?

No, none of that really encompasses what finally happens in Job. Yes, there is a sense in which Job's relative innocence is proven. There is a sense in which the miserable comforters are shown to have been themselves too arrogant and also finally incorrect. But after nearly thirty long, almost interminable, chapters of doubts and questions and complaints lodged before God's throne, when Yahweh finally speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, what Job got and what we readers now get could hardly be called a philosophical argument, a theological reply, or in any way the kind of answer you'd expect.

Just imagine God's coming down to Ground Zero in New York, hearing the awful questions of "Why, God, why?" and then responding to those pleas by inviting everyone to accompany God on a whalewatching excursion. God would take these folks out into the Atlantic Ocean to the east of New York City, find perhaps a humpback whale, and then say, "There! You see that!? Do you see that whale swimming so mightily, frolicking amidst the ocean swells in exactly the way I designed this marvelous leviathan to do? Well, that's your answer, my grieving friends! If you can tell me how I made this creature, if you yourselves are capable of the kind of power I so routinely display throughout the expanse of this vast creation, well then, maybe we can talk a bit more about the whys and wherefores of suffering and evil. Until then, consider the humpback and let's just let it go at that!"

Now I can't speak for everyone here this evening, much less for everyone in the world who has ever pitched a difficult and wrenching question God's direction, but I'm guessing that most folks would find this kind of reply to be merely puzzling at best and downright frustrating at worst. But so it goes in this book. Job asks God why the innocent suffer, and God sings in chapter 40 a song about a hippopotamus! Job asks God why the wicked sometimes prosper, and God croons a ditty about a whale.

This line of reply begins in chapter 38 and continues right on through chapter 41. God does almost all of the talking here with Job now and again managing to do no more than sputter out a few pathetic lines to the effect that he doesn't know what to say now and he also realizes that what he had said earlier had quite probably been all wrong, too.

But in the course of these four chapters in which God does all the talking, God directs our attention to the dimensions of outer space, the depths of the oceans, the shape of the earth, the power of thunderstorms, the beauty of the stars in the Pleiades and in the constellation Orion, the cunning of lions and the loveliness of mountain goats and deer, the giddy power of wild donkeys and the strength of the ox, the unlikely speed of the ostrich, the power of a horse's neck, the soaring wonder of eagles and hawks, the muscle structure of the hippo, the spouting and sporting of whales. It's as though Job had ordered a book of theology from Amazon.com but received instead a Sierra Club calendar with pictures of wildlife! Job turned on his TV hoping to see Alvin Plantinga deliver a lecture from his book, God, Freedom, and Evil only to find a National Geographic special about polar bears!

It all seems so unexpected and strange. Yet the funny thing is that it works. It works because God is clearly re-framing the issue. God is not sweeping it under the rug. He is not denying that there are questions to be asked and maybe by and by answers to be given. But he casts all of this out into the larger arena of the entire creation and somehow this re-framing of it all has a profound effect on Job.

And make no mistake: God is putting Job (and all of us mortals) into his proper place. Verses 8-14 of chapter 40 fairly drip with sarcasm. "Let me see your arm, Job--does it look like mine? Yell as loud as you can, Job--does it compare to my thunder? If it does, then the world is yours to rule, my friend. Go ahead! Have at it! Put on a crown, slip on the most resplendent robe of holiness you can find and then go get 'em, boy! Let loose with a thunderbolt or two of judgment and nail the wicked, humble the proud. Round them all up, shoot them all, and then bury them in a mass grave somewhere out in the Sahara Desert. If you think you can handle it, do it! And then, but only then, will I admit that you are better than I am. You are, on your own, strong enough to hold the whole world in your hands."

Of course, God doesn't really give Job a chance to answer all that in that it is a rhetorical question if ever there was one! Without missing a beat between verses 14 and 15 God returns immediately to his tour of creation, starting this time with the so-called behemoth, which most commentators are quite sure is what we now call the hippopotamus. But the point with the hippo is the same point that has been made throughout that vast array of other creatures and wonders I just listed; namely, these display the awesome power, the glorious ingenuity, and the mind-blowing wisdom of God. And since we are not capable of creating, managing, or controlling all of that, just possibly we are also not capable of understanding other parts of life, including every detail related to life's moral dimensions.

