Deeper Faith

When we look at the exchange taking place between Job and his friends in the book that bears his name, the conversation probably looks familiar to a lot of us. As we saw yesterday, what's happening here is that everyone is speaking from experience about the God they know, the One they have encountered, everything they have learned about Him throughout their life.

It's not that one is right and one is wrong, or even that one is right and several are wrong, or even that several are right and one is wrong; they all are right in speaking about the God that they have become acquainted with through their own experience. 

But they are all limited. Even Job.

What is important for us to notice, however, is not the degree to which all are right, but the extent to which all are unmovable. For all their discussion, for all their talking, for all the time they spend going back and forth, laying out their own theologies and listening to the theologies of others present, not one of them, at any point, says, "Wow, you know? You make a lot of sense. I must have been wrong about that." Not one of them comes to a deeper understanding of God.

Until God Himself speaks.

When God speaks, He sets them all straight. He tells them all what's going on. He doesn't condemn them for the ways that they've spoken, but He shows them how limited their insights are. And when God speaks, they see, for the first time, that this is absolutely true.

It's what they've been telling each other for several pages. It's what they've been going back and forth about forever. They've all been trying to show the others where their theologies are limited, without recognizing the limitations of their own. But it hasn't done any good.

It doesn't do us any good either.

We spend so much of our time in this wasted effort, so much of our time trying to convince one another that maybe we have a good starting point, but our theologies are limited. We spend so much of our time adamantly standing on what we know about God, claiming that we have a more developed theology. Claiming that we know more than the guy sitting next to us. Claiming that we have it right where they have it wrong. 

But it doesn't do us any good. There's not a man on this earth that has been argued, badgered, or belittled into a deeper faith. Not one. There's no one among us who has been whittled down by the repetition of our own theology to the place where they just buy in to what we're saying. There's no one who hears our message again and again and throws out his own. 

We all have to be shown by God who He is. That's the only way we ever grow.

There are two reminders for all of us in this little truth from Job's witness. The first is that it is God who deepens faith. It is God who broadens theologies. It is God who reveals Himself. No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we argue, no matter how firm we stand, it is God alone who reveals more of Himself to a person. All our talking is, as is so often cited in Job, just hot wind. 

The second reminder is a call to humility. We want to pick a hero out of this story. We want to get to the end and say, see? Job was right all along. But when God speaks, He reveals what He's promised in other places in Scripture - not one is right. Not one is even close to the fullness of His majesty. Not one knows as much as he thinks he knows. We may be right in what we know about God, but we're still limited. We still know only a small fraction of all things holy. It's all that our finite minds can wrap around. 

So we must come together with humility and with grace, knowing that our experience of God is different than anyone else's experience of God and that all our talking can do nothing but blow in the wind. It is God who has to change hearts. 

May we pray that He will change ours also. 

The God I Know

Yesterday, I said that we need to cut Job's friends a little bit of slack - they're just speaking from what they know about God. They're not trying to have a limited theology. They're not trying to get it "wrong." They simply know what they know. They've experienced what they've experienced. They've been taught what they've been taught.

And if you read the way that Job handles this, it's a good lesson for all of us.

Job never really tells his friends how wrong they are. He doesn't tell them that what they're saying is not true. In fact, Job even says some things that seem very close to what his friends are saying - all of the men present understand the contractual, covenantal nature of God and the way that human faithfulness is correlated with His pleasure. That much is not up for debate.

But what we see in Job's dialogue is an attempt to introduce to his friends a grander idea of God. He doesn't say they are wrong, but he certainly calls out their theology as limited. Every time he gets the chance, he claims that God is greater than what they can even imagine. In other words, You're not wrong, friends, but there is so much more to God.

He does this in a bit of an interesting way, by referring to his own character to show God's, to get his friends out of their contractual mindset. To them, there is only one very limited way to be faithful, and it is to act out the law according to their own interpretation of it. But Job shows how the law is more encompassing than even they know, how his life is a testimony to keeping God's commands in ways that they never could imagine in their narrow definitions. 

And if Job's nature is broader, yet still firmly rooted in the law, then God's nature must also be greater than they could ever imagine. 

God, Job testifies, is not one-for-one; He is One-for-all. 

I love this theological debate that takes place between these friends. In our modern minds, we see that they are all just trying to be "right," but what's really going on is that these guys are sitting around trying to figure out their theologies. What do I believe about God? What do I know about Him? What have I experienced? What can I say about Him that is true and that resonates with my experience? 

The thing we have to keep in mind is that this is not a scenario in which one of them is right and the rest are wrong; they're all right! It's just that they've all had their own experiences of God, and that's all they've got to draw on. And I think what we read as frustration in Job's voice as the dialogue continues is right on - it's frustration. But it's also grief. Is this all that his friends really know about God?

