The Bible in a Year – 7 August

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

7 August. Job chapters 6-9

In chapters 6 and 7, Job replies first to Eliphaz, criticising him for not understanding the depths of Job’s depression. It is not for those whose life is going well to criticize those who are suffering, unless they can truly empathise from their own experience.  But few people have suffered like Job.  Then Job turns his anger to God himself, still stopping short of the sin of “cursing” God, but nevertheless very angry with him. “If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity? Why have you made me your target? Why have I become a burden to you?” (7:20)

In chapter 8 the second friend, Bildad, tries to persuade Job that if things have gone wrong for him then he cannot be a “pure and upright” person. Job’s reply starts with “Indeed I know that this is so; but how can a mortal be just before God?” (9:2). In other words, no-one can be pure and upright, before a God who (as Job goes on to explain) is all-powerful and can therefore not be argued with, even by one who is (as Job is still sure) “blameless and innocent”(9:20).

It is important to note that being angry with God is not counted here as a sin.  It is a natural reaction to suffering.  If Job could have seen the goings-on in heaven he would have known that it was Satan, not God, who was testing him.  Throughout history people of all faiths have asked “where is God in suffering?” and those without faith have taken the existence of suffering to be either proof that there is no God, or that any god that might exist is not worth knowing. But the story of Job shows us that it is possible to live a good life, believe in God, and yet still suffer; and to react to that suffering with anger, yet still not sin.

 

 

 

 

The Bible in a Year – 6 August

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

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).

The Bible in a Year – 31 May

If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

31 May. Ezekiel chapters 4-7

Ezekiel was undoubtedly master of the ‘acted parable’ or ‘acted prophesy’.  Using vivid language as Jesus did was not enough for him.  Such was the import of his message that the exile was God’s punishment for Judah’s sins, and that further destruction of Jerusalem would follow (in 586BC, about eleven years after the first siege and exile), that he felt called to go to extreme lengths to demonstrate the message in action.

 

In chapter 4 it meant the physical suffering of lying, bound in ropes, on his left side for 390 days (over a year) to represent 390 years of rebellion against God.  During this time (in which he was brought only flour and water, and baked bread over cow dung) he had to act out the siege of Jerusalem using a model of the city.  All this presumably took place in public so as to attract the attention of passers-by.  The nearest equivalent to this today would be the Greenpeace activists who chain themselves to military installations or invade whaling vessels, or perhaps Brian Haw who protested in a tent outside the UK Parliament for nearly ten years.  Such people disturb the complacency with which most of us meekly accept the injustices that we see around us, even when we know that people will suffer if they are not challenged.