I cry to you, O God, but you don’t answer.
    I stand before you, but you don’t even look.
You have become cruel toward me.
    You use your power to persecute me. (Job 30:20-21)

I have been breaking up Job by chapter, but that is not really the structure of this book of poetry. The chapter designations are somewhat arbitrary and meant to break some of the more unwieldy poems into manageable bites like we would a good, hefty steak, but really this book is originally structured by who is speaking at the time. That means chapter 26-31, Job’s Final Speech, are all one long poem. The sections we have broken it into are meant to make it easier to swallow, but like a good T-bone, it loses some of its distinctive shape when we slice it this way.

I said last chapter that if Job 29 were its own mountaintop experience, the verse that would be the peak would have been verse 18. But chapter 29 is not an isolated poem. It is part of a greater poem that builds to a pinnacle in chapter 30. That means in order to really understand the peak of chapter 30, we have to read it within the context of the building momentum of chapters 26-29:

26: Job has established his respect for God’s power and right to rule

27: Job expresses his agreement with the meting out of justice

28: Job explains his motivation for being good, his pure, genuine reverence for true wisdom.

He has refuted his friends’ arguments against his character. Now that he has corrected the fallacies in their arguments, now that he has established this base of his true convictions, he can build on top of it the fully accurate truth of his situation.

29: Now, he moves from correction, from rant, into lament. He confesses that he misses the evidence of God’s favor in his life, and he laments that even after he tried so hard, God has abandoned him.

Chapters 26-29 were all the supporting arguments for Job’s thesis, his one main point that he has spent the whole book defending. His friends have tried to refute him, and they have all failed. His argument is well-founded on the evidence they can see and though they do not like it, they cannot find a way it is false. This final speech of Job’s is his closing argument in his court case: summary of the evidence and claims (26-29), conclusion (30), and call to action (31).

So now we get back to… <drumroll please>

30: Job asserts his own (he thinks) watertight conclusion and levels his accusation – at God.

You use your power to persecute me. (Job 30:21)

Talk about slinging a mudball. In human relationships, we have a word for a person who uses their power to hurt others for no good reason. We call that person a bully.

Imagine calling God a bully to his face.

Imagine God putting that one time Job called him a bully in front of his friends in the Bible.

Why would he do that?

Maybe because he is not afraid of our accusations. There are two things that make accusations frightful things: 1) the fear of what people will do if they believe them and 2) the fear they might be true. God is not afraid of what people can do to him. And God is not afraid that Job’s accusation is true. So go ahead, God invites. Be honest with me. Tell me what you really think. The most righteous man alive did. Maybe – just maybe – God wanted us to see how he responded to Job so we can have the courage to be honest with him, too.

Here’s the thing about Job’s accusation: he’s wrong. God is not a bully. The devil sure is, and we could get into an argument over sovereignty and guilt by association etc, but the fact of the matter is that Job did not know the full behind-the-scenes plot in this story. He did not know God did have reasons for allowing this, reasons that were far beyond the scope of Job’s understanding or ours, even now, even after the fact, even if we in hindsight and with the full revelation of his plan for salvation can see and understand some of them. He did not know how God was using these circumstances to correct a pervasive false theology in his own heart and in millions who would come after, to prophesy and prepare Job and the world for the saving work of the cross, to draw Job’s heart into his Redeemer’s arms thousands of years before his birth! Job did not know about Jesus.

But if Job never admitted what he really thought, how could God correct him? If Job had not been honest, if he had been willing to lie –

I vow by the living God, who has taken away my rights,
    by the Almighty who has embittered my soul—
As long as I live,
    while I have breath from God,
my lips will speak no evil,
    and my tongue will speak no lies. (Job 27:2-4)

if Job had been willing to compromise the truth about what he really believed to “keep the peace,” to avoid the conflict, he and God could not have made any real progress. Job would have continued to grow more and more bitter and separated from God without hope for restoration. Their relationship would have broken. It would have been their end. God invited Job to reveal the mistake, to say it out loud, so he could help Job fix it – so they could continue. My band teacher growing up used to say, “I would rather hear a mistake than nothing. I can correct a mistake. But I can’t teach you if you won’t try!”

Even though it can be scary to hear Job accuse God of being a bully – even if we are afraid of what we will do if we believe it, even if we are afraid it is true – this moment of struggle in Job’s relationship with God is absolutely important enough to justify all the time and resources it took to preserve it for us. It tells us the relationship we each have with God is important enough to him that he wants to put in the work with us. He wants our raw, honest thoughts. He wants to heal, restore, and carry on loving each other after all the hurt, after all the anger. He really wants us after all. He is not afraid of our mistakes.

Job has finally said it, everything he came to say. He has lobbed that mudball at God’s own holy face. Now all that is left for him is to come down the mountain in chapter 31.

And then God will take the stand.