Biblical Text

You can read Job 42.1-6 here.

You can listen to the scripture passage here.

Sermon Video

You can watch the sermon video here.

Sermon Transcript

“If God chose to kill nine million people to make a point and then destroy their persecutors, we must still say, as was said long ago, ‘Righteous and just are the ways of the Lord.’” This is what Philosopher and Mathematician David Berlinski, whose parents fled from Vichy France to the USA, said about the Holocaust.

[Let us pray.]

It was late in 1995, as I was getting ready to begin my studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, that the movie 12 Monkeys was released. A science fiction thriller, the premise of the movie is that in 1996 a virus was released that caused a global pandemic, wiping out 99% of the population and forcing the remaining 1% to burrow underground to eke out a Spartan living beneath the surface. 

In 2035 humans have developed the ability to travel back in time and the scientists send an agent back to 1996. At the climax of the movie it seems clear that the protagonist played by Bruce Willis has failed in his task. But the final scene of the movie remains enigmatic as we see one of the scientists sitting on a plane next to the person responsible for the pandemic and as she introduces herself she says, “I’m in insurance.” and ever since 1995 there has raged a debate over what she meant.

Insurance is a funny word because it seems to promise something but actually does not. Fire insurance does not prevent a fire. Theft insurance does not prevent theft. And the nicely but misleadingly named life insurance comes into effect only when the insured’s life has ended. But insurance is one way in which humans have used their collective wisdom to enable a collective pool of numerous small contributions to go a long way for a few eventualities.  

But insurance cannot prevent the devastation. The loss remains a reality even though the financial consequences of the loss may be somewhat mitigated. The fire insurance payout does not negate the fact that you stand amidst the charred remains of the house you called home. The driving third party insurance payout does not change the fact that the negligence of a drunk has left you paralyzed. The life insurance payout does not remove the grief caused by the death of a beloved spouse. 

And so also we are faced with pain and tragedy in our lives. We know that the insurance companies are not going to provide us with anything more than some money to mitigate the financial fallouts of the tragedies we experience. But the grief and the questions raised by the loss are uniquely ours to bear and ours to experience. And we wonder in the midst of the anguish at the wisdom of God that allowed such a thing to happen to us.

We begin to ask questions like, “Does God not love me enough to spare me from such a tragedy?” and “Is God not powerful enough to have intervened to save me from such evil?” Like Epicurus we find ourselves facing a trilemma. We find it easy to explain the presence of evil either by rejecting the assertion that God is all loving or by rejecting the claim that God is all powerful. But the book of Job invites us to wrestle with the issue from a different perspective.

If I asked a Christian to describe the central idea of the book of Job in one sentence it is quite likely I would receive the answer that it is about the problem of evil or that it is about the problem of unjust human suffering. But both those ideas about the book are misguided and myopic and ironically are explained by the true purpose of the book. If we read the book we would find that it comprises a prologue that sets the scene, which is followed by a series of discourses.

In these discursive speeches Job’s three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar attempt to explain to Job what the reasons for his suffering might be. All four of them work under the assumption of a retribution principle according to which God punishes those who have sinned and rewards those who have done what is right. Job’s friends tell him that he is suffering because he has sinned. Job, knowing that this is not the case, expresses confusion and a desire to challenge God about this injustice.

All four believe that God is able to prevent such suffering as Job is experiencing. They refuse to surrender the belief that God is omnipotent. They then wrestle with the issue of God’s justice as captured by the retribution principle. This is how they argue. Health and wealth are a sign of God’s favour.  The lack of health and wealth must mean being out of favour with God. Job both lacks health and has suffered setbacks to his financial situation. 

Hence, he is out of favour with God. God favours those who are righteous. Hence, Job must be unrighteous and must have sinned. As a Mathematics teacher, all I can say is that I wished my students were able to argue with such ironclad logic. Job, however, knows that their conclusion is incorrect. He has not sinned. He is not unrighteous. And because his friends have used impeccable logic of the strongest kind known to humans, he is bewildered. 

