2.4 Job as Man on Trial

• The Skinner Box

  Satan's contention, as he so emphatically tells God, is that Men are calculating sorts who are forever optimizing their chances for success, their probability of survival, the propagation of their genes. If, as B. F. Skinner once did with pigeons, we put Men in a box and feed them at random intervals, they will develop all sorts of superstitious behavior on the belief that their actions cause the gods of chance to bring them food. Even worse, if we reward certain behaviors by feeding them, their actions become very predictable, they become conditioned. If there exist any "religious sentiment" in Man, Satan argues, it is the recognition of the "laws of nature", that whatsoever a man sows, that shall he also reap. Men understand retribution, they understand divine justice, they understand that one must be polite and respectful with persons of power. But are they capable of devotion? Can they love this distant god that they worship? "Ridiculous", snorts Satan, "its all a matter of mind control and manipulation! Take away the payoff, and the behavior will be rapidly extinguished." So Job was placed in the glass box, the observers gathered around, and all external stimulation was terminated. The experiment had begun.
  
  Whatever else we might say about Job, we must say that he didn't crack. When a computer no longer responds to external inputs, we say it is "hung" or "frozen", or in electronics we say that "latchup" has occurred, with a cure known to all PC owners, rebooting. Job's faith appears to have become independent of external inputs, it had been "internalized". Satan was not about to let God win this argument over what was obviously a sick puppy. This man had clearly lived so long in God's unreal operating environment that he was retreating into imagination, into dreamland, protecting himself from harsh reality by this cocoon of "integrity". "Skin for skin!", Satan says, "just let me reboot this fellow. Let me cut through this cocoon and give him some external stimulation that he can't ignore. I'll jolt his circuits, and you'll see that a man will sacrifice anything for his life." So Job was afflicted with painful boils, preventing him even from sleeping.
  
  The trial of Job then, was the ultimate experiment in Skinnerian psychology. The outcome will take 30 more chapters to describe. For the outcome of this experiment is intimately tied to faith, to hope, to love, to religion; the outcome tells us about Man, his weaknesses, his foibles, his fears; the outcome tells us also about God, both in His image revealed faintly in Man, and the response of his creatures toward Him. For the philosophy espoused by Satan is more than an academic experiment, more than a mental Turing machine, it is a direct assault on the nature of truth and the character of God with immense moral and legal implications.
  
  

  • The Image of God

    Why do I say that the test of Job's response to external stimuli is a moral issue? Surely modern psychology does the same sort of thing all the time, determining if consumers prefer orange crispy crackers to green soggy ones, for example. Why should Job's response have anything to do with morality? Satan would argue that it doesn't because Job's response is determined, it is trained. Therefore morality itself doesn't really exist because there's no real choice. God would say that Job is a man made in the image of God, and therefore has the ability to create new possibilities, to chose freely without compulsion. If Job merely reacts, then Satan is showing that either Man has lost God's image, or never had it. If Man never had it, then God has failed in his creation, and if Man has lost it, then God's creation has been ruined. Job's choice then will determine whether he is man or machine.
  
  
  

  • The Whirlpool of Stoicism

    Well if everybody is waiting for a response, maybe Job should just refuse to play along. Surely he is smart enough to realize that he is a pawn in some divine chess game, and that the lack of information must be part of the strategy. Perhaps he should take it all stoically, saying in effect, "God has his reasons, which become clearer in time. I'll just wait for His next move." There have been many people throughout history who have suggested that it is far greater piety to bear one's sufferings silently than to express emotion. Some have even suggested that Job's sin, for which he repents in the last chapter, was one of complaining, of whining about his God-given circumstances. Should Job have remained silent, eliminating the need for chapters 3-40?
    
    Job did remain silent, he did wait for God. For all of seven days and seven nights he waited. Under the circumstances, I would consider that a heroic achievement. But to remain silent forever confuses severe depression with uncommon restraint. It is no more pious to say nothing to God than it is virtuous to stop speaking to a neighbor who has been insulting. Unlike the ascetic, God does not separate mind from emotions, the will from the heart; rather He commands through Moses that we should "love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." God made the body, He made the feelings, He invented the emotions, they were all declared good. When a very young child encounters impossible evil and pain, he may develop "multiple personalities" in an attempt to bottle up the suffering. Like that child, a Stoic attempts to bottle up the pain by severing all ties to the emotions, and with similar results. Such an approach may be the foundation of other religions, but not of biblical wisdom.
    
