The Patience of Job

Behold, God puts no trust in his holy ones, and the heavens are not pure in his sight; how much less one who is abominable and corrupt, a man who drinks injustice like water!-- Job 15:15-16

I don’t usually pull verses from Job because it has much in common with one of Plato’s dialogs or a philosophical novel and calls us to take it as a whole more than most Scriptural writings.  Like Job and his friends, we are always searching for the reason behind and the meaning of suffering, why there must be evil, even why there can be good. 

We long to find a way to avoid trials, to live free of grief.  We think perhaps if we can be good enough, sanctifying ourselves, being kind and generous, taking care of others, living morally and circumspectly, that God will have mercy upon us and spare the losses and the pain that afflict so many.  If we get a bad diagnosis from the doctor, if our marriage falls apart, if our children take the wrong path, we have to declare bankruptcy, etc., we want desperately to believe there is some reason behind it – even if that reason is that we have made mistakes and sinned or that God is capricious and unjust. 

Personally, I can’t help siding with Job’s friends.  If something bad happens to me I assume it is because I have done something wrong.  I know -- far better than anyone else does, how corrupt I am.  I know the evil and darkness that I sometimes embrace and so easily excuse.  I suspect that most of us live with a degree of guilt and shame.  It is probably one of the few things in which I am above average.  But that is just because I have a self that is one of Job’s friends – one of his accusers, a Pharisee of Pharisees. 

We are all Job, and Job’s friends, and Elihu, and something else.  The dialog and drama that is Job is what plays out in our souls.  We accuse; we self-justify; we blame God. 

But you are full of the judgment on the wicked; judgment and justice seize you (Job 36:17).  We are, rightly, quick to want evil to face justice.  I hear about a child molester or some creep who raped and murdered a little old lady, and my response is almost always to wish that I could have ten minutes alone with the perpetrator in a locked room.  Islamic terrorists are loose in Paris?  Let’s kill every Muslim on the planet! 

We are creatures, save for the apparently increasing number of psychopaths among us, who believe in fair play and “an eye for an eye”.  The laws of Moses make sense to us.  The love of Christ does not always.  When evil befalls us, some of us are naturally prone to think justice must be the cause.  I have learned but a few things in life.  For example, my encounters with the courts and police have taught me that we do not have a justice system but a legal system, that what is legal has little to do with what is moral, and what is moral, right, and just is, as often as not, illegal.   

Another thing I am learning is that God is not a formula.  He does not perform for me.  He cannot be manipulated.  In Chapter 75 of Christ the Eternal Tao, we read:

The world is like a hollow utensil

And cannot be manipulated.

That which is not the Way soon fades away.

Hence the sage assists the natural development of all things,

Even though he does not venture to interfere.

It comes down to trusting God.   Job, in the end, realizes that, while all that is false, including the illusions of self, are broken and ground to dust by truth, the yielding essence of our being, the spirit within us, the Way within us is always right and inevitably overcomes.  The accusers are shamed and silenced but so is the justifier, the rationalizer, the moralizer.  There is none good but God.    

Tamp 'Em Up Solid

For the Lord will not cast off forever, but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion according to the abundance of his steadfast love; for he does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men. -- Lamentations 3:31-33

I talk about my nephew quite a bit.  I have several nephews and nieces, both by blood and by marriage.  My nephew M. is more like a younger brother.  My sister’s husband died suddenly a few weeks before their son’s fourth birthday.  I was there within minutes after my brother-in-law collapsed.  There was nothing anyone could do.  It was his third heart attack.  My sister never remarried, and I always tried to be a big brother to M., but Dad was his father figure.  Dad could have let his grandson sit on the couch and watch television, but he loved him too much for that.  He knew that a spoiled child has, in the long run, a greater risk and a much harder time than one who is disciplined and toughened by labor and toil.   

One of the reasons M. and I are so close is that we were both close to Dad.  He taught us most everything we know that matters in life.  Like how to dig a posthole.   A properly formed posthole should be, on these Ozark ridges, a minimum of 32 inches deep, only slightly larger in diameter than the post.   It should be bigger at the bottom that it is at the top, and, with a good tamper, all the dirt and rocks you took out should go back in, with perhaps room for a little more.  In theory.  In practice, there is this thing called hardpan, a layer of clay and God only knows what that is too hard to get a shovel point into and too soft to chip.  I would rather break through a foot of solid rock than an inch of hardpan. 

