Scripture Study

Job, the Perfect Child

A Blameless and Upright Man

In the beginning of the Book of Job, God calls Job “a blameless and upright man” (Job 1:8). [1] He feared God, did no evil, and obeyed the commandments. In case any of his children cursed God in their hearts without his knowing it, he sanctified them and made burnt offerings. All he did was good in the sight of the Lord, and he was rewarded with a great wealth of children, oxen, camels, many servants, and more.

This theology, that if we do good, we will receive good, was common back in the day (the 4th to 7th centuries BCE) when Job was written. The theologians of that period were concerned less with how this affected individuals and more with how it impacted Israel as a people. When the Hebrews obeyed God, they won their battles and prospered. When, instead, they bowed down to foreign gods, their enemies cut them down and imprisoned them.

Is that how God acts in the world? Do we win wars because we are righteous? Does our soccer team win because our prayers find favor with God? Is the victor always more blameless?

Why Bad Things Happen

Of course not. Yet we often want to believe that life is fair, so we make excuses for suffering. We blame the victim by claiming they brought it on themselves or offended God or were bad at their core. After all, if it’s just blind luck, we, too, are at risk.

If we can’t bring ourselves to kick someone when she’s down, we might decide everything happens for a reason. God is testing our faith, or God has taken everything from us in order to give us back even more. After all, that’s what happened to Job, isn’t it? God let the Adversary take away his entire family, all his belongings, and inflict him with sores, yet because Job didn’t curse him, God returned what he’d had, double. Being a good boy has its rewards.

Job Introduced

For those who don’t know or who have forgotten, Job was a sheik from the land of Uz. As we saw, he was blessed by a good family and by riches. One day, God and the Satan were talking, and God brought up his faithful servant Job. The Satan suggested that Job loved God only because he’d been so well blessed.

“But stretch out your hand now,” said the Satan, “and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face” (Job 1:11).

So God let the Adversary see what he could do.

Then, all manner of calamity struck. In one day, marauders killed Job’s oxen and donkeys and the servants who tended them. Fire destroyed his sheep and more servants. Then raiders took his camels,

killing the servants there. Finally, while all his children were eating together at the eldest brother’s house, a wind struck the building, caving it in and killing everyone inside.

Yet Job did not curse God.

More Affliction

So the Satan “inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head” (Job 1:7). Without comment, Job sat down in a pile of ashes and scraped at his skin with a shard of pottery. It was an act of mourning and self-abasement.

His wife told him to “curse God and die” Yet he didn’t. Instead, he told her, “Shall we receive good at the hands of God, and not receive bad?” (Job 1:9-10).

Patient and faithful, he refused to curse his deity. For seven days and seven nights, he lay in his ash pit, and his friends stayed with him, weeping and rending their clothes. His friends, too, were good.

Yet after a week, Job started feeling desperate. He began to hate his life. He wished that he had never been born.

When our troubles are great, we often long to die. At least, we long to be free of our sorrows, to get some rest, some relief. As a chaplain, I sometimes sit with people who have tried to kill themselves because the pain, physical or mental, emotional or spiritual, was more than they could bear. Those who didn’t try to die may wish they would pass away. Some even prayed to God to take them.

Fear of the Future

One man longed to die because he couldn’t face the terrible future he imagined for himself. He’d been diagnosed with cancer. Years before, he’d survived a different kind of cancer, but he always thought he’d live into his nineties, like his parents. Now here he was, sick again. This time, his cancer could not be cured. It wouldn’t take him immediately, but he didn’t know how long he had, and that’s what scared him. Somehow, he couldn’t face the uncertainty, the lack of control.

He didn’t so much ask why God had done this to him, as many do. For him, God was amorphous. There, but not necessarily Christian, and certainly not definable. He was comfortable with that particular unknowing.

But it seems that most people are not. So we come up with ways to explain the vagaries of life. Why are the righteous cut down in their prime? Why do the blameless suffer loss, illness, and indignity?

Who knows? If there were one correct answer, surely we would have found it by now. Job and his friends asked that question thousands of years ago. The best minds have studied it. Yet today, we have no firm answer. Maybe we have an explanation that allows us to keep going one day after another, and maybe that explanation is robust enough to protect us against despair should all manner of terrible losses strike.

And perhaps it is not. Perhaps when the terrible thing turns our life upside down, our explanation will shatter along with our heart.

Job’s Friends Offer Advice

That’s probably why Job’s friends seek answers that will hold in the face of a misery as great as his. Eliphaz, for instance, suggests that Job must have done something to offend God. “[w]ho that was innocent ever perished?/ Or where were the upright cut off?” (Job 4:7).

Yet anyone can see that makes no sense. Innocent people perish, and the upright are cut off, all the time. That’s why Eliphaz comes up with another idea. “Can mortals be righteous before God?” he asks. “Can human beings be pure before their Maker?” (Job 4:17). We might think we are good, so the thinking goes, but in God’s eyes, we are sinners. If we enjoy good things in life for a while, it’s not because we deserve them, so we shouldn’t complain when they’re gone. Which is easy enough to say, but hard to do. Even Job complains bitterly that he was ever born.

So Eliphaz comes up with another idea. “How happy is the one whom God reproves,” he tells Job, “therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty” (Job 5:17).

Does this mean that if we are scoured out until nothing remains, we can be filled with God’s grace? If so, many would say this is better than any material wealth. Or perhaps Eliphaz’s words teach us that misery is temporary. All things pass, even suffering. Something good will surely come of this. When the old is swept away, there’s room for something better.

