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.    

Speaking the Truth in Love

Therefore thus says the LORD:  If you return, I will restore you, and you shall stand before me.  If you  utter what is precious, and not what is worthless, you shall be as my mouth.  They shall turn to you, but you shall not turn to them. -- Jeremiah 15:19

I can understand how Jeremiah felt.  He was living in the midst of wretched perversion and an atmosphere of spiritual apathy when it was not outright apostasy.  Judgment and destruction hung over the heads of his nation and his people.  He was ridiculed, condemned and threatened for his warnings and his calls for a return to righteous standards. 

Can we blame him for feeling a little down?  Woe is me, my mother, that you bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land! I have not lent, nor have I borrowed, yet all of them curse me (Jeremiah 15:10).  We live in a time when doing good and living right are cursed.  When I would read these passages just a few years ago, it never occurred to me that something like this could be the state of affairs in my nation in my lifetime.  Hollywood has been making Christians the villains for many years, but I suppose I have always assumed that the First Amendment would protect us from direct government hostility.  I’m not so sure anymore. 

Like many of us today, Jeremiah began to wonder if perhaps God was playing him:  Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail? (v.18)  You, Lord, are telling me to say all this, to stand up for holiness and truth, yet nothing is happening.  I’m beginning to wonder if You are going to back me up or if maybe You are just going to make a fool out of me. 

This is why God reprimanded Jeremiah.  The prophet was uttering what was “worthless”.  God is merciful.  He is patient and long-suffering.  He would rather we repent.  For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord GOD; so turn, and live (Ezekiel 18:32).  I personally am most thankful for that.  God’s love and mercy are the only reasons I’m not burning in hell right now – a fate I enthusiastically earned and richly deserved. 

Nevertheless, we live in a time of weeping and sorrow.  Reality cannot be changed by changing the meaning of a few words.  If I am driving my truck toward the edge of the Grand Canyon at a hundred miles an hour, my refusal to listen to “negativity” is not going to alter what will happen at the bottom.  It is not time to stop telling the truth; it is time to speak it relentlessly, regardless of opposition.  Comforting lies will spare no one in the end.

The caveats are few.  Our motivation must be love.  We should always, for our part, endeavor to be speaking from a place of peace.  We seek to heal, enlighten, and liberate, not control, dominate or manipulate.  God will speak to the heart.

Days of Reckoning

For it will come upon all who dwell on the face of the whole earth. -- Luke 21:35

The context here is the not-too-future destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.  The Lord warns us to be watchful lest we become too distracted by the worries as well as the pleasures of life.  That’s an important understanding.  But alone, the verse says something more general. 

All of us “who dwell on the face of the whole earth” will face a day of judgment and reckoning.  It may be as part of some great and noted movement of history – wars, revolutions, reformations, invasions, natural catastrophes of disease or destruction – something that will be written down and remembered.  It can also happen on a very quiet, mostly unnoted, personal level. 

Every day there are thousands upon thousands of people who find their lives turned upside-down.  Unless it happens to us or to someone close to us, we won’t even be aware of it.  It may be the ultimate day of the Lord as we step through the veil into eternity to answer for our stewardship and our lives.  It can also be something like Saul of Tarsus experienced on his way to Damascus.  It may be an unexpected loss or setback or threat in any area of life. 

There are all kinds of reckonings, and all of us, regardless of our place in history or society, regardless of our families, our resources or abilities will have days of reckoning come upon us.  The best we can hope for are two such cataclysms.  The one I have already mentioned.  Death is inevitable and unavoidable.  My standard answer to people who remark about the dangers of riding a motorcycle is that the mortality rate for bikers is 100%.  The funny thing is that it is also 100% for non-bikers. 

The second is not altogether dissimilar: 

Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (Romans 6:11, KJV)

This, too, is a crisis, a calamity of will.  To come to the Cross is to recognize our own death in the vicarious sacrifice of Christ.  If we will come to this crossroad and take the right way, when that which comes upon all comes upon us – whatever it might be, up to and including the laying aside of our physical body, it will not find us unprepared. 

Hard Head, Soft Heart

Behold, I have made your face as hard as their faces, and your forehead as hard as their foreheads.  Like emery harder than flint have I made your forehead.  Fear them not, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. – Ezekiel 3:8-9     

I know this person – actually, there are several people I know that are like this – this one who thinks I am easily deceived.  Ben was talking the other about giving and when it is appropriate to give money to someone who might misuse it.  This person comes and gives me a story, usually pretty elaborate, fairly desperate.  It always starts out, “I hate to even ask you.”  One of these days I may reply, “Not as much as I hate to hear you say that.” 