    

  • The Rock of Rage

    Well, if silence is unhealthy, should Job then proceed through the "five stages of grief" as espoused by modern counselors? As I recollect them, they are Denial, Anger, Fear, Depression, and Acceptance. If we identify stoicism with denial, is Job any better off by expressing anger, anger against God for denying him justice and causing him grief? Is it healthy to "let off steam" and tell God how it feels? Or does a proper "creator-creature" distinction preclude such insubordinate expressions of rage?
    
    Not all expressions of anger are beneficial. We are warned by St. Paul, "be angry but do not sin". Or, as our marriage counselor taught us, it is the difference between saying "you make me angry when you do X" and "when you do X, I get angry". Our anger is ours and ours alone, we are neither victims nor executioners of our emotions. If Job feels angry, as he reports so eloquently, it is neither sin nor weakness. How he handles it, however, is of great moral consequence. For if emotions are not sin, neither are they license. We cannot excuse our actions on the basis of overwhelming emotion. And we could make the same argument for Fear and Depression; that as feelings they are value-neutral, but one's handling of them is not.
    
    
  Job then finds himself in a storm of emotions through which he must steer a straight and narrow course following the faint light of the image of God, the hope of the eternal. For Job, whether he wants to or not, must respond to his feelings, must choose his words carefully. The trial is about his choice. His fate hangs on his decision.
  
  

• The Wife

Job's wife gets no respect. But look at it from her perspective: those were her children too, that was her household, her servants, her husband and yes, her future grandchildren who had been accursed. A man may have his career, his reputation, his integrity, but what does a woman of her time have beyond her home, her children and her husband? For Job, pain is its own analgesic, it distracts one from the indignities of disease. But no such balm was hers, rather she had to stare day and night at this blackened body, those oozing sores, this withered husk that had been her husband. Make no mistake, observing the suffering of a loved one can be harder than enduring it oneself. Out of this pain, out of this intolerable situation can one fault her for wishing that it were over? "Curse God, and die!" she pleads with Job, "just make the suffering stop. There's nothing worse that can happen to you. Please, just end it."

There are three ways that I can understand her plea. It can mean, "curse God, and He will kill you", or "curse God and commit suicide", or "commit suicide, which is a curse to God". The first two elaborations don't make much sense to me. Here is the wife of a righteous man, who has lived 20 or 30 years with her husband, the wife who raised his ten children, who shared his sorrows and his joys. How then could she so vindictively urge him to curse God, especially when she knows how he will answer? No, I think this conversation, like Satan's conversation, reveals an ongoing dialogue. She appears to be urging him to end his sufferings, to commit suicide, perhaps she is even suggesting a mutual suicide pact. His response to her must have been that this was not allowed, that suicide would be the equivalent of cursing God, since like homicide, it erases the image of God. This would have kept her quiet for a short time but the suffering continued and when she could contain it no longer she finally burst out, "Curse God then, but die!"

This was Job's first test. A quick, painless ending to intolerable suffering. A solution to the embarrassment of disease. A balm for his beloved wife's anguish. But a curse thrown in God's face.

It is curious that Satan told God "a man will do anything to save his life", yet his first test of Job was a temptation to take his life. How like Satan it is to lie, to destroy, to distort, to make the grave a friend. Job is confronted with Death speaking through the lips of his wife. How should he respond?

And we see again the exquisite control that Job has over his feelings. After Job has overcome the temptation and seen through the disguise, he could well have redirected his anger at God toward his wife. We would expect him to explode and tell his wife she was Satan herself. But he doesn't. Instead he reproves her gently, leading her to the quiet waters of acceptance. "You speak like a pagan woman," he tells her, "not as one who has known God. Should we receive good from God and not suffering? It is still God's good hand that leads us." And though we should not draw great conclusions from silence, it appears that Job's words have ended the debate, have somehow comforted his wife. And my heart aches for this man who could comfort his wife from the pain of his own suffering.



• The District Attorneys

If the first test of Job was a battle for his emotions, the second test was a war for his mind. Like the "brainwashing" tactics employed in the Korean War, Job's friends counsel him to admit to something he didn't do. But why, what difference would it make? Would such hollow admissions remove an iota of the pain he felt? Perhaps analyzing their response from the perspective of the Korean conflict will be helpful.

