Learning from Job

This is a loose follow up to my thoughts on 22, a Million by Bon Iver and Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake. It may be helpful to read through those if you haven’t. On that note, yes, I realize that sounds like this will be about me starting shrooming, but no, I’m not shrooming. I’m talking about the Book of Job, and how I’ve come to understand Job, and the nature of understanding, in a different way.

Job is a complex and tricky book. In the book, Satan comes to God, and bets that Job, God’s most righteous servant, will turn on God and curse Him if God takes everything from Job. God, with no explanation, takes the bet. Job loses all of his children, his flocks, and is covered in burning lesions. Job’s wife tells him to curse God and die, his three friends tell him he must have sinned or else he wouldn’t be suffering. Job insists that he is innocent. He is adamant that he is still just and that he hasn’t sinned, and we, the reader, know that Job is right. Everything is happening to Job because of the wager between God and Satan. Job demands that God come to him so he can make the case for his innocence to God. At the end of the book, God comes to Job in a whirlwind and speaks. He tells Job of his power and sovereignty, of all the worlds and beasts he creates and masters. And this seems to satisfy Job. He says:

“I know that you [God] can do all things;

    no purpose of yours can be thwarted.

You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’

    Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,

    things too wonderful for me to know.

“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;

    I will question you,

    and you shall answer me.’

My ears had heard of you

    but now my eyes have seen you.

Therefore I despise myself

    and repent in dust and ashes.”

God restores Job’s wealth and family, and the book ends.

While this seems to satisfy Job, it satisfies basically no one else. Certainly, it satisfies at least nearly none of the Christians that I know. Many Christian’s hate Job and view it as an evil mistake that somehow slipped into the Bible, or a primitive and barbaric understanding of God that is overthrown by the coming of Jesus. And there is merit in reinterpreting Job through the lens of Christ, but I want to have confidence in the people that put together the Hebrew Bible. It’s really easy to read Job and see it as a gross injustice done by God to Job. On the surface it seems like the meaning of Job is that God is arbitrary and unjust, and Job is a pushover, or worse God is a tyrant who subjugates people through terror. But the Jewish scholars that structured their holy scriptures did not have that view of God, and must have thought that there is important insight into the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Job that doesn’t depend on Jesus.

I reread Job on Ash Wednesday this year, and I realized that Job is an example of one of my very favorite things in literature. Job puts me, the reader, in the same position as the subject, Job. My favorite recent example of this is Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights. It’s a hard novel to read because it jumps through space and time, building to conclusions only to lead them hanging. This is an intentional choice to put the reader in the place of the subjects. Flights is about how jarring and discontinuous life has become, and the novel is deliberately jarring and discontinuous. Likewise, the Book of Job is about the justice of God, and we’re asking the same question as Job; is God just? Job is complex and hard to make sense of, but that’s the kind of novel I read for fun. While there’s a limit to reading the Bible as a work of literature, the Book of Job is clearly stylized and literary, and things start to make sense when I interpret it like a Nobel Prize worthy piece of literature. The sense of injustice we feel reading Job is intrinsically part of Job. It’s how we're supposed to feel. Pulling back the cosmic curtain to see what happens to Job as a result of a bet between God and Satan, puts us firmly in Job’s shoes. Job knows he is innocent, and so do we. How can the faultless Job suffer like he does while God is both good and sovereign? I know I’m not as pure as Job, but nevertheless how do I make sense of the times of loss? 

If we’re in the same position as Job, what does Job do? Job is audacious. He demands that he make the case of his innocence to God himself. He wants to see God face to face. Yet, when God does come, Job's audacity evaporates. God arrives, and Job doesn’t lay out an argument for why he’s righteous and God has done him wrong. “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak; I will question you, and you shall answer me.’ My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”

Four years ago, I would have been immensely dissatisfied with being told to imitate Job. I’m a physicist, but I work with mostly engineers, and we run into predicaments occasionally, because we have different definitions of knowledge. There was a paper I wrote about optical scattering, and I wanted to understand the underlying physical mechanism for an unintuitive result we were seeing. For me, knowledge is being able to explain why something works. For my engineer boss, we did the experiment, and made the measurement, and that was the important part. Knowledge of him is if it works, you trust it. It’ll still work whether or not I can explain why. Job switches between these two modes of thinking, separated by the appearance of God in the whirlwind. Before the appearance of God, Job and his friends want to explain why God is doing what he does. Afterwards, that question seems irrelevant to Job. Job knows that he doesn’t understand what God is doing, “things too wonderful for me to know,” yet something beyond that understanding answers Job’s questions. “Now my eyes have seen you.” In that seeing, Job understands God in a way that can accommodate not being able to explain what’s going on.  

The key for me understanding Job is to go after what I can’t understand. Job goes from hearing to seeing, and that seeing completely changes his nature. Four years ago, I’d have said that Job’s moment of seeing is impossible, or that he really is just cowering before a tyrant god. But in the meantime, I did what Job does. I sought God’s face even when I couldn’t make sense of life. I did the disciplines of prayer, reading the Word, and service even when I didn’t really believe there was anything behind them. And then, eventually, I was able to say that “my ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you.” And Job made sense to me. I, suddenly and inexplicably as a whirlwind in a clear sky, understood God as I never had before, and I knew that trust in his Goodness was valid and immovable, even when I couldn’t grasp what was going on. The work in me isn’t complete. As John writes, “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” But as John and Job both point too, there is something ineffable about God that reworks understanding. That ineffability is why Job is often dissatisfying. The most important part of Job is an interaction and intimacy that can’t be put into words. For me, I had to find what couldn’t be contained by the text in my life. I don’t know how to explain it either, but it’s there if we have the audacity to seek the face of God.