When The Wind Spoke - Job

For most of my life I thought I understood the story of Job.

I had been handed the version most of us inherit. A righteous man appears to become a pawn in a wager between God and the accuser. He loses everything in a single afternoon. His wealth, his servants, his children, his health. Then three friends arrive and sit with him in silence before taking turns insisting that somewhere, hidden in the folds of his life, there must be a secret sin.

Surely a just God would not let a man suffer unless he had earned it. Job protests his innocence. He holds his ground through speech after speech. In the final scene he receives back double what he lost, and we close the book satisfied that he passed the test and collected his reward.

I believed that for years. It is a tidy story.

It has a moral and a scoreboard and a man who comes out ahead. The trouble is that the longer I sat with it the less it held together. If the doubling at the end is the prize for passing, what exactly was the passing grade?

Job spends most of the book demanding an audience with God so he can argue his case. He questions, he accuses, he comes close to putting God on trial. If that is what passing looks like, the marking scheme is stranger than we admit. The conclusion only holds if you already decided how the story ends before you read it.

What changed for me was not the facts of the story. What changed was the man I saw inside it.

Look again at Job before the storm.

Here is a man so careful that he rises early to offer sacrifices for sins his children might have committed without his knowing.

Read that again slowly.

He is covering wrongs that may never have happened, on the chance that they did, in case he had missed his opportunity to account for them.

He does this continually, we are told. Day after day. That is not the rhythm of a man at peace with his God. That is the rhythm of a man managing a threat he cannot quite see. Job loved control. He believed he was holding up his end of a contract, and he worked tirelessly to leave God no opening, no reason, no conceivable cause to withhold what the arrangement promised.

His devotion was real.

Yet, it was also a fortress, and like every fortress it was built because something inside him was afraid.

We are told as much in his own words. When the worst finally arrives he says that the thing he had always feared has come upon him. The fear was there the whole time, humming quietly beneath the rituals. His religion was immaculate. His record was spotless. Yet, his heart was braced for disaster the entire time, which tells you he never truly believed he was safe.

You do not armour yourself against someone you trust.

This is the trap of a life built on fear. When we see the journey as performance, we try harder, and the harder we try the more we feed the very fear we are trying to outrun.

Our effort becomes its fuel.

A relationship works the other way. When we are held rather than tested, we can open our hearts and let the fear finally speak, and let God heal what is underneath it, because we are no longer driven by shame.

Then everything he dreaded happened anyway.

What follows is the most brutal stretch of suffering imaginable. He loses his children in an hour. His body turns against him. The wife who remains tells him to curse God and die. 

Now a side note here for you to consider.

For many years her reaction has been misunderstood as the outburst of a rebellious and wicked woman, yet consider the possibility that what if what we are briefly told is not a woman rebelling so much as a woman who has finally come to the end of herself, having seen where her husband's obsessive and controlling lifestyle was leading.

As you hold the last paragraph in tension also consider the picture Yeshua gave us of what God is after when he shares the love affair between a bride and a groom. Is very possible that Job's wife was never the rebel the tradition made her out to be. 

She was simply tired. 

Tired of playing second fiddle to a god who seemed to consume her husband's every waking hour, a god whose demands left Job with little tenderness to spare for the woman beside him. 

This is what a life spent trying to satisfy the rules does to a person. It hollows out the heart until there is nothing left to give to the ones who share your table. 

Job's fear drove him into a blindness so complete that he could probably no longer recognise a love affair when it stood in front of him. 

Even the one with his own bride.

Therefore, with this in mind consider, 

That if we are the bride and He is the groom, then religion the way Job practiced it is a spiritual affair, where the mind is given to the contract rather than the heart to the One who longed to love and be loved. 

Read that again slowly.

From here we see that the friends who came to comfort him become prosecutors, not fellow God lovers, and therefore through all of it Job does what a man of contracts does when the contract appears to have been broken.

He files his complaint.

He had kept his side of the agreement to the letter. Why was God not keeping His. The logic is airtight if the relationship is a transaction. The whole edifice rests on a single hidden assumption, that obedience purchases protection and that suffering must therefore be evidence of a debt.

His friends believed it too. That is why they kept searching him for sin. They were not cruel men. They were simply working the same equation Job had built his life upon, and the equation demanded that someone must have failed for this to happen.

When God finally answers, He does not address the ledger at all.

He does not explain the wager. He does not defend the math. He never tells Job why. He speaks instead out of the whirlwind and begins to ask questions of His own. 

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Do you command the morning? Have you walked in the depths of the sea? Do you know when the wild goats give birth, or who sends the rain on a land where no one lives? On it goes, question after question, none of them about Job's case.

It can read like an evasion, as though God is overwhelming a wounded man with grandeur rather than answering him.

Yet, it is not an evasion. It is an introduction.

God is showing Job that for all his flawless performance, all those early mornings and careful sacrifices, he had been in a relationship with a system and never once with the living God Himself. If he had been the fears would not have been as overwhelming as they were - perfect love casts all fear out.

Job says it himself, and it is the hinge of the whole book. Before all this, he says, he had heard of God by the hearing of the ear. He had lived on rumour and crumbs, on secondhand reports and inherited rules.

Now, he says, my eye sees You. There it is.

All the duty and dread and anxious accounting had earned him a reputation with God and never a relationship. The suffering did not buy him anything. It did something far more severe and far more merciful. It dismantled the manufactured god he had been serving so he could finally meet the real one.

Everything he thought he knew had to fall before he could actually understand and see.

So what of the double portion at the end?

I no longer read it as a prize.

Job was a gifted man long before his troubles began. He was a builder of wealth, plainly able to make things grow. That gift was always in him. What had not been in him was freedom. For his entire life the gift had operated under the ceiling of the law, inside a relationship governed by fear and obligation and the constant anxious need to keep the contract intact.

A gift can only ever produce so much when the hand holding it is clenched. Once Job finally meets God as God, rather than as a transaction to be satisfied, something in him loosens.

The fear that had capped his life is gone. The gift is released from the ceiling it had always lived beneath, and a gift set free from fear simply thrives and multiplies more than once as we see in the Parable of the Talents.

The doubling is not the wage of a test passed. It is the natural overflow of a man who has stopped striving and started living connected. The same gift, finally unbound and healthy, did what it was always able to do because,

Under the law your blessing has a ceiling. Under grace the sky is the limit.

Now here is what I have come to believe, thus far, the book is actually about.

God was never after Job's perfect performance. He was after Job's heart. He wanted the man and not the man's compliance.

The whole ordeal was not a courtroom where Job was on trial and obedience was the verdict. It was a rescue. God loved him enough to take from him the thing that was keeping him from real intimacy, which was his belief that he could secure God's favour through effort and vigilance and never putting a foot wrong.

What God wanted, what I believe He still wants, is an unconditional love affair where the only requirements are that we stay real and connected. 

He handles the rest.

The friends were wrong about the cause of the suffering. Job was wrong about the nature of God. The only one who was right was the One who refused to argue the contract and instead invited a frightened, faithful, and exhausted man to finally lift his eyes and see the truth.

We were not designed to manage God.

We were designed to know Him.

PS See you next Sunday!