He can only conclude that somehow there has been a failure in God’s justice and so he begs for an opportunity to plead his case before God. He believes that, if he only had the chance to present his case before God, God would agree that Job is facing unmerited injustice and God would then reverse Job’s fortunes. If we pause to think of it, we are either like Job or his friends. When faced with inexplicable evil we either accuse people of sinning or God of injustice.

When we hear that someone contracted COVID 19 and died, we attempt to explain how he got infected. Did he not sanitize his hands often enough? Did he interact with others and not wear a mask? Did someone around him violate quarantine? And we could go on. But at bottom the question is, “What did he or someone he knew do wrong that resulted in this sickness unto death?” We just cannot imagine that an innocent person, a person who has taken all precautions, would suffer and die.

Quite frankly, it pains me deeply when I hear Christians try to determine the reasons for suffering by trying to determine where to lay the blame. I feel like saying, “Wake up, Christian! Our faith is founded on the mistrial and unjust execution of the only person who did not deserve to suffer and die – a gross injustice from a human perspective.” Hence, trying to determine where fault lies in the face of suffering is actually a denial of what God has done through the death of Jesus.

And so, faced with the irrefutable logic of his friends, Job, in desperation, cries out for an audience with God, presuming that, when he has pleaded his case, God would set things right and show his friends that Job had been innocent all along. Then suddenly God booms out in response to Job. Job was finally getting the audience he so desperately thought he needed. But the encounter with God does not go as Job expected. He had expected he would be able to plead his case.

However, after being faced with a barrage of questions from God, Job can only say, “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” What happened during the encounter with God that led Job to such a realization? And what exactly did he realize? What is it that he discovered about God and about himself in the encounter that made him make such a remarkable aboutface?

What Job realized is that he and his friends, like most of us, considered only two dimensions to the problem of suffering and evil. You see, in a broken world, we, who believe there is a God, desperately need to believe some things in order to carry on. First, we need to believe that God is benevolent. That is, we need to believe that God’s will toward us is good and positive and beneficial; that he does not act with malicious intent when he interacts with us.

If this were not true, if it were true that God acted with malice toward us, then, quite frankly, I would want to end my life for I have no desire to be the puppet for the entertainment of a malevolent deity. But, of course, we believe that God is good. Otherwise, we would not even have a problem of evil. So a belief in God’s benevolence is critical if we wish to adequately address the problem of evil that arises from the pain and suffering we experience or witness.

Second, we must believe that God is able to do something to remove the evil we experience or witness. If God were not able, then this world and the evil that is in it has spun or will spin out of his control and we would have no hope of any just resolution to the evils we face. And once again, quite frankly, if God were powerless in the face of evil, then he does not deserve to be worshipped. But, of course, we believe that God is able to remove evil, which is why we wrestle with the problem of evil.

But so far we have only described the problem in the same way as Epicurus had. Either God is malevolent or he is impotent. For if he were benevolent and omnipotent, then how is it that we face evil? But Epicurus failed to consider another critical dimension that must be considered when wrestling with the problem of evil. And in his encounter with God, Job realized that he too had been guilty of dealing with a multi-dimensional problem as though it were a flat one.

I had a breakthrough in my approach to interpreting the bible when I saw The Gospel According to Matthew, a movie starring Bruce Marchiano. The full movie is available on YouTube and I highly recommend it to everyone. I vividly recall a scene in which Jesus is preaching his famed Sermon on the Mount. And when he talks about the speck in the brother’s eye and the plank in one’s own eye, he actually takes a man’s walking stick and places it on his eye. 

The absurdity and humor of the situation hits home and the listeners would never be able to forget it. And I realized two things. First, Jesus had a robust sense of humor and at times used humor and irony and sarcasm to make his point. Second, the bible is not written like a play. We do not have the stage directions to understand the text. We do not know what actions the speakers are doing while they are speaking. The text, while inspired by God, does not capture the entire scene. 

It had never occurred to me that Jesus could actually have taken a stick and placed it on his eye to make a point. But as soon as I saw it in the movie, I realized that it could well be so. And more than that, such hidden actions could be there all over the place and we have to infer their existence from the context. In some of my recent sermons, like the one last year on Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, I have engaged in such an interpretive strategy and have found that it bears a lot of fruit.