At first I thought that such extorted "confessions" were a trifle eccentric, since the televised "criminal trials" had little if any impact on the outcome of the war. But on reflection, it seemed apparent that brainwashing was not done for the sake of the Americans, but for the sake of the North Koreans. Eyewitness accounts of the prisoner exchanges at the end of the war contrasted the malnourished, bony, and ragged yet unbroken spirits of the American POWs jubilantly singing with the well-fed, well-dressed defiant faces of the returning North Korean POWs. The contrast was striking, revealing that the conflict may have ended in stalemate, but the spiritual superiority of Christianity over Communism was inescapable. Against this evidence, the Communist government expended great resources to discredit the West in the eyes of their countrymen. The future of a Korean Communist state was at stake, and so the warfare for the hearts of the people extended into the psychological and spiritual realm, inventing the bizarre weapon of invisible torture, "brainwashing".

Going back to my traffic court experience, the district attorney applied psychological pressure to obtain a guilty plea, not for my benefit, but in order to reduce the workload of the district court, regardless of the veracity of the police report. In a similar way, the three friends were not interested in the truthfulness of Job's report, or in comforting their hurting friend, rather they wanted to protect the status quo, to uphold their fragile cosmopolitan compromise religion in the face of overwhelming opposing evidence. They needed a guilty plea from Job to maintain their positions of power and privilege. So from a legal perspective, most of what is said in the next 30 chapters was an attempt to extort a guilty plea from an innocent man. Those 30 chapters will provide much ammunition for this point of view, which we defer to the verse-by-verse commentary, but it suffices to say that if Job capitulated, not only would he be discrediting God before Satan, since it was God who said Job was blameless, but he would also be defaming the Truth, and demonstrating the fickleness, the inherent weakness of God's flawed image in His creation, Man. In short, Satan would win.



• The Friend of the Court

When the Supreme Court convenes to hear a case, often unsolicited amicus cure, "friend of the court", briefs are filed by interested parties. They often present a philosophy or a viewpoint of a group or organization that would like to influence the decision of the justices. Sometimes it is irrelevant to the particulars of the case, but addresses the generalizations or precedents that this case might set. For example, if the Supreme Court should care to rule on the accessibility of pornography on the Internet, an amicus brief might present the view that this case should be decided by the physical location of the defendants rather than the principles of the First Amendment. Of course the court has no need to respond to or even acknowledge such unsolicited advice.

In the same way as an amicus brief, the appearance of Elihu in chapter 32 is sudden, and his disappearance in chapter 37 is equally so. It is as if he were invisible or ignored by all the participants in this trial, despite his familiarity and self-declared presence throughout the opening arguments. Therefore some scholars view Elihu's speech as a later insertion, however, in a legal context this appears to be an amicus brief. Certainly Elihu presents himself as a friend and defender of God. If we view Elihu from this perspective, perhaps we can find in his arguments a different objective or perspective than that of the three friends.



• The critique of the three

  Elihu is introduced by some prose that says his speech is a result of anger; he is angry with Job for belittling God but twice as angry at the three for not refuting Job. His introductory comments demonstrate this emphasis because they are directed not at Job, but at the three friends. Like our imaginary Supreme Court case above, Elihu is concerned that the three friends have missed a crucial point in Job's attack, they have implicitly allowed Job to claim a dangerous precedent. By not countering Job's bold assertions of God's responsibility, Elihu feels that the three friends have strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel; the gnat being Job's personal guilt and the camel being God's divine (in)justice.
  
  This critique of the three is significant for several reasons: first, it lumps the three together, as Job did, giving us some confidence in stating that the three friends have a unified front; second, it gives us an alternative critique of the three friends producing in effect a "trialogue" with four points of view expressed; and third, it opens up a whole range of interpersonal dynamics, with young, old, and older points of view. One might even make the case that we are observing a "socialization" or "maturation" of religious sentiment in these three groups. Regardless of the psychology, Elihu's criticism of the friends is three-fold: though elder, they lack wisdom; their arguments with Job deteriorated into personal attacks; and finally, they chose silence rather than refutation. Thus, Elihu argues, he must carry on the debate even though he is young, but not by making personal attacks, rather by refuting Job's faulty theology.




