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6 August. Job chapters 1 to 5
Let me say at the outset of this commentary that Job is one of the books of the Bible that I do not consider to be historical. The form of the telling of it, the exaggerated series of disasters that start it off, and the equally exaggerated ‘happy ending’, do not suggest that this is the story of a real person. But we can of course learn a lot from it. The opening verse gives us a clue as to what it is really about by describing Job as “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil”. He also, we are told, prayed every morning for his many children (who by the time of this story were adults themselves). This is someone for whom people mattered more than possessions (of which he had many).
The rest of chapter 1 looks behind the veil of what we think of as reality to reveal how God and the ‘heavenly beings’ (spirits or angels, including the one called Satan) are at work in ways that we cannot see. It describes how God agrees to let the great faith and goodness of Job be put to the test by Satan manipulating human and natural forces to destroy or capture all his animals, and finally his sons and daughters. Job passes the first test, and continues to worship God,
Job’s declaration “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” deserves comment. No money, no animals, not even our relationships with our closest families, will survive death. Contrary to what many people like to believe about their dead relatives merely “slipping away into another room”, the Bible never suggests that these relationships will continue in the same form in the afterlife. “Naked we return”, in the sense that the afterlife will primarily be about our relationship with God. The New Testament does add the idea of the “fellowship of saints”, but pictures them as a crowd worshipping God the father and Jesus his son, rather than catching up what we did in this life.
In chapter two, Satan is allowed to torment Job with itching sores all over his body. His friends come (who are important to the rest of the book) and sit in silence with him for a week, while he goes through the shock and denial that come with sudden bereavement. In the next chapter Job cannot stand it any longer, he passes into the anger stage of grief, and “curses the day of his birth”. Note that he does not curse God – that is the test that has been set for him (though he does not know it). But understandably, he wishes he had been stillborn and spared the physical pain and emotional anguish that he is now going through. There is nothing wrong with crying out in emotional or physical pain – God, whose son cried out on the cross “why have you forsaken me?”, can take it.
In chapters 4 and 5 the first of his friends, Eliphaz, dares to suggest that Job is in fact a sinner like anyone else. For no-one can be righteous, and therefore he deserves to suffer like anyone else. “Human beings are born to trouble just as sparks fly upward” (5:7). In fact, Eliphaz suggests that this suffering is good, for “happy is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty” (5:17).