Way back in Eden we have a similar situation which, if we take the text at face value, leads to many interpretive problems that have forced Christians and Jews through the centuries to devise all sorts of fanciful theories to explain the text and what comes after it. In chapter 3, the humans are enticed by the serpent to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent tells them that, if they ate the fruit, they would become like God, knowing good and evil.

When God banishes them from the garden, he says, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” Taken at face value, this indicates that humans possessed the knowledge of good and evil, that is, the ability to determine before taking action, in any situation, what the best course of action, the summum bonum, would be.

And yet, in the very next chapter, Cain kills his brother and Cain’s descendant, Lamech, institutionalized unbridled revenge. And by chapter 6, things had spiralled so much out of control that God could find only one man – Noah – who was righteous. The desire to reconcile this plain depiction of the narrative of Genesis 4-11 with a face value reading of God’s statement in Genesis 3 about humans knowing good and evil has led to all sorts of exegetical gymnastics.

But what if the statement in Genesis 3 was not to be taken at face value? What if God were doing something quite similar to what we do when we place something in air quotes? What if he were saying with air quotes, “The man has now become like one of us, (wink, wink) knowing good and evil (wink, wink).”? What if that statement was uttered tongue in cheek, with a heavy dose of irony and sarcasm? In that case, God is saying that the attempt to become like him had failed.

The serpent had enticed the humans to eat the forbidden fruit with the promise that they would become like God, knowing good and evil. They ate the fruit out of a very good desire – the desire to be like the one they adored. But they went about it the wrong way. And because they went about it the wrong way, they actually failed in the task. They had not become like God. They did not possess the knowledge to distinguish between good and evil. 

But what they did get is something far more damaging and something that easily explains the rot that quickly spread through the human race as depicted in Genesis 4-11. But before I reveal that, let me talk about our digestive system. What? You must be thinking that this guy has lost his way. Please do bear with me and it will make sense. In the fourth chapter of Daniel, we read the account of how king Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon became insane and ate grass.

Grass, while non-toxic and edible, is a pathetic source of nutrition for humans. Animals like cows and sheep have specialized stomachs that enable them to adequately digest grass and extract the nutrients from it. If you ate grass, you would feel full. You would feel as though you had eaten a proper meal. But in actuality, while your stomach would be full, it would be full of something your body could not properly digest and you would end up being malnourished. Why?

The simple reason is that you ate something that your body was not designed to digest. In a similar way, while a cow can easily digest grass, if you fed it animal products, that could cause mad cow disease because its body is not designed to eat meat. But note that a human who eats grass and a cow that eats meat will both feel full. They would be full of something that would eventually result in their deaths. But they would feel like they have eaten their full of good wholesome food.

And so it was with the humans. They had eaten something that their bodies were not designed to digest. Their bodies were incapable of digesting the forbidden fruit. But it made them full. And so what happened was humans believed that they had gained the knowledge of good and evil simply because they had eaten the fruit. But because they could not digest the fruit, it yielded no benefit to them. But because they believed they had benefited from it, great evil resulted.

Now, while a person who is ignorant can have a detrimental effect on those around him, one thing that is more damaging is an ignorant person who thinks he is wise. And give that person sufficient power and we have a recipe for disaster.

It is this third dimension, that of knowing good and evil, that is missing in Epicurus’ argument as well as the lengthy speeches of Job and his friends. But that should not surprise us.

When we object to various aspects of this world, claiming that they are wrong, asking how God could allow such things to happen, wondering how a good and powerful God could permit such evil, we are actually revealing ourselves to be good pupils of Epicurus, with a remarkable ability of flattening complex issues and believing we have obtained comprehensive understanding and wisdom by doing so. And we reveal ourselves to be like Job and his friends with a myopic view of reality.

You see, underlying all the cries of “this is wrong” and “how could God allow this to happen?” is the tacit assumption that we know better. Such objections can only be uttered by a person who claims to have a large enough view to perceive the whole picture, a deep enough comprehension to make sense of the whole picture, and a robust enough knowledge to decide a better course of action. What such questions reveal is that humans remain children of Adam and Eve.