• The attack on Job

  If we can accuse the three friends of attempting to "brainwash" Job, getting him to admit to something he didn't do, then we might characterize Elihu as attempting to "deprogram" Job. The phrase "deprogram" arises out of efforts of parents to "regain" their college age children from cults such as the "Moonies". The modus operandi was to "kidnap" the child from school, separate the child from the influence of these groups, and if possible, break the faith of the child in the authority figures represented by the leaders of the cult. I realize I am being extreme in calling Elihu's efforts "deprogramming", but the goal is the same, halting Job's heresy by destroying Job's faith in an immanent God, a God who is there.
  
  Now to destroy faith is arguably as difficult a task as to build faith. In the case of the parents above, the effort is focussed on undermining the authority figures, on attacking the internalized (memorized) presuppositional "truths" of the cult, on shattering the emotional security that a cult leader provides. In the same way, Elihu attacks all expressions of God's immanence, all experiences of God's kindness are dissected mercilessly. As in the case of the child, no attempt is made to redress the deficits that made the cult attractive in the first place: the lack of appropriate authority, the emotional distance, the omission of moral absolutes. In the same way Elihu never addresses the ultimate responsibility of God, the issue of Job's pain, the problem of evil. Instead he focusses almost entirely on the image of a transcendent, incomprehensible, and unknowable God.




• The defense of God

  Elihu calls his speech a defense of God's good name. But it could also be viewed as propaganda for Elihu's private view of God. Look carefully how Elihu defends God against Job's complaint that God isn't telling him anything. In chapter 33, Elihu argues that one can learn what God is saying by 3 methods: dreams, physical discomfort, and messengers (angels). Note what is missing from his list: direct communication. God spoke directly to Adam, to Cain, and to many others including Abraham. We have no reason to believe that Elihu was ignorant of these stories. So if Elihu downplays Job's complaint that God no longer reveals himself directly, Elihu is perhaps merely showing that he has never had that kind of a relationship with God. Yet if for the sake of argument we agree with Elihu, does this then answer Job's pain? The simple answer is that it doesn't, nor does Elihu think he has to find an answer, only that he prove Job incorrect.
  
  Furthermore when Job calls out of his unbearable pain that "it profits a man nothing that he should delight in God.", Elihu argues that this sentence is obviously false because this statement has also been made by wicked men to defend the uselessness of morality. Which is to say, context counts for nothing, Job's pain is unimportant, experience is not to be trusted, for truth is a ephemeral abstraction uncontaminated by sensory perception. I may be reading more into this than I should, but Elihu's very last words are: "He does not regard any who are wise of heart." (NASB) Since the heart for a Mesopotamian was the seat of emotions, it suggests that Elihu mistrusts anyone who might value emotions, or even worse, relate to God in an emotional way. Elihu would say it is better to sacrifice one's unfounded expectations on the altar of theology than to end one's life hoping for a merciful word from a distant Deity. If then Elihu finishes his speech with lofty words of God's transcendence, which almost inspire me to echo the "Amen", they are still words that say, "The Almighty--we cannot find him." For these words that Elihu speaks with praise are the same ones that Job cries out in agony.

We aren't sure if Elihu expected an answer from Job, which raises the question, for whom is Elihu defending God? Surely not the court of heaven, for to defend God to God appears pointless. But if he intends to defend God to the court of men, where then is the judge, and where the jury? Clearly he views both Job and his friends as defendants and witnesses in this trial, and not as the jury. Perhaps there was an audience, though Job seems to say that only scoffers bother stopping by. As we look around for a jury it begins to dawn on us that we, the readers, are the judge and the jury. And then, looking harder, we perceive the beady eyes of Satan watching us, mocking us, accusing us, and we realize that our choice, our decision is as weighty as Job's. Who is God? Where is He? Why doesn't He answer them? Why doesn't He answer us?



• The Hanging Judge

Returning to my appearance in traffic court, I went in trembling to see this hanging judge, not really believing that any judge could be as unreasonable as the district attorney seemed to imply. I was mistaken. I met an obese balding man who appeared to be reclining in some sort of hospital bed, which gave the appearance of legs too small for his body. The folds of his massive neck gave his head a distinct bullet shape. An extinguished cigarette dangled from his lips. As the DA ushered me in to a room full of stale smoke and closed the door behind me, his small black eyes latched on to me. I remember a low bass rumble, asking me how I would plead. My only thought under that piercing gaze was, "Oh no, it's Jabba the Hut!"