We're so tempted to judge each other. We're so tempted to say that the other person is wrong, that they've got God wrong, that they just don't understand. Maybe they don't. Maybe they don't understand who God really is, but if that's true, it's because they haven't had the experience of Him that we've had. It's not our place to judge. It's not our place to condemn.

What we have to do - what we have to get better at as Christians in a broken world - is saying, "Yes, but...." Yes, that is true about God, but there's so much more. Yes, you're right, but you're not exhaustive. Yes, that's part of Him, but that's not all of Him. Yes, I see what you're saying, but let me tell you what I also know. Job does this pretty well, if we're paying attention. 

We...need to get better at it. 

Job's Friends

When we read Job's story, there's something in us that wants to look down at his friends. Here they are, sitting with a guy who has lost essentially everything in the world (but not sitting too close because his skin disease makes him unclean), and all they can do is tell him all kinds of things that are not particularly comforting at the moment. All they can do is tell him that he clearly has God all wrong.

All we can do is read their words and think that they are the ones who have God all wrong.

We shake our heads, wag our fingers, and proclaim in a loud voice how wrong they have it, without realizing the irony of the situation - here we are boldly proclaiming that those who are boldly proclaiming we have it wrong...are wrong. 

Now, God is going to step in at some point and explain it all to them. He's going to put them in their place. He's going to show them where their theology is hollow, and it may look like God is therefore proving us right. See? we say. They were wrong.

But they weren't as wrong as we'd want them to be, and honestly, we can't really fault them for it.

What Job's friends had right was the law of God. They understood the contractual nature of the law, that tit leads to tat. That one thing leads to another. That in response to all things, there is a response to all things, and that God plays by His own rules. They knew the covenant, as well, and that's what they were basing their advice on. Job just needed to get in the game of covenant, contractual living. This was likely the God that Job's friends had been taught. It was likely the only God they had ever encountered.

In this way, they are much like the Pharisees in the New Testament. They've invested their lives in the law; it's what they know best. It's how they conceive of God. It's how they come in contact with Him. And it's not as wrong as we'd want it to be - there are some very logical explanations for why someone would have a law-based theology, especially in times before the witness of Christ. 

What they don't seem to have encountered in quite the same way is the goodness of God, the kind of goodness expressed by grace and mercy. They seem to have dug into the Ark of the Covenant and pulled out the stone tablets, but neglected entirely the throne of mercy that sits over the law. Likely, they simply haven't experienced God's goodness or, if they have, they haven't incorporated it into their theology of Him. 

In other words, when we look at Job's friends, we're looking at people who are doing the best they can with the theology they have. Just like we're all trying to do. 

It's a powerful lesson for us, particularly because in today's faith, we are still surrounded by Job's friends. Except now, they're our friends. They're our family. They're sitting in our pews. They're living in our neighborhoods. We are surrounded by persons who are doing the best they can with the theology they have. 

It's not that they're wrong. Not at all! Or at least, they're not as wrong as we'd want them to be. It's just that they haven't experienced the vast goodness of God in ways that would help to expand their theology. It's just that they don't know beyond what they know. And how could they?

This is precisely why we can't be so quick to judge Job's friends...or ours. Nobody tries to be unfaithful to the Gospel (at least, not many, and the ones who do are easy to spot). Nobody wants to get God wrong. Nobody wants to have a limited idea of who He is. No, the greater our experience of God, the greater our experience of life. Given the choice, none of us wants to live in a box, and none of us wants a God who fits in one, either. 

But there are countless persons among us, even faithful persons, even Bible-reading, God-fearing, neighbor-loving persons who simply don't have a theology big enough to incorporate things like grace and mercy and the goodness of God. That doesn't mean we should judge them for that. That doesn't mean we should condemn them for it. 

They're doing the best they can. Just like we all are. We're all just doing the best we can. 

And if we think they're wrong, well, let's show them a better way. Let's introduce them to a bigger theology. Let's make room in their contract for grace. Let's show them where mercy lives. I love the way that Job responds to his friends - let's be more like that. 

If you're not sure what that looks like, stay tuned. We'll look at a little bit of that tomorrow. 

Curse God

I've just finished the book of Job in my daily Bible study, and here's what I love about Job: it's one of those books that brings us right up to the line, but doesn't cross it. A lot of the dialogue centers around whether Job will curse God or not, and he ends up doing just about everything but.

It's a little too close for most of us. We wouldn't go as far as Job goes in his blunt honesty, but I think that's kind of the point - we can go that far. We can be real with God. Job is. And yet, he doesn't sin in being so. 

We struggle, in our postmodern world in which just about everything is offensive and crosses some sort of line, to understand what it means to be raw-ly emotional and responsive to the world without "cursing" it (read: offending it). We read the way that Job calls God out, and we think that surely, he has offended the Lord somehow. Surely, God is not going to put up with this.