M. was here the other day, and we went out to the barn.  I pulled out a long steel bar and handed it to him, asking if he recognized it.  He laughed and said, “You’d be pounding on that hardpan with this bar, and it would just thud and bounce, and Granddad would say, ‘That’s the way.  You’re goin’ ever lick.’”  Sure.  When you did get the hole emptied, it was time to tamp, which is in some ways worse, especially when it was either too wet or too dry.  We complained plenty, but we never thought Dad was doing that merely to have something for us to do.  There was a purpose, and everybody ought to do something to earn their beans.            

Good parents such as I had do not torment their children or willingly cause them to suffer and grieve.  What they do is intended to, as the Bible says, reprove, rebuke, and correct.  We are not born into this world knowing how everything works.  As we develop physically, we grow in knowledge, wisdom, and understanding – or we ought to. 

Jeremiah was a witness to many horrors and much destruction.  The prophet suffered greatly himself and was repeatedly persecuted by his own people.  His warnings were ignored and ridiculed.  There were times when he despaired.  His lament reflects the ruthlessness of the enemy and the terror, dread, and anguish that descended upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem.  Yet, in spite of all the turmoil, death, and agony, Jeremiah remained confident in the goodness of God, in His mercy, love, and kindness. 

The Lord did not willingly allow His people, His children to suffer affliction.  Over and over, the Father offered escape and reprieve.  Over and over, His children rejected Him, stopped their ears to His pleas, and closed their eyes to the spiritual price of the degeneracy and degradation in which they indulged.

God could spare us from every difficulty.  Instead, He challenges us according to our strength and our degree of development.  He pushes us a little, enough to show us that we can be stronger, that we can endure, that we can achieve and do what we would have thought impossible.  If we go astray, it is the love of God that hastens to correct us.  It is up to us whether we will be gently guided by the eye of the Lord or more roughly redirected by a long-shanked bit in the mouth or a cruel hook in the jaw.      

The Long and the Short

And Job again took up his discourse, and said:  “Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me, when his lamp shone upon my head, and by his light I walked through darkness, as I was in my prime, when the friendship of God was upon my tent, when the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were all around me, when my steps were washed with butter, and the rock poured out for me streams of oil!” – Job 29:1-6

Now that I have gotten older, I have a tendency to look upon the world as increasingly degenerate and decadent, and I think there might be some objective evidence for that, just here in this country.  Not knowing the story of Job, a person might read the verses above and think that Job is waxing nostalgic for the days when things were better and more wholesome, for Faded Love and Crocodile Rock. 

Job has gone through a great and heart-rending series of losses, and it is all inexplicable to him.  He has no way to comprehend the reasons for what has happened, and no reason he can find for believing that his suffering has an eternal and transcendent meaning.  From his perspective, life has taken on the aspect of chaotic randomness and appeared to have lost all its significance.  He longed for the time when he thought differently, when his faith and righteousness seemed to be bearing fruit and making the world a better place. 

As believers and rational creatures, we consider that our existence is part of a grand design governed by laws, that good pleases God and is rewarded by Him and that evil is disobedience and will be punished or corrected.  There is a reason for us speaking of the “patience of Job”.  Through Job’s story, God is revealing that sometimes faith only works in patience, in that most descriptive word, “longsuffering”.  We wish there was a shortsuffering wherein worketh Instant Karma with bolts of lightning delivered on the spot to fry the wicked while the good are all “drinking that free bubble up and eating that rainbow stew.”

So you have Evil Roy and lovely, unsullied Miss Innocence.  God ought to protect Miss Innocence from Evil Roy.  At what point does the lightning strike?  Is it when Roy conceives his first little thought of violating Innocence?  What if he sees that his course is wrong and changes his mind?  Maybe instead of a lightning bolt God could just use a cattle prod?  Those of us that have one call it “conscience”.   When we are the ones ignoring the prodding of conscience, we are not usually calling for higher voltage.   That’s the problem with free moral agents:  they are just as free to be immoral. 

I knew a girl who was molested and abused by her father.  He ended up in prison for other crimes.  She decided to call him one day.  She told him how much he had hurt her and caused her to suffer.  Then she thanked him.  She said that without that pain she would not be the person she had become.  She would not be as strong, not as much a person of unshakeable faith had it not been for the vile torture inflicted on her by a person she ought to have been able to trust. 

I don’t know how someone does that.  I can’t imagine.  But, she was right.  She suffered long, yet she found a way out.  It was not by going back to a lost past made golden in memory, though, no doubt, she had, like Job, wished for that at times.  It was to go through, to patiently keep pressing on in faith that, somehow, some way, someday, the senseless would make sense.