Job (Part III)

But before that... A belated Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year in advance! This Christmas, I have 6 kids in my home for a week. Yup, ST's sisters are in town and have wisely decided to deposit the kids with us. This is making training & blogging pretty much impossible, but I should not be complaining about having family over during the Christmas holidays. I have to admit that having 6 kids (between 5 to 12) in the house continues to test my patience and energy, but I am sure that the minute they leave for their homes in the USA/Australia, I will miss them real bad.

And now onto more observations about Job. Since my last post, I have read Job chapters 24 - 37, which is 4 days in the http://www.bibleinayear.org/ reading plan. It is interesting to note that even in his complaints, Job was wise beyond his time.

1. Starting with what perhaps could be trivial, Job understood some pretty profound scientic truths - e.g. earth is suspended in space (most of the rest of the civilized world then still thought that the earth rests on the back of a giant turtle) (Job 26:7), rain comes from water vapour (Job 36:27-28), etc...
2. Job longed for and anticipated one who can mediate between man and God (Job 9:32-35). Interestingly Elihu, the youngest and last of the speakers (Job 33:23-25) also alluded to the same messenger/mediator, before he fell back to the general "pattern" of Job's other 2 friends (which is that Job must have done something wrong to deserve his troubles, because God does not allow bad things to happen to good people). This mediator anticipated by Job finally came in the form of Jesus (God Himself) on Christmas Day.
3. Job longed for and anticipated seeing God at the end of his time (Job 19:25-27). Without having the promise of eternal life (that came only with Jesus much later in time), Job trusted God enough to know somehow that God will be fair to him, and will not allow him to just disappear with death. He certainly had doubts - the entire book is filled with his doubts and fears about dying without any notion of fairness from God - but HE NEVER GAVE UP.
4. Which brings me to what to me is the most moving observation about Job - He had the maturity to accept that sometimes bad people prosper while the righteous suffer, and he had the tenacity to argue with God when bad things happened to him despite being blameless before God. We live in a world where sometimes it is hard to understand why crooks amass their wealth and the rightoeous suffer at theirs hands, and this is a problem that his friends seem to overlook (Job 21:28-34). Job's friends seem overly eager to interpret Job's complaints to God as being illegitimate and ill-founded. In their zealousness, they even proclaimed that God Himself was prompting them to speak and defend His name. What's amazing about Job is that (1) he had the maturity of faith to understand that he need not jump to God's rescue when there are open issues (Job 27:5); and that (2) he had the tenacity to stubbornly pursue God for an answer even though he was undergoing all his sufferings without knowing why. How many of us give up on God when we hit issues that cannot be explained away? The book of Job tells us that if we, like Job, stubbornly pursue God for answers, He will answer us. It may not be the answer that we were expecting (just like with Job), but He will answer one way or another.

While we are on the subject of Job, http://tryathlete.blogspot.com/ has a different (and rather profound) intepretation which he expresses beautifully. You may want to check it out here.