Philip Yancey in the second part of his book ‘Disappointment with God’ looks at Job to find how we too can have his faith in the face of disappointments. He acknowledges, “Studying someone like Job as an example of faith is a little like studying the history of civilization by examining only the wars.” However, he does that because there are others that promise victory alone and make no mention of the wars. The book of Job portrays one man confronting misery that makes no sense. He lost 7000 sheep, 3000 camels, 5000 oxen, 500 donkeys and numerous servants. He then lost all children – seven sons and three daughters – in one mighty gust of wind. Finally, his last consolation too failed – he lost his health as sores broke out from the sole of his fee to the top of his head. Yancey asks us to think of it as a “mystery play”, a “Whodunit” detective story. Before the play begins, we in the audience get a sneak preview. The plot and the main characters are described to us and every mystery is solved except one: How will the main character respond? He points out, that the book is not about suffering as most people think; it is primarily about faith in its starkest form. The book is not about ‘Where is God when it Hurts?’, the preview settles that issue; it is about ‘How does Job respond?’ Will he trust God or deny Him? Satan scoffs that God, unworthy of love in himself, only attracts people like Job because they have been ‘bribed’ to follow him. When God accepts the challenge to test Satan’s theory, calamities begin to rain down on unsuspecting Job.
God’s critics protest that Job paid one hell of a price to just make God feel good. Yancey points out that the wager, the bet, the wresting match was not between Job and God. Satan and God were the chief combatants – Job was just performing in a cosmic showdown before spectators in the unknown world. Many people get up, eat, drive their cars, work, make phone calls, tend to their children and go to bed without giving a single thought to the existence of an unseen world. Hence they find it absurd to believe that one human being, a tiny dot on a tiny planet, can make a difference in the history of the universe. Job’s friend Elihu too had the same thought: “If you sin, how does it affect God? . . If you are righteous what do you give him? Your wickedness affects only a man like yourself”. But according to the Bible, human history is a staging ground for the battle of the universe. The opening and closing chapters of Job prove that God was greatly affected by the response of one man and that cosmic issues were at stake.
The bible rustles with hints that something like The Wager is played out in other believers as well. Apostle Paul, borrowing an image from gladiators being lead into the Colosseum, pictured himself as on public display, “We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men”. He is emphatic, “The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own”. God who had created from nothing and ended up with an universe rich in splendor is now engaged in Re-Creation employing the very humans who had spoiled his work. Creation progressed through stages: stars, sky and sea, plants and animals and finally man. Recreation reverses the sequence, starting with man and culminating in the restoration of all creation. Yancey is convinced that The Wager is a stark reenactment of God’s original question in creation: Will man choose for or against me? Satan denied that human beings are truly free. Man has freedom to descend . . . but freedom to ascend, to believe in God for no reason at all? Often disappointments with God begin in Job-like situations. The death of a loved one, a tragic accident or loss of job may bring on the same questions that job asked. Why me? What does God have against me? We may beg God to change the circumstances – the ill health, the bank account, the run of bad luck. In our own trials, we will not have the insight that we got as readers of Job’s story. Will we trust God? Job affirms that our response to testing matters.
The book of Job does not answer the question ‘Why?’ When God himself arrives on the scene, one would have expected God to say, “Job, I’m truly sorry about what’s happened. You’ve endured many unfair trials on my behalf, and I’m proud of you. You don’t know what it means to me and to the universe”. God says nothing of this kind. He rather seems to guide Job through a course of appreciation for the created world. Perhaps God keeps us ignorant because enlightenment might not help us. No intellectual answer will solve suffering. Perhaps this is why God sent his own son as an active and personal response to human pain, to experience it and absorb it into himself. Perhaps God keeps us ignorant because we are incapable of comprehending the answer. A tiny creature on a tiny planet in a remote galaxy simply can not fathom the grand design of the Universe. In Yancey’s view, the book of Job substitutes the question ‘Why?’ with another question ‘To what end?’ Every act of faith by every one of the people of God is like the tolling of a bell, in the struggle to reverse all that is wrong with the universe.
At some point, everyone confronts the question –- Is God unfair? Yancey lists out several ways in which we respond.
