“Shall we accept good from God and not trouble??”
Job 2:10
In an age of the prosperity gospel and pentecostal positivity….I’ve been wondering, is there a place for Job at the table anymore??
The man who, not unlike Jesus, in humble submission to God’s sovereign will, did not grab the Dyson and conveniently hoover away the confronting and brutal reality of suffering. The one who held tension between accepting the cards on the table and the feast that was supposed to be there.
What of those who are living the first words of the testimony?? The early chapters, rather than the last lines. What of those who still cling to God even in a tempest of doubt and anger? Those of us who shave our heads and tear our robes just as quickly as we take the posture of worship and adoration. What of those who have continued to choose Love as their greatest calling, even when faith and hope seem nothing more than deeply painful words? Those of us whose flesh is sweating blood even as our spirit manages to whisper “Not my will but yours, Father”.
Just as it was for Job, I think the greatest challenge in the suffering of a servant of God...is the people around them who just want to manage you out of it, rather than minister to you in it. I think we in modern christianity, can all too easily skip past the 7 days of sitting with Job in his grief, allowing him to mourn. Instead, we reach straight for our well learned “godly wisdom” based on how we understand Jehovah to operate...you know, within the 12 step program we designed for the Holy of Holies to do his thing. We draw Job a diagram and explain how the creator of the universe works and that he need just follow the flow chart and everyone gets out alive.
Yet right here in the crucible of suffering is the essence of the hope held out in the gospel. For hope can only be spoken fluently from the mouth of anguish. There lies it's birthplace and true identity…and it is indeed a beautiful thing.
After the loss of everything he considered worth living for, Job still proclaimed: “Though He [God] slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15). And “I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth” (Job 19:25). He spoke of resurrection hope in a moment filled only with the stench of death, he cast his eyes on a big picture victory in the depths of an unimaginably painful moment. This is true discipleship…yielding to the process even when the outcome isn’t imaginable, let alone visible. It’s trust in it’s purest form, the life of faith over sight that we often romanticise, but which is brutal in it’s price tag. And Job was not silent about the pain of the cost. For that, I am deeply grateful to him.
As I’ve immersed myself in the Word over the years, no more have I been given to rapture by the stories of miracles at the roadside of those who heard Jesus was passing by, but rather I’ve gloried in those who have stewarded the honesty of suffering over time, waiting for their redemption, believing all the while that God is on the throne… but left wondering if he will ever visit. I do not see surrender in those who followed after tasting the catch of fish or the choice wine, as much I see it in those who wept aloud in distress, as they praised between each staggered breath. Those who followed through the valley unable to see the table laid out with a feast which awaited them, yet still called him their Shepherd.
I’ve discovered the beautiful intimacy that David expressed so well in the Psalms…a place where the valley and the victory are not mutually exclusive; where the faithfulness of God is as true as the faultiness of man; where in the divine paradox of suffering and transformation, death and life, valleys and tables, we find one single constant. And that my friends, is the power of the gospel. It is the beautiful tapestry of redemption. Let’s not sanitise the table...let the redeemed tell their story, even while they are living it.