The last post about Job was all about marking the text. We mark the text so that we can better comprehend what is being said. And our comprehension is connected to our perspective. You will not comprehend correctly with the wrong perspective.
Studying Job: Perspective & Comprehension
Perspective cannot be emphasized too much. One of my favorite quotes from CS Lewis says, “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”
Two people, standing in two different places- with two different hearts- will read the same text and come out thinking two very different ideas about its meaning. This is why we get to know the author of the text, what he was writing to the original hearers and why he was writing it. Our perspective shifts when we understand the author’s intent.
Twisting God’s word to mean something based on our own circumstances is not how we read scripture. We change our attitudes, our choices, and our hearts because we read God’s word for what it actually means. It’s all about his word changing us; not us twisting his word to fit our needs.
Job & His Wife
I’ve been spending time in the first two chapters of Job for awhile now. Letting the words sink into me. Ruminating. I mark the text-the little ideas that catch my attention, and I find myself wondering about God. Why does he ask Satan to consider his servant Job? Is he dangling a carrot in front of a cat? God already knows where Satan has been; so why does he ask him?
Then I sit and gaze at Job. Really look at him. There with his perfect life-then everything gone. I watch him in his grief. His response to God’s silence is acceptance. “God gives and takes away. I’ll salute him no matter what he gives me. ” And later on, his wife tells him to “Curse God and die!” Everyone gives Job’s wife a hard time…I can hear the preacher now, “There’s a reason Satan didn’t kill off the wife.”
But she had 10 children-and they all died.
Forget the wealth she’d lost; imagine the pain as she watched her husband suffer. His groans. His tears. He wished he were dead. And of all the people on the planet, she had a front row seat to this unimaginable torment. I know, I know she isn’t the role model we want to look up to, but we can acknowledge her weakness while still recognizing her suffering.
Two people standing in two different places.
Job and his wife-two different hearts. Two perspectives. They go through similar suffering. But each has a different response.
One says, “Curse God and die.”
She didn’t see God through the pain.
The other says, “Why do we only expect good from God, and not evil?”
He believed God in his pain.
And then I ask myself, which one am I?
Am I like Job-the one who believed God was good when he was surrounded by evil? Or am I like Job’s wife-the one who crumbled under the pressure of darkness?
And what makes one strong and the other weak? Suffering reveals who we are-it revealed Job’s tenacity and his wife’s weakness. What does my suffering reveal about me?
I don’t understand God.
But if I did fully understand him, then would he really be God? Reading Job, getting to know him and his wife, jolts me to the reality of how small I am. There is a world my eyes can’t see. And although, some-myself included- can look at Job and wonder if God is some puppeteer doing with humans whatever he pleases, the truth is clear.
Job’s love for God was more beautiful that the bitterness in Job’s wife.
I want to love God like Job did.
To be tenaciously strong. To know the darkness, to look at it, to feel its presence engulf me, to doubt-but still choose to believe that God is good. And when everything around me screams he’s not real, it’s then I shout out to the darkness,
“You’re wrong! God is holy! He’s beautiful and he loves me! He loves me!”
You see it, don’t you?
What God really wants is for us to follow him-not because he is good to us (although, he is)-but simply because he is God.
