Okay so remember how in chapter 23 we talked about Hebrew poetical structure? Job has been climbing a proverbial mountain, so to speak, of contemplation, in which he realizes he is not big, strong, or smart enough to convince God to do what he wants and consequently wishes he had a mediator to argue his case to God. This realization of his need for a mediator grows into the major spiritual revelation of the book in chapter 19. He came to the pinnacle of that mountain where he had the revelation that he would one day have a mediator, a Redeemer, and he would see his Savior stand on the earth. Big moment. Huge. Truly cinematic. So quotable. I mean really, like, the only thing people ever quote from Job.

So now we’re on our way back down the poetical mountain, and he’s trying to figure out how this big spiritual revelation transforms his theology. In chapter 21, he expresses his unwillingness to found his beliefs on ear-tickling lies any longer:

“How can your empty clichés comfort me?
    All your explanations are lies!” (Job 21:34)

We see him start to face the truth and wrestle with cold, hard facts he flat out does not want to be true, but can no longer deny:

One person dies in prosperity,
    completely comfortable and secure,
the picture of good health,
    vigorous and fit.
Another person dies in bitter poverty,
    never having tasted the good life.
But both are buried in the same dust,
    both eaten by the same maggots.

Look, I know what you’re thinking.
    I know the schemes you plot against me.
You will tell me of rich and wicked people
    whose houses have vanished because of their sins.
But ask those who have been around,
    and they will tell you the truth.
Evil people are spared in times of calamity
    and are allowed to escape disaster.
No one criticizes them openly
    or pays them back for what they have done.
When they are carried to the grave,
    an honor guard keeps watch at their tomb.
A great funeral procession goes to the cemetery.
    Many pay their respects as the body is laid to rest,
    and the earth gives sweet repose. (Job 21:23-33)

This is not necessarily a judgment. It is not a condemnation of the way things are, but rather a flat, scientific, just-the-facts description of things he has seen happen. He is not willing to sweep these things under the rug or pretend they were something they were not, like his friends seem intent on doing. He says no, I will build my beliefs on the truth, not on what I think should be true! He is comparing what he has been taught all his life to what he has seen with his own eyes, and he sees that those two things are different. He wants a reconciliation of his beliefs with the facts. Job is finding that his beliefs no longer fit around his experience; either they must stretch and grow, or they will tear. Who has faith and does not at some point find themselves in this place?

So he goes about asking questions, digging for the places where his beliefs need some altering. While in our language it sounds an awful lot like he’s criticizing or accusing God in chapter 24, I don’t think that’s really what he’s saying here. He really is flat out confounded by God’s choices, and he really does want to understand them. There is a strong dissonance between what Job used to believe and what has unfolded right in front of him. He is desperate to reconcile the two.

In this chapter, he’s really trying to work out why good God doesn’t do something about these horrible people! Most of the chapter is dedicated to a brilliant but long-winded poetical description of the truly brutal, cruel, greedy things he has seen people do for money. He is thunderstruck at how profoundly some people value wealth over the very lives of other humans.

If we were to take chapter 24 as its own poem, the “pinnacle,” so to speak, of revelation that Job reaches might be this:

The groans of the dying rise from the city,
    and the wounded cry for help,
    yet God ignores their moaning. (Job 24:12)

Somehow, he has to reconcile his beliefs about God to this fact: usually, oppressed people die. The pages of history are filled with them. Millions on millions, billions even. People who did nothing to deserve the cruelty of genocide, of human trafficking, of mass weapons, of regimes led by bloodthirsty, power-hungry men and yet still die by the tens and hundreds of thousands in every era of history. And God does not stop it. Sometimes he intervenes here or there, and eventually he brings these things to an end but on a large scale, he allows them to continue. On a small scale they continue constantly, too. If our theology cannot admit that, then our theology is nothing more than empty cliches and lies.

That sounds like a cold-hearted and brutal faith, doesn’t it? Doesn’t some part of you want to crawl back to the Sunday school Jesus on the felt board petting the soft, fluffy sheep and pretend bad, scary things don’t happen if we just stay with him? How can they both be true, the Good Shepherd and the wolf attacks?

This is why Job is so frustrated. This is why so many Christians are so frustrated. There is dissonance here that is hard to reconcile. The great thing about the Bible is that it does not ignore it and just pretend it does not exist, like many do, like Job’s friends did. The great thing about the Bible is that it dives head first into the hardest question, and God himself takes the time to answer it. The great thing about the Bible is the book of Job.

So Job is frustrated, but is he accusing God of doing it wrong or just asking a hard question because he really wants the answer? The word “ignore” in verse 12 has some pretty negative connotations in English, and so it can sound again like Job is accusing or criticizing. There is so much about what he says that comes across condemningly, but I think we have to remember we are interpreting this through our own cultural-linguistical perspective. In Job 1:22 it says, “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.” We have to step back, then, set aside our own perceptions of the words, and take them at their face value meaning only to see if this could possibly mean something else. Ignore, at its face value, simply means to not respond to something. We view that as a malevolent or passive aggressive action, but sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is a choice made not aggressively, but pragmatically. Sometimes it is a survival mechanism, like the ability to ignore background stimuli to focus on priorities. Job is sitting here puzzling about why God would choose not to respond to something that he feels deserves immediate attention. This is not necessarily a criticism. It could be an honest question.

But does that mean Job was right to ask it? That’s a harder question, and one we will have to let God answer himself.

Oh, dear. We’re to the end of a reasonable blog post length already for part two, and still not finished with this chapter. I guess we’ll have to pick this up in a bit.

to be continued…