“Have you considered
My servant Job,
that there is none
like him on the earth,
a blameless and
upright man,
one who fears God and
shuns evil?”
Job 1:8
Very few people in Scripture received such praise from God
as Job did, yet perhaps fewer still went through quite so much misery as this
same man. Job’s three well-meaning
friends came to tell Job the answer to his dilemma and solve all of his
problems for him – or so they thought.
In their view, the formula was simple: God blessed the righteous with
prosperity and punished the wicked with hardship; Job was in hardship;
therefore, Job was being punished for wickedness and needed to repent so God
would bless him. Meanwhile, Job insisted
upon his innocence and complained that God was heedlessly using him for target
practice. After a while of this
bantering, God spoke for Himself. He
gave no answer to the assumptions about Him, no explanation or defense of Job’s
plight – He simply rhetorically compared Job to Himself until finally, Job could
only respond in awed humility, “I have heard about You by the hearing of the
ear, but now my eye sees You” (42:5).
Job and his friends alike put God into a small,
comprehensible box in which He was supposed to behave according to their
understanding and expectations of Him.
It didn’t seem to enter their minds that there might be another answer
they couldn’t see. I think we too often
are guilty of putting God into a nice, manageable box, making assumptions about
His actions and motives based on our own limited knowledge of Him. We like to draw lines, make either/or rules,
analyze God like a list of data and assure ourselves that we’ve got Him all
figured out. Like Job’s friends, we want
to know how to work His system, what formula we need to apply in order to get
God to work to our best advantage. But
God will not be contained, manipulated, or explained. He may do something entirely outside the
plans we’ve made for Him, obliterating our notions of His identity and thought
process, in order to reveal to us that, after all, we know only the very
faintest whisper of all He is.
“For My thoughts are
not your thoughts,
nor are your ways My
ways,” says the Lord.
“For as the heavens
are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher
than your ways,
and My thoughts than
your thoughts.”
Isaiah 55:8-9