But look at what's happening here - for all Job's ranting and raving, for all his lamenting, for all the ways that he's pointing out what he believes is wrong here (and for the record, sometimes, he does seem to think that it is God who is wrong), what he's actually doing throughout his entire testimony...is affirming who God is.

And that's exactly what God expected him to do. That's exactly what God told the tempter that Job would do. You do whatever you want to Job, and he will continue to testify to who I am.

See, when Job says This is not what I expect from you, God, what he's actually saying is what he does expect from God. When he says this isn't just, he's saying that the God that he knows is just. When he says this isn't grounded in truth, he's saying that the God that he knows is truth. When he says that this is not what he anticipates God to truly be like, he's making a statement that he knows who God is.

And he's right.

This is what Job is trying to show us - when you know who God is, when you worship Him, pray to him, obey Him, and live your life for Him - then it's absolutely okay for you to put your feet down firmly on that understanding. When God has shown Himself clearly and demonstrated His own character and faithfulness, it's okay for you to demand from Him that He be who He claims to be, who He says He is, who He promises He is.

Notice that throughout the entire testimony of Job, the man never once says, God is not who He says He is. What he always says is, This is not who God says He is. It's not a sense of entitlement that God should be treating Job somehow differently; he's calling God to account on the basis of God's own testimony about Himself. He's very clearly saying, I know who God is, and this is not Him. And he's calling on the God he knows to step and be the God he's sure of.

He's trusting God to do just that.

To us, it looks really close to cursing God. To our postmodern minds, it seems very much that he's tempting fate here, pressing the line, testing the waters. He's pretty close, we think, to God just giving up on him and pushing him away. If Job didn't deserve all that happened to him before now, just let him keep speaking for a few more chapters, and we're sure that he'll get there.

But what's actually going on here, even in all his anger, even in all his grief, even in all his lament, even in all his protest, is that Job is praising God. He's making a bold, repeated, adamant testimony to who God is, even if that doesn't seem to be what God is acting like at this particular moment. He's banking his life on his theology that says that God is good and that God is still good. He's holding onto that promise, and he won't let go.

Even if his raw, scaly, diseased hands fail him.

Lesser Gods

Recently, I was reading an article in a Bible-related periodical, and the author indicated something to the effect that it was always in God's plan to give the non-Israel nations in the Old Testament over to lesser gods, with the intention of pulling them back into Himself later. That way, they would know the supremacy of His deity. 

It sounds good on paper, but theologically, there's a lot here to make us cringe.

Specifically, it should strike us right away that God never claims to be the greatest God; He claims to be the only God. So the idea that God would have been planning to utilize "lesser gods" from the beginning, that He has them in His employ for His purposes, is very troubling.

This is complicated a bit because throughout the Old Testament, God never seems to question the legitimacy of other gods. He questions their power. He calls them worthless. He says they're idols. He says they're not very good gods, but He never quite says they are not gods at all. So neither can we quite say that these other gods are not gods.

But it gets to the heart of this whole thing: what is a god?

We can't say that these other gods are gods in the same way that God is God. That, as we just introduced, creates a theological problem. It offers a pantheon of gods where our God says He is the only. It creates sub-gods interrelated with the Triune Godhead, and that doesn't work with the testimony of the Scriptures. It doesn't make sense with what God says about Himself very clearly.

What we can say is that there is a very clear paradigm for referring to things as gods that are not gods, but only because we have made them so. We do this all the time, particularly in the church. We talk about how easy it is for the idol of money to become our god. Or television. Or beauty. Or social standing. Or whatever it is. We call these things gods, but we would never think that up in the heavens, in the grand expanse of the cosmos, sits God, our God, money, television, beauty, social standing, etc. running the world. That's insane.

When we talk about other "gods," I think this is what we're talking about - we're talking about ideas and image and idols that the nations have set up for themselves and called them gods. God, our God, points out that they are worthless, but He doesn't say they're not gods. To the people, they are very much gods, and it's in God's interest to acknowledge them as such.

That seems strange. Why should God acknowledge as gods things that are clearly not? Because what He's actually doing is acknowledging the peoples' God-hunger. Their God-longing. If He dismisses their gods out-of-hand, He risks alienating them from that thing inside of themselves that's actually searching for Him. But if He acknowledges what they're doing, He says, essentially, yes! Yes, you are looking for gods because you are a God-hungry people.

Then He can step in and say, "But here's where those gods of yours fail you. And where I never will."

Going back to the original article that prompted this discussion, I think it's true that God always planned to use the peoples' God-hunger to bring them back to Himself, even those outside of the nation of Israel. All men were created in the image of God, and there's something in every soul that is searching for Him.

But I think that the way that the article put it says something very, very different from this to the average reader - it suggests a legitimacy to the gods that God never gives them. It suggests some kind of elevated status that God doesn't actually affirm. God does not employ "lesser gods" in His work. He can't, for He repeatedly says unequivocally that He is the only God. We must be very careful not to suggest anything otherwise.