And God Just Stands There

Job 15-16

When you suffer, is it a direct result of your sins?

Yes and no. 

For many of us, our complicated situations flow from our pride, anger, lust, gluttony, greed, envy, or apathy. So in these cases, there is a connection between our hardships and our transgressions.

But what about when someone sins against us? When we are innocent? When they trespass against us and produce hurt and anxiety and fear and woundedness into our life? What then? Are we too blame for the tsunami of difficulties that flow out of that?

For Job, he was convinced that he was innocent, and that God was to blame for his horrors. And to a degree, he was right - since we get to know the backstory, the conversation God had with Satan. For Job's friends, who like Job don't know the backstory, they are convinced that Job is guilty of sin, and this explains his terrible suffering.

Despite Job's protests to his innocence, the friends are sure that deep inside, despite the great reputation Job had for being blameless and upright, despite his life of righteousness, somewhere deep inside was lurking sin that has produced this terrible affliction of suffering.

Here is how Eliphaz puts it:

If you were truly wise, would you sound so much like a windbag, belching hot air?
Would you talk nonsense in the middle of a serious argument, babbling baloney?
Look at you! You trivialize religion, turn spiritual conversation into empty gossip.
It's your sin that taught you to walk this way.
You chose an education in fraud.

But Job resists their simplistic and unfeeling accounting of the situation:

I've had all I can take of your talk.
What a bunch of miserable comforters!
Is there no end to your windbag speeches?
What's your problem that you go on and on like this?
If you were in my shoes, I could talk just like you.
I could put together a terrific harangue and really let you have it.
But I'd never do that. I'd console and comfort, make things better, not worse!

And then Job speaks directly and forcefully to God about his dire situation:

People take one look at me and gasp.
Contemptuous, the slap me around and gang up on me.
And God just stands there and lets them do it,
let's wicked people do what they want with me.
I was contentedly minding my own business when God beat me up.
He grabbed me by the neck and threw me around.

Do you ever feel this way towards God? That the hard times you're going through are undeserved? We'd be wise to contemplate the thoughts of both Eliphaz and Job. There are times when our sins produce chaos in our life, and thus our repentance and return to God put us on the path to healing and restoration.

But sometimes, when we get sinned against, and life turns upside down, we have a choice: of either retaliating, of sinning in response, or crying out to God for intervention and rescue.

Job is caught in deep tension: he's convinced that the hard times are undeserved, and yet from God. He's also sure that God is the one that can rescue him. Job must wrestle with relying on a God who has seemingly been so unfair to him. Job is forced to reach out to a God who just seems to stand there.

Job is being tested. And in his rage against the injustice of his situation, he still trusts God for resolution. Even though he sees God as the cause of the storm, he's willing to believe that God will bring it to pass. And that God will have a good reason for all of this. But in the meantime, it's as if God just stands there.