It's not that there is no explanation, it's just that we maybe cannot bear it. It's not that there is no rhyme or reason to life, it's just that we need to trust the God who is ultimately in charge of all life to do the right thing and to bring matters to their proper conclusion in God's good time. Of course, we cannot now help but read Job in the light of the gospel. Now we know God's ultimate surprise when dealing with sin, evil, and death. If we thought it was a bit bracing to be shown a hippo when we thought we were going to hear a theology lecture, the Bible's vastly more surprising move is to show us a baby in a manger and then a lowly carpenter's son when we thought we were going to see the armies of God marching from the horizon to slay the beasts of evil. If we thought it was a touch unusual to be brought to the zoo when we thought we'd be stopping by a seminary to learn deep matters of the faith, it is vastly more earthshakingly shocking to see God deal with death by dying himself. Even the disciples in the New Testament could not believe it when Jesus refused to take up the sword in favor of instead dying on a cross at the tip of the enemy's sword.

None of this quite makes sense, and yet all of it seems to be God's way of operating. But there is something else I want to highlight from Job before we are finished here this evening, and it ties in with what we thought about this morning; namely, the creation matters. This physical world is important to God. The creatures, stars, oceans, birds, and fish of this universe loom large in the divine mind--so large, in fact, that God himself did not deem it at all strange to approach Job's moral and ethical probes via a tour of the natural world.

As Frederick Buechner once noted, a perennial fault of religious people is the attempt to be more spiritual than God himself is. God's thoughts may be higher than our thoughts and his ways higher than our ways, as Isaiah observed, but the Bible also bears witness to the fact that God's thoughts are often more earthy than our thoughts. God often takes care to ponder this earth even at the same time we are focusing an undue amount of attention on the dimensions of "heaven."

That may well have environmental and ecological ramifications, and in past sermons I have tried to suggest what some of those may be. If creation is that vital to God, then a proper part of our own piety and discipleship should likewise be a regular celebration of and preservation of the physical creation and our fellow, non-human creatures. But for this evening we can let God's turn toward creation remind us of another thing: namely, maybe the answer to our hardest questions and deepest thirsts is to be found not high up in the stratosphere of rigorous philosophical and theological arguments but instead in the bed of roses in our backyard, the splendor of Lake Michigan as it stretches out to the horizon, the lyric beauty and majesty of a Great Blue Heron in flight.

No, I am not saying anything as simplistic as, "When you are grieving, take a trip to the countryside and you'll come back refreshed and happy again as though the bad thing never even happened!" Of course I am not saying that! At the end of the day, we may find ourselves looking every bit as vaguely consternated by life's turns and twists as the Job we see in Barry Moser's third portrait. But there is a difference between being consternated and being in despair.

My suggestion is that perhaps the splendor (and indeed, perhaps the sheer fact) of the created world around us can remind us of God's wisdom and power in ways that will help us to go on. If God could create, and if God now maintains, all of that complexity and joyful beauty, then surely we have reason to go on with some hope. We don't know all the answers, but we know the Creator God, who has now become the Redeemer God through the surprise that is Christ Jesus the Lord. Considering the wonders this God has already wrought in Creation and Redemption, surely he can and will work one more wonder some day, and that is the satisfying of our every question, the drying of every tear from every eye.

Just possibly the creation around us can remind us of that. Some years ago when Neal Plantinga opened his book on sin, he directed our attention to the movie Grand Canyon. As some of you know, mostly that is a movie that pummels viewers with images of urban chaos, evil, and mayhem. Gangs of thugs roam the streets of Los Angeles. Babies are born and then abandoned by their crack-head mothers. Marriages threaten to dissolve into bitterness. A lead character's nephew is a gang-banger. When this uncle asks his teenaged nephew, "Do you still want to he gang-banging when you're twenty-five?" the sad-looking youth replies, "Man, I'll never live to be twenty-five!"

The whole movie bears witness to one character's summary comment, "Man, everything is supposed to be different than it is. This is not the way it's supposed to be." It was, in a real way, a theological assessment of life. But that same movie ends with a partial theological solution. Because through a series of events, it so happens that the day arrives when many of the film's main characters, including the gang-banger and other confused folks, all end up visiting the Grand Canyon together.

And suddenly, inexplicably, in the face of this created spectacle of God, much of what was crooked in the lives of these people gets straightened out. The squalor of chaos in their hearts is strangely stilled. Even the hard lines on the gang-banger's face soften in wonder, making him look young and full of promise--the way a teenager ought to look. The scene is serenely silent for a few minutes until one character quietly asks another, "Well, what do you think." And this oft-bedraggled character replies, "I think . . . it's not all bad." The Book of Job could hardly put it better. Amen.