In hindsight, I'm sure that the appearance was well planned, but at the time I remember losing all courage to argue, all hope for reasonableness. I had wanted to be frank, to challenge the obvious mercenary intent of the speed trap and the self-serving error of the ticket. I expected to have the judge on the defensive, and would then demand for my accuser to step forth, knowing full well that the patrolman would not be loitering around the courtroom that day. It was a grand dream, well rehearsed, and futile. Under that gaze I wasn't even sure that I was innocent of manslaughter. I clung to the only truth I was certain of and blurted out "I plead guilty to 68 miles per hour, your honor."

In the same way that this judge used his appearance to his advantage, so God's appearance, in chapters 38-41 is crucial to understanding His message, for in some ways, His appearance is the message. And just as this judge recognized that the adolescents who filled his court would respond to a familiar image, so we must also identify the recipients of God's message and gauge their response. Only after these two steps, I believe, can we make sense of what God said in these chapters.



• The object

  Traditionally, Job is taken to be the object of God's lecture, partly because the introductory sentence says that "the LORD answered Job out of the storm", and partly because God uses the second person singular. Note however, that God does not use Job's name, leaving the object of his rebuke somewhat ambiguous. Occasionally a commentator will argue that God is talking to Elihu, since Elihu was the last person to speak. There are other indications that perhaps Job was not the sole object of God's questioning, though it would be difficult to argue that Job wasn't at least included in the list.
  
  The first difficulty lies in the introductory sentences of 38:1 and 40:1 which state clearly that the LORD was speaking to Job. How can we take this speech to address anyone else? This form of speech, however, has other precedents in the Bible. At Mt. Sinai, the people told Moses that they could not listen to God, it would kill them, and would Moses please take the message for them. So from that point on, God's messages to Israel came through Moses. Likewise, when Samuel was a small boy, God gave him a message for the high priest, Eli, which Samuel was to deliver. So we see that it was typical for God to speak through an intermediary, a prophet, though perhaps it was not typical for the final recipient to be present with the prophet. This identification of Job with the office of prophet is confirmed in the last chapter where God commands Job to pray for his friends. Thus God's speech to Job could be construed as a prophecy to be passed to his friends.
  
  Even if we take these chapters as prophecy, the next sticking point is that God uses the second person singular. Why would God not use the third person or the plural if He had more than one in mind? Perhaps because, unlike prophecy, a trial requires the presence of the defendants, and each of the friends was present for God's rebuke. And since each person in the debate had used the singular first person in their arguments, that is, no one claimed to be representing a group, God replies to each one individually. One might even say that it is a question of responsibility, that no one can hide behind the screen of committee decisions, of mob rule, rather God deals with each one of us directly.
  
  Yet a third difficulty arises with this interpretation, and that is Job's response in chapter 40 and 42, where he seems to take God's rebuke personally. Yet focus on his longer response in 42, where he says "My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you." Job apparently does not credit the words in God's rebuke, but the appearance of God himself. Thus I interpret this as evidence that the words were directed toward the others, but the vision was the message for Job. This may not be unambiguous evidence for deflecting God's rebuke from Job, but it should give us reason for broadening the scope of His message.




• The sarcasm

  The most shocking aspect of God's speech in the book of Job is the raw sarcasm. There are no two ways about it, God is asking questions either for which there is no answer, or for which Job could not know the answer. If someone is asking impossible questions, we would rightly assume that they do not really have a question, they are making a statement. God's statement appears to be that human beings don't know diddly about the universe, much less the world that they inhabit. But was this such great news, didn't everyone agree to this in the last 36 chapters? Why must God hammer on it for so long? When someone overdoes a humorous put-down it ceases to be funny and approaches the limit of bad taste. My reaction to these chapters is to feel embarrassed for Job. What keeps God going for 4 chapters?
  
  A similar event occurs in the Gospel of John, when Jesus asks Peter repeatedly, "Do you love me?" until Peter was mortified. The reason was clear, Peter had earlier three times denied that he even knew Christ. Christ was then simultaneously reminding Peter of his disloyalty, allowing him to repent of his sin and cleanse his guilty conscience, and drilling into him the necessity of future faithfulness. The repetition made this point better than any twenty minute sermon on the subject. Likewise I believe the four chapter drubbing was intended to provoke embarrassment, but in the 4 friends, not Job. It was the 4 friends who had given Job such treatment themselves. It was the 4 friends who felt that they could speak for God. It was the 4 friends who had judged Job and found him wanting. It had been their implicit argument that God can be controlled very nicely by admissions of false guilt, or kept an arm's length away from the heart. All of these conclusions were shattered by the presence and immanence of a terrifying God. God's appearance was the message because it so powerfully smashed their endless arguments. And only Job could speak a reply to God's questioning because only Job believed that God could be spoken to. It is, to a large extent, our approach to God that makes God approachable.




