Job is one of the most honest books of the entire bible that examines the human dilemma that theologians call, theodicy. Theodicy asked the question “how can God be all powerful and good and there be so much unmerited suffering, tragedy and pain.”
Another way of putting it in the language of society is “why do bad things happen to good people?”
The phrasing of theodicy in the language of the society actually began with the 1981 book by Rabbi Harold Kushner “When bad things happen to good people.” Rabbi Kushner did not ask “why bad things happen…” instead his book says “when bad things happen.”
Rabbi Kushner wrote the book to help him grapple with the tragic death of his young son Aaron to an incurable disease.
His conclusion in the book is that God is loving, good and God comes to comfort us through the bad things but that God is not all-powerful and cannot do anything about the bad things. He chose to limit God in order to help him keep faith in God. Theodicy.
Many Christians who choose the Beatitudes over the 10 commandments as Jesus did have been thrust into the vortex of a theodicy as a result of the November 5th election. Many prayed but the worse they could think of happened and they are asking “how can God be good and allow someone like that to ascend to the highest office?” Theodicy.
Job’s friends come to him in his theodicy of why was all this happening to him after all the good he tried to do in his life?
His three friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar come with the tainted lens of a warped belief. Their Hermeneutic was dirty and smudged.
Hermeneutic is how a person comes to understand the holy scriptures. Hermeneutic is like a person that wears eye glasses. Eye glasses are lenses people who wear them see the world and interpret the world through. If those glasses are dusty, dirty and smudged then their view of everything will be tainted, distorted and corrupt. Job’s friends have a skewed belief or hermeneutic about their faith.
They constantly try to get Job to confess that he has committed some sin that caused his suffering. They choose to blame him, like too many Christians do today to people going through trauma.
They believe in a transactional theology that believed that“if you do good then you will get good and if you do bad then you will get bad.”
It is a wrong way of believing in God. Yet it is what many in this 21st century still believe. Job was written to renounce that way of believing because Job proves that bad things just happen to everybody and many times there is no explanation.
In fact, the book of Job opens up with that troubling conversation that God has with Satan. Satan tells God that Job only worships and serves God because of his material and physical blessings (wealth, wife, children and good health). God then allows Satan to afflict Job to prove Satan wrong (I told you this is troubling).
Satan is betting that if God allowed Job to suffer then Job would curse God and cease serving and believing in God.
The book of Job causes those who say they believe in God today to ask the question of themselves “why do you really believe in and have faith in God?”
Do you worship and serve God as the prosperity preachers proclaim so that you will have wealth? Do you worship and serve God because you want to have an exemption from Hell? Do you worship and serve God because of a transactional relationship?
Satan in Job is betting that once you are afflicted physically and materially that you will turn away from God? In other words, Satan is banking on that everybody has a price and a point.
How many disappointments will cause you to become an atheist?
How many funerals will you attend that make you stop going to church?
How many rejections will it take to make you stop serving in a ministry?
How many elections will it take to make you stop praying sincerely?
Do you have the faith of the Hebrew boys who faced being thrown in a burning furnace by the King?
They responded to the King with these words, “O king, please know that the God we serve is able to deliver us from you and the furnace but even if he don’t, we still will not serve your gods or worship your image of gold.” They had an “even if God don’t kind of faith.”
When God shows up to Job in a whirlwind and chastises his three friends because of their wrong Hermeneutic and then faces Job.
God first tells Job to answer God’s questions and God proceeds to raise 77 questions about the complexities of creation to Job. Beloved Job never gets an answer to his question from God because everything about life cannot be easily explained.
Yet Job in a transformational moment declares “I know that my redeemer lives.”
The next four years will require a transformational faith among people who say they believe in a transformational savior who overcame death, Hell and the grave with all power.
Transformational faith that does not wallow in blaming others but takes responsibility to organize so that the least of these will survive and thrive.
Religion will not suffice; this will take spirituality and a transformation in how we see faith and the work of Christ.
Be well, Be authentic and Stay woke! Uhuru Sassa!
Rev. Dr. John E. Jackson, Sr. is the Senior Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ-Gary, 1276 W. 20th Ave. in Gary. “We are not just another church but we are a culturally conscious, Christ-centered church, committed to the community; we are unashamedly Black and unapologetically Christian.” Contact the church by email at [email protected] or by phone at 219-944-0500.
