“When bad things happen to good people”
By Rev. Michael Stonhouse
Job 1: 1-22
Quiet Time – Thursday, August 23, 2018
(Forward, p. 25) CEV p. 525
“When bad things happen to good people”
The problem of evil: it truly is one of the most serious sticking points in any conversation about ‘the faith’. The question, “How can God allow such evil in the world?”, almost invariably comes up in any serious conversation about the Christian, Judaic or Moslem faiths. And certainly, what we have just read about Job gives fuel to this query. He is a righteous man, in and of himself, and he goes out of his way to ‘cover’ for his children as well, just in case they had in some way violated God’s will and instructions. We might even consider this to be a bit ‘overboard’, but that’s just how zealous and intentional Job was in serving and submitting to and pleasing God.
And yet, in our passage, he loses everything—in one foul swoop—servants, livestock and children. And why? Because God did it? Because God planned it? No, God did not do this or plan this. But, at the same time, God allowed it. God allowed it because of a bet, a wager, between He and the accuser, which in Hebrew is ‘Satan’. Satan accuses Job of cozying up to God only because God had been so good to him—only because God had blessed him and protected him. ‘Take away this protection, this blessing, and just see what happens,’ Satan said. ‘Job will curse you to your face.’ So, God ‘allowed’ all this to happen, presumably just to prove His point, namely that Job would remain faithful in spite of it.
Honestly, I can’t say that this answer to this particular instance of evil being visited upon a person is very satisfactory. Honestly, to my way of thinking, it sucks. It makes God seem like some irresponsible gambler in a wager where human lives are at stake. To me, that’s not a very pretty picture of God.
But then, what if we step back from this particular instance and look at the bigger picture, at instances of evil in general and at God allowing testing and temptation to rear their ugly heads in our lives. Two things might be said here. One is that trials both test our faith and strengthen our faith. (I think that certainly this can be said of Job. More on that later.) The other is that God works through these trials and uses them for good. While I certainly think that this is generally true, I’m not really sure how this pans out for the individuals caught in them. Here I think, for instance, of the servants and family of Job that perished in this ‘test’, or of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Maybe the overall result was for good, but what about those individuals? I’m not so sure. But then, God, while intensely more concerned about human life when we’re ‘managing’ it, also seems somewhat nonchalant about it when He’s in charge. It seems as if physical life and death aren’t quite so important, that what matters is spiritual death and eternal life.
And maybe that’s the overall lesson of Job. Job learns to trust God, to place His hope in God not only in this life but also beyond in a life to come--in other words, in eternal life. And Job learns to trust God, even when he’s angry and doesn’t like what’s happening, even when he feels that it’s unjust (which it is), and even when he doesn’t understand. Then maybe his grave misfortunes had a wonderful impact, at least for him. As for the others, I’m not so sure. It still seems as if some awfully bad things happened to some pretty good people.
Forward notes: “[Job] said, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed by the name of the Lord’” (verse 21).
“Can you imagine praising the Lord after losing everything in life important to you? I can’t. I struggled with praising God after losing out on a promotion recently. I even get mad when my fantasy football team does poorly. Yet in today’s reading, Job prays words of acceptance and graciousness after losing all of his possessions, his wealth, and even his children.
“Job reminds us that each day of our lives is a gift of unmerited grace given by our Creator. I wrote this on my 16,800th day of life. That’s a lot of days, and I have taken far too many of them for granted.
“I didn’t even think about the gift of being to run until a pulled muscle made it hard even to walk. I wasn’t able to praise God in the midst of the injury either. But maybe I will remember Job’s faithfulness and pray for the grace to respond differently each time.”
Moving Forward: “Are you mourning a loss of some sort today? Can you find a way to respond like Job, with acceptance and graciousness? If you’re not ready for that yet, simply ask God for strength and courage to move in that direction.”
A concluding thought: most of the time I think of life as a right, something that I and everyone else is entitled to, rather than as a gift, a free, unmerited, unearned gift from God. So, rather than seeing death as taking away something that is rightfully mine, I should see each day of my life as something wonderful that I didn’t deserve, and certainly didn’t ‘have coming to me as a right.’