Job (eBook)

Introduction

WHAT IS JOB ALL ABOUT?

The book of Job raises three big questions: What kind of world do we live in? What kind of church should we want? What kind of Savior do we need?

What Kind of World Do We Live In?

This book began as a sermon series on the book of Job in the church where I was pastor.1 Twelve days before the first sermon, on January 14, 2003, Detective Constable Stephen Oake was stabbed and killed in Manchester. Why? He was an upright man, a faithful husband, a loving father. What is more, he was a Christian, a committed member of his church where he used sometimes to preach. The newspapers reported a moving statement by his father, Robin Oake, a former chairman of the Christian Police Association. He said through his tears that he was praying for the man who had killed his son. The newspaper articles told of the quiet dignity of Stephen’s widow Lesley. They showed happy family snapshots with his teenage son Christopher and daughters Rebecca and Corinne.

So why was he killed? Does this not make us angry? After all, if we're going to be honest we will surely admit that there were others who deserved to die more than he. Perhaps there was a corrupt policeman somewhere who had unjustly put innocent people in prison or a crooked policeman who had taken bribes. Or perhaps another policeman was carrying on an affair with his neighbor's wife. If one of those had been killed, we might have said that although we were sad, at least there would have appeared to be some moral logic to that death. But the Oakeses, dare we say it, are good people. Not sinless, of course, but believers living upright lives. So why is this pointless and terrible loss inflicted on them?

We need to be honest and face the kind of world in which we live. Why does God allow these things? Why does he do nothing to put these things right? And why, on the other hand, do people who couldn't care less about God and justice thrive? Here in contemporary idiom is the angry voice of an honest man from long ago who struggled with this same unfairness:

That was the voice of Job, in a paraphrase from chapter 21. “Let's be honest,” he says. “Let's have no more of this pious make-believe that it goes well for good people and badly for bad people. It's not true; look around the world—it's simply not true. By and large people who could not care about God live happier, longer lives with less suffering than do believers. Why? What kind of God runs a world like this?”

Armchair Questions and Wheelchair Questions

It is hard questions like this that face us in the book of Job. But there are two ways of asking them. We may ask them as armchair questions or we may ask them as wheelchair questions. We ask them as armchair questions if we ourselves are remote from suffering. As Shakespeare said, “He jests at scars that never felt a wound.”3 The troubled Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote eloquently and almost bitterly:

We grapple with God with wheelchair questions when we do not take this terror lightly when we ourselves, or those we love, are suffering. Job asks wheelchair questions.

Every pastor knows that behind most front doors there lies pain, often hidden, sometimes long and drawn out, sometimes very deep. A few years ago a pastor was discussing how to preach a passage from Job with four fellow ministers when he looked around at the others. For a moment he lost his concentration on the text as he realized that one of them, some years ago, had lost his wife in a car accident in their first year of marriage. The second was bringing up a seriously handicapped daughter. The third had broken his neck and had come within 2 millimeters of total paralysis or death six years previously. The fourth had undergone repeated radical surgeries that had changed his life. As his concentration returned to the text of Job, he thought, This book is not merely academic. It is both about people and for people who know suffering.

Robert Gordis writes, “The ubiquity of evil and its apparent triumph everywhere give particular urgency to the most agonizing riddle of human existence, the problem of evil, which is the crucial issue in biblical faith.” He calls the book of Job “the most profound and—if such an epithet may be allowed—the most beautiful discussion of the theme,” more relevant than ever, “in this, the most brutal of centuries.”5

Job is a fireball book. It is a staggeringly honest book. It is a book that knows what people actually say and think—not just what they say publicly in church. It knows what people say behind closed doors and in whispers, and it knows what we say in our tears. It is not merely an academic book. If we listen to it carefully, it will touch us, trouble us, and unsettle us at a deep level.

What Kind of Church Should We Want?

But as well as asking what kind of world we live in, the book of Job will force us to ask what kind of church we belong to. What is the greatest threat to Christian churches today? That question was asked to an Any Questions panel at the Proclamation Trust’s Cornhill Training Course in London where I work. It is a good question, although answers are bound to be impressionistic. But here’s a suggestion: in most of the world churches are liable to be swamped by the so-called prosperity gospel, and in the richer parts of the world churches struggle to guard the gospel against metamorphosing into what we might call the therapeutic gospel. These two closely-related pseudo-gospels threaten to displace the authentic Christian and Biblical gospel.

The prosperity gospel, in its crudest form, is the message that God wants you to be rich, and if you trust him and ask him, he will make you rich. One of the largest Christian occasions in Britain is the annual International Gathering of Champions, run by Pastor Matthew Ashimolowo. Preachers tell the congregation how God wants them to be rich and then richer and richer. The American preacher T. D. Jakes has an estimated personal fortune of one hundred million dollars. Such fortunes are regarded as evidence of God’s favor.6

The first time I visited Nigeria I was astonished at the myriad of ramshackle signs alongside the roadside advertising little independent churches. Most of them seemed to be teaching the prosperity gospel, with names like The Winners Chapel, Divine Call Bible Church (its slogan was “Excellence and Power”), or The Redeemed Evangelical Mission POWER WORD (how to speak a word that gets you power and influence). Come to Jesus and become a winner in life—that seemed to be the message. In our contrasuggestible English way, my traveling companion wanted to start a Losers Chapel, and I suggested an Apostolic Scum of the Earth Church, neither of which would be a marketing man’s dream, but each of which would have been closer to the New Testament.

We visited the Ecumenical Centre, the large cathedral-like building at the heart of Abuja, the capital city. This is the flagship Christian building in the country (mirrored by an equally large central mosque not far away). When we were there, the building was being used by a prosperity gospel denomination, headed by self-styled Archbishop Sam Amaga. The bookstall consisted entirely of books by him. Here is a selection of the titles: Cultivating a Winning Habit (with the subtitle “Sure Guarantee for a Top Life”), Created for the Top, Don’t Die at the Bottom, and Power Pillars for Uncommon Success.

A Ghanaian student at Cornhill told me that some weddings in his country replace the traditional wording of the wedding vows with the words, “For better, for best, for richer, for richest” because they cannot countenance the possibility that there may, for a Christian couple, be anything “worse” or “poorer.”

So that is the prosperity gospel. If I am poor (financially and materially poor) and I come to Jesus, Jesus will make me rich. If I am sick, and I pray to Jesus, Jesus will make me well. If I want a wife or a husband, and I ask Jesus for one, he will give me a wife or husband. If a couple wants children and call out to Jesus, Jesus will give them children. And so on. This, according to the prosperity gospel, is what he has promised.

But what if, as in some parts of the world, I already am rich? I may not think of myself as particularly rich, but I have running water, I do not worry about having enough food, I have a roof over my head and adequate clothing. I may well have much more than these, but these alone suffice to make me very rich in world terms. Perhaps I am also healthy, happily married, and have children. What happens to the prosperity gospel when I already enjoy prosperity? It...