Humility
/Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? -Job 38:4
Job is one of the more challenging books of the bible. It’s a book that reminds us all that we are subject to God and have no power whatsoever to make God do anything. We can plead, whine, pray and complain, but when push comes to shove, God’s going to do what God’s going to do, and our lives are going to be what our lives are going to be, whether we like it or not.
Job was a prosperous and faithful man. He had everything! He was healthy, wealthy, intelligent, surrounded by family and owned lots of productive land. He was one of the privileged people of his day and he was highly respected by everyone. And then suddenly, with no good reason, Job loses everything. His children die, his wife and friends turn against him, his buildings and crops burned to the ground, his livestock die and he gets covered with pox. He is the embodiment of sudden bad fortune.
His ‘helpful’ friends try to get him to get up off his ash heap and do something. They say he hasn’t been faithful enough, that he needs to do more to get back into God’s favor. But Job realizes that he had done nothing to deserve this fate. He waits and suffers more than his wife can stand it. “Do something!” she demands.
Finally Job decides to question God. “Why? Why would you do this to me, God?” And the passage from Job assigned to this Sunday is just the start of God’s tough-love response. God says, “Why? Who are you to question why? Were you here at the foundation of the universe? Did you create water and sky and land?” He goes on to ask if Job had any hand in creating dark and light, wind and water, stars and moon, animals, plants, earth. God’s list of things that Job has no control over, or mastery of, goes on for several chapters. Finally, in chapter 42, Job is finally humbled, recognizing that he is of small acount to God’s vast greatness and wisdom. He is also satisfied that if he is so very infinitesimally small, and God so awesomely big, there is nothing he can do to change his circumstances. His powerlessness and surrender becomes his salvation, for in submitting to God, he does not turn away from God and go his own way. And in the end, God restores all Job’s previous abundance and more.
So this is tough teaching. We don’t like it. We want to be masters of our own fate and captains of our own ships. We don’t want God to play around with our lives or allow any suffering. But the book of Job can’t be denied. Life is unfair and it is often hard and while we can choose to turn toward or away from God, we don’t have the power to control the world or even our own fates.
There are terrible realities in this world that we cannot understand. Why do some have so much and others hardly anything? Why is the world so unfair - with good people often suffering and underhanded people often triumphing? Why can some people make choices that bring healing and peace into their lives while others just keep turning away from healing over and over and over in a downward spiral? Why is it that sometimes people can come together to make positive progress and then later on, people and circumstances see to band together to take the progress away? Why do some have so much power in the world, while others are so powerless?
There are many passages in the bible that deal with all this theodicy (the theological study of why bad things happen to good people). The book of Job gives its own stark answer - Only God Knows. What do you think about that? How does it feel to lean into the theology of the book of Job? What rings true for you about it? What makes you squirm? Theodicy is tough and our modern minds tend not to want to wrestle with it. But how could true humility and surrender to God’s reality be what this world needs a bit more of right now?