- Some respond like Job’s wife who advised Job, “Curse God and die”. Why hold on to a sentimental belief about a loving God when so much in life conspires against it. Still they cannot avoid a tinge of outrage, as if they have been betrayed. They overlook the underlying issue of where their primal sense of fairness comes from.
- Others equally mindful of the world’s unfairness cannot bring themselves to deny God’s existence. They propose that perhaps God agrees that life is unfair but cannot do anything about it. Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the best-seller ‘When Bad things happen to Good people’ portrayed God as compassionate but powerless, and millions of his readers found comfort in such a conclusion. If God is indeed less-than-powerful, why did he choose the worst possible situation (when he was being tried by Pilate) – when his power was most called into question – to insist on his omnipotence?
- Still others evade the problem of unfairness by looking to the future when an exacting justice will work itself out in the universe. The Hindu doctrine of Karma calculates that it may take a soul 6.8 million incarnations to realize perfect justice. At the end, a person will have experienced exactly the amount of pain and pleasure he deserves.
- Yet another approach is to flatly deny the problem and insist that the world is fair. Echoing Job’s friends, these people insist that the world does run according to fixed laws: good people will prosper and evil ones will fail.
Was Job’s case exceptional? Yancey finds from reading through the Bible that Job stands as merely the most extreme example of what appears to be an universal law of faith. The kind of faith God values seems to develop best when everything fuzzes over, when God stays silent, when the fog rolls in. Yancey gives a new label “Survivors of the Fog” to Hebrews 11, a chapter most have labeled ‘The Faith Hall of Fame’. He draws distinction between two kinds of Faith: child-like Faith and the greater Fidelity. David exercised childlike faith when he strode out to meet Goliath, as did the Roman Centurion whom Jesus commended. Today, “faith missionaries” write stirring accounts of miracles – houseful of orphans being fed and mountains being moved - resulting from “seed faith”, a childlike trust. Childlike trust may not survive when the miracle does not come, when the urgent prayer gets no answer, when a dense grey mist obscures any sign of God’s concern. Such times call for something more – hang-on-at-any-cost faith that can be called fidelity. God did not exempt himself from the same demands of faith. Job sat on ashes, scratching his sores. Jesus hung on a cross, unable to reach his wounds. In a sense, God tied his own hands in The Wager over Job; in the most literal sense, he let his hands be tied the night of crucifixion. The three day pattern – tragedy, darkness, triumph – will someday be enlarged to a cosmic scale. We have little comprehension of what our faith means to God. According to the Bible, human beings serve as the principal foot soldiers in the warfare between unseen forces of good and evil, and faith is our primary weapon.
Why doesn’t GOD intervene? Living in a seen world of trees and buildings, we have difficulty in believing in another, unseen world existing alongside it. “We want proof”, we say. “How can we be certain that God even exists if he will not enter into our world?” We look for a blinding difference between the natural and supernatural worlds; a gulf separated by barbed wire. But in reality, we do not stop being ‘natural’ persons when we pray; we still get sleepy and lose concentration. Yancey quotes C. S. Lewis who talked of the obvious continuity between things which are admittedly natural and things which are claimed to be spiritual. He talked of the reappearance of all the same old elements which make up our natural life in what is professed to be our supernatural life. The modern world can reduce most natural phenomena and even most spiritual phenomena, to their component parts. Should it surprise us then to find the same universal principle operating in the realm of the spirit? From below we tend to think of miracle as an invasion, a breaking into the natural world with spectacular force, and we long for such signs. But from above, from God’s point of view, the real miracle is one of transposition: that human beings can become vessels filled with his Spirit; that ordinary human acts of charity and goodness can become nothing less than the incarnation of God on earth. Jesus Christ, said Paul, serves now as the head of the body. The risen Christ accomplishes his will through us, members of his body.
A final objection that one might have: Job got a personal appearance by God, but how does that help me who has not had a visitation from God, with my struggles? In a sense, our days on earth resemble Job’s before God came to Him in a whirlwind. We too live among clues and rumors, some of which argue against a powerful, loving God. We too must exercise faith. Paul told the Corinthians that in spite of incredible hardships, he did not ‘lose heart’. “Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary [!] troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal”. Let us fix our eyes on eternity and respond to God in Faith.
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