None of this helps. Job is still the most miserable of men. Is this the blameless and upright fellow God extolled to his satanic adversary? Does the perfect child ever complain?

Job is comforted by his friends

Job and His Comforters, Luca Giordano c.a. 1700

No Better than We Can Be

It seems his friend Bildad doesn’t like Job’s whining. If he is truly blameless, Bildad tells him, God will not reject him. If he is patient, God will soon enough restore his health and all his worldly goods. In the meantime, Job ought to look for the fault that lies, if not in himself, somewhere in his family. Perhaps his children sinned, or his ancestors. We are none of us pure, after all.

Yet Job is certain that no one connected to him has done wrong. If they did, he made amends. And if he himself sinned, he did no more than anyone does, for “how can a mortal be just before God” (Job 9:2)? Why should he repent of being no better than he can be? Others do worse evil, yet they prosper.

Job is full of woe. He hates his life. Though he doesn’t understand why these things are happening to him, he doesn’t really care. His suffering is not fair. If God is testing him, he doesn’t see why he should. What did Job ever do to make God think he needed to be so scrutinized? If his fellow citizens and even his wife shun him, that makes no sense. He is no less upright now than he was before disease struck him.

Still, he does not despair. He wants answers from God, and he intends to get them. Perhaps he is not so perfect, after all. What good boy would dare to question his parent? Or is it entitlement that makes him so angry, so unwilling to accept his lot, so insistent that God justify himself?

We Achieve Nothing Alone

Sometimes it is less a feeling of entitlement that makes us shake our fist at fate and more a lack of perspective. When life has been good to us, when we have faced few hardships, we don’t consider what it’s like to struggle. We may judge the abused, the hungry, the sick, the poor, the lonely. It’s easy to assume the downtrodden did something to bring on their fate. From that assumption, it’s a simple step to assume that our fate was a result, not of good fortune, but of our superior nature or righteousness or simple hard work.

Yet we do not achieve anything on our own. Generations before us paved the way. Today, thousands work for little pay at grueling jobs so we might have the the roads, the electricity, the schools, the groceries, the clothing, the land, the beauty, the leisure we need to make something of ourselves.

Job might have been perfect, but he never once wondered whether what God did was fair to his children, not to mention his servants or animals. He never considered whether he was being fair to those who depended on him. Though he might have considered the state of their souls, for he was responsible for them and made sin offerings just in case, yet did he wonder whether his children were happy? Did he ask his servants if they had all they needed, if they suffered somehow? Or did he simply accept his blessings as his due without a thought for what he would have considered his property? Was that his sin?

Facing Adversity

The gentleman I spoke with who had a new diagnosis of cancer was not so caviler about his children and other loved ones. These days, we don’t think we own our family. At least, most of us don’t. This man realized that bad things sometimes happened, but not to him. Like Job, he didn’t create his blessings on his own, but he felt responsible for them. He assumed he controlled his destiny. Now he realized that he didn’t, and he was scared.

With some reflection, the man realized that his problem was that he didn’t know how to cope. He had never suffered serious loss. His siblings, his wife, his children still lived. He had lots of friends. After a long and rewarding career, he’d retired with a good pension, lived in a lovely home. True, his parents had both died, but they hadn’t been young, so it was expected. When he’d battled cancer before, he’d known he’d beat it. No one suggested anything else. The treatment was uncomfortable, but manageable. Life, for him, had been easy.

Now he faced something truly difficult, and he was afraid. This time, with this cancer, he didn’t know what to expect. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to get through it, and if he was going to die anyway, he wasn’t sure why he should bother.

Unlike Job, he didn’t seek answers. He didn’t wish he’d never been born, though he was thinking about taking his life before the pain got bad. For Job, of course, the pain was already intolerable.

A Seat at the Table

Though unlike Job in some ways, like him, the man did accept his blessings as his due. He never questioned his lot in life. Why should he? It’s not as if he were a bad man. He didn’t steal, cheat, or lie. He was blameless and upright, after all.

Most likely, he would have agreed that tragedy strikes both the good and the bad. Perhaps he’d have acknowledged that just because we fail doesn’t mean we’re unworthy. He could even accept that not everyone who achieves success deserves it, though if that were true, he might not deserve success, either. That’s a little harder for us to accept.

Yet being blameless is not enough to get us ahead, and being sinful does not always keep us in poverty. No matter how good we are, we can’t all win a seat at the table. Not in this world. Yet we seem to think that’s okay. For Jesus to invite everyone to his feast was radical in his day. For us to question the rightness of our social and economic structure is radical, as well.

A New Job

The Book of Job is not that radical. In the end of the story, Job receives material wealth once more. It seems we know a good man because God has blessed him.

But I like to think that Job was a different man. The patient with cancer learned humility. Perhaps Job did, too. As he reunited with his wife, and rebuilt his business, and fathered more children, I like to think the memory of his hardship made him a bit kinder to the leper and the poor, more gracious to his family. Instead of trying so hard to be blameless and upright, to be a good son to his god, maybe he learned to forgive more easily and love more heartily. It seems to me, that would have made him a more perfect child.

In faith and fondness,

Barbara

Credits

  1. All scripture quotes are from the NRSV.

Photo – Job and His Comforters, Luca Giordano c.a. 1700

Copyright © 2021 Barbara E. Stevens. All Rights Reserved.

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