The thing is, I know I am being lied to.  One of the things I prayed for when I first became a Christian was the gift of discernment.  I don’t know if I got that, but I certainly have the gifts of suspicion, skepticism, and cynicism.  None of us probably tell the whole truth all the time.  I don’t, but it’s not with the intent to deceive.  It’s more like changing the names to protect the innocent – and sometimes to protect the guilty.  There are details that people really don’t need to know.  It’s good to be laconic. 

Anyway, Ezekiel in general, and these early chapters in particular have always meant a lot me.  Ezekiel and Thomas, and, to a lesser extent Gideon, are the men in the Bible that I identify with most closely.  Not that I was ever called like them, but they did their jobs.  They did what they had to do.  If I had a motto it would probably be something like “Stick to it.”  To do that, you have to be a little hard-headed.  There is a form of stubbornness that is positive, a refusal to quit even when it’s hard and when it hurts and it’s not going your way.    

There is another side to all this, though, for the same God who made Ezekiel’s head harder than flint said, Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you (Psalms 32:9).  Later on, in Ezekiel 11:19-20, the Lord spoke of a change He wanted to make in His people:  And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

There is nothing wrong with being analytical and skeptical in terms of the intellect, but, in the end, the intellect must be informed and guided by the heart.  And the heart must be open and sensitive to the Spirit, to hear God and respond.  This has become something of an expansion of the comment I made on OC yesterday about love and logos.  We can be intellectually rigorous with regard to doctrine so long as it serves love and is motivated by love. 

What my deceptive friend does not understand is that I do not help a person because they can come up with a good story.  Usually the better the story, the less apt I am to buy it.  My head is too hard.  It’s my heart that responds to the plea the Spirit makes between the lies.

Just Us

If he fathers a son who is violent, a shedder of blood, who does any of these things …  who even eats upon the mountains, defiles his neighbor's wife, oppresses the poor and needy, commits robbery, does not restore the pledge, lifts up his eyes to the idols, commits abomination, lends at interest, and takes profit; shall he then live? He shall not live. … -- Ezekiel 18:10-13

The thing that struck me in this verse is “does not restore the pledge”.  This refers back to Exodus 22:26-27 -- If ever you take your neighbor's cloak in pledge, you shall return it to him before the sun goes down, for that is his only covering, and it is his cloak for his body; in what else shall he sleep? And if he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.

The Lord knew that it was possible in those times that a man might have nothing except his heavy outer garment, not unlike the Scotsman’s plaid of the Rob Roy style, to give as collateral for a loan.  A man would always come back for his cloak, at which time he could be reminded of his promise to repay.  However, it would be both pointless and too cruel to hold a man’s cloak overnight, for he would suffer and possibly become ill or even die from exposure. 

Still, it seems rather extreme to include the “crime” of holding onto a coat with adultery (or rape), robbery, killing, idolatry, and the rest. Yet all the more blatant acts of wickedness arise from the same root:  a sad lack of empathy, a sociopathic disregard for the good of our fellow humans.  We were talking about this the other day, in that, as the song says, “If you don’t love your neighbor then you don’t love God.”  We fail to recognize that our down-and-out brother has the same nature that we have, is a child of our Father, as we are, and is indwelt or maybe indwelt by the same Holy Spirit as we ourselves.   

Further, the message Ezekiel was given in this chapter is a counter to a proverb that was in common use:  The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.  That is, the people were seeing great turmoil and tribulation in their lives.  Some were suggesting that this was a result of the “sins of the fathers”.  There’s no doubt that the apostasy and iniquity of previous generations had caused Judah to come under condemnation.  We see the same thing today in America.  Our profligate spending throughout the last several decades, our embrace of an all-powerful central government, our acceptance of the welfare state, etc., all have contributed to our current decline as a nation, but it is no excuse for individual moral laxity. 

In the end, to sing yesterday’s refrain, the course of human events is not my concern.  We hop on the wheel of time, the cycle of history where it finds us, and we ride it to our getting off point.  We do what we can, where we can.  We may not have a lot to work with.  It may just be handing someone back his coat or inconveniencing ourselves to help someone get home.  God doesn’t forget any of it.