We still believe that, because we have eaten the forbidden fruit, we possess the knowledge of good and evil. We believe that, if we were given the authority to run things, we would be able to do a better job than God. We concur with Woody Allen, who said, “Even if God exists, he’s done such a terrible job, it’s a wonder people don’t get together and file a class action suit against him.” The next time you ask, “How could God allow this to happen?” think about what Woody Allen said.

But when Job encounters God, he realizes that his intellect and understanding are infinitesimal compared to what God’s intellect and understanding must be. “My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you,” he says. Before the encounter, he had had second hand knowledge. He had heard of God. He had knowledge about God that had come from others. But now his eyes had seen God. He had had a first hand experience with God and it was completely humbling.

Job concludes that, even if God explained to him why what had happened to him had happened, he would not be able to make sense of it. He says, “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” Job realized what we humans deny. He realized what we refuse to accept – the simple fact that our puny brains are limited. He realized the truth behind God’s declaration through Isaiah, “My ways are higher than your ways.”

Like the blind men in the parable of the blind men and the elephant, we grasp a little bit of reality through numbed senses and believe we have the whole picture. And so, when we see evil around us, we question God’s wisdom in allowing the evil to happen, silently declaring that we, with our narrow perspective of the world, actually have the solution that God seems to have overlooked. And this is precisely why we struggle so much with the problem of the evil around us.

You see, it is not enough that the person in charge – in this case God – is benevolent, acting only for the good of those under him. And it is not enough for the person in charge to be able to act effectively. That is only two legs. And a stable stool or chair or table requires a third leg. It must also be true that the person in charge actually knows what to do. Job and his friends and we after them understand that we are powerless and so are willing to believe that God is powerful.

Job and his friends and we after them are also willing to believe that God is benevolent for without that there would be no point to life itself. But like Job and his friends, we believe we know better than God. We believe that, if we were in God’s shoes, we would have done things differently. But Job realizes how puny he is when he has his encounter with God. He realizes that the problem of evil in the end is amplified precisely because we are unwilling to trust the wisdom of God.

Throughout the book, Job cries out for vindication. He pleads for answers that would explain what is happening to him. He begs for an audience with God so that he can defend himself. But when he meets God, the questions fly out the window and he is left only with a profound understanding of how shallow his understanding of the world could ever be. In the end, he does not get any answers. He has searched for the wisdom of God and discovered it is unsearchable.

But God commends Job in the end. Even though Job rants and raves throughout the book, coming dangerously close to blaspheming God at many points, God tells Eliphaz, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has.” Job refused to accept his guilt even though his friends insisted on it and God commends that. Job’s friends berate him for asking God for the reasons for his suffering and God commends Job for that.

You see, in the end we will never be able to fathom the wisdom of God in the midst of evil. Our minds are too small for such wondrous knowledge. We will never be able to reconcile the existence of evil with the view that God is both benevolent and omnipotent. In the end, the only comfort we have is not just that God is not malicious and that God is not impotent. What we desperately need to be assured of in the midst of evil is that God knows what he is doing.

What we really need when we see the face of evil is the conviction that, while the search for an explanation is noble and while the attempt to reconcile God’s goodness and power with the presence of evil is to be lauded, our quest is a grasping the ungraspable, a comprehending the incomprehensible, and a searching the unsearchable. This does not mean that we stop looking for answers to try and understand how the existence of evil fits with a belief in a loving, powerful, wise God.

To the contrary, Job struggled immensely in his attempt to understand the problem. And he came away with an understanding of the unsearchable depths of the problem unrivalled in all of literature. His understanding is so off the wall that even today most people who read the book reject its central claim – that the existence of evil does not challenge the benevolence of God nor the omnipotence of God, but that it resides in the wisdom of God.

And the book invites us not to reject God when we face evil, but to trust him, trust that he intends good for us, trust that he is able to pull us through any evil, and to surrender ourselves to his incomprehensible wisdom while continuing in faith the process of searching the unsearchable.