• Self-judgement

  When I stood before His Honor, Jabba the Hut, the only thought in my mind was that he wanted to embarrass me, he wanted to condemn me, he wanted to squeeze the last dollar out of my pocket. Appeals to mercy were futile. And it was because I viewed him that way that I abandoned all attempts to protest my innocence, my only defense was the truth. After blurting out my one sentence plea, unable to make any further elaboration on my well-rehearsed speech, I stood in what I hoped was brave silence awaiting his reply.
  
  His mouth twitched slightly, as if he were amused, and he nodded his head at the secretary who took down my plea. I was escorted out of the room wondering whether I had won or lost. The secretary told me to fill out some forms and write a check out for the amount of $35, the appropriate fine for "travelling 1-14 miles per hour in excess of the speed limit". I was elated. I had stood up to the corruption of the traffic court and had been victorious! There would be no "black points" on my driving record. I had faced the hanging judge and won. That is, until I discovered at the cashier window that I had to pay an additional $100 for court costs. By the time I had added in the gas and tolls for the trip, it came to almost identically the original fine. Suddenly I felt deflated, cheated. "At least our insurance rates won't increase", I told my wife as we got in the car. "I hope you learned your lesson" was her curt reply.
  
  Years later as I look back on this incident, I think that I could have stood up to that judge, I could have escaped without even a fine. It all hinged on how I went in to that crucial interview. It was, in effect, my own view of the judge that had judged me. This is how I understand God's message coming out of the whirlwind. Our response to God's ambiguous questioning becomes the judgment that we expected God to deliver. Self-judgment is a theme that resurfaces in many places in the Bible, perhaps the clearest is the story that Jesus told--the parable of the talents. In this parable, a rich man goes on a long journey and calls three trusted servants into a private conference. "Here are three sums of money" he tells them, "one of you will get 10 talents (say $1 Million), one will get 5 and one will get 1. Use it wisely until I return." Then the man leaves for a year. On his return he calls in the three servants to see what they have done with their capital investment. The fellow with 10 talents had doubled his investment, as had the fellow with 5. The master was pleased. But the servant with 1 talent reported, "I know you are a harsh master, so I was afraid, and I hid the 1 talent in the ground. Here it is, just exactly as you gave it to me." To which the master replied, "Yes I am a harsh master. You were a fool not to put it in the bank and collect interest. Take the talent from him and give it to the man with 10, but take this servant and throw him out into the darkness."
  
  I have struggled with that conclusion since I heard it. Slowly it has dawned on me that the man with one talent condemned himself, not so much for collecting no interest, but for viewing the master as harsh and cruel. If he had seen his master as kind and compassionate, he would have taken risks, he would have known that he would not be accused for doing his best. As it is he lost not a cent, but his job and perhaps his life. Why? Because he damned himself, accusing his master of libelous motives. As Job and the four friends stood before that whirlwind in the desert, hearing the questions that have no answers, it was their own words that brought them into judgment. For Eliphaz had said "what is man that he could be pure, one born of woman, that he could be righteous?" and now he stood in God's presence bearing that judgment. Bildad too had said "if the stars are not pure in his eyes how much less man who is but a maggot", and now Bildad finds himself square in His gaze. Their own words condemn them, when the Almighty appeared. Elihu too had said, "we cannot draw up our case because of our darkness. Should He be told that I want to speak? Would any man ask to be swallowed up?" And now speechless, Elihu is swallowed up in terror. Only Job could answer God in his awful appearing, because only Job had not damned himself.

And so it is that we find a second reason for the strange use of the second person singular in God's reply. For we find ourselves engaging in a mental dialogue defending God to Job, and Job to God. We want Job to know that he is above reproach, as God himself says in the first chapter, and we desire to reinterpret God's harsh words as words of comfort, as words of praise. Then in the midst of this self-imposed arbitration, we suddenly realize that Job has fallen silent, and that God has fixed his gaze on us. As we splutter into silence, we begin to understand that Job's response is not the cowering squeal of a whipped puppy, but the brave response of a man who has received his request, and we realize that God's questions are now directed to us. How can we answer Him?

Copyright © 1997 Rob Sheldon