John Madden and Job

I'm now reading Job. This book is definitely in the "deep end" of the Bible; I find it to be one of the more challenging books of the Bible to read, for a few reasons:

First, it's written in the form of long poetic dialogues that don't necessarily cover lots of new ground with every verse. I find myself asking, "What exactly is the point of that long rambling monologue Job just gave?" It can be hard to see where the conversation is heading when Job has said for the millionth time that he'd be better off dead.

Second, it's dealing with big questions of the nature of evil and the goodness of God. Are righteous people always spared from evil? Are the unrighteous always punished for their misdeeds? Does God cause suffering? Does God care about the plight of people who are suffering? Does God let Satan mess with people and their children and their health on a regular basis? Facing those questions head-on, as the book of Job does, is not provide a comfy, cozy reading experience. It demands a lot of us and can stir up troubling questions.

Third, what are we supposed to think about who's right here? Job and his friends do not see the situation the same way. Job keeps asking God, "Why have you done this to me?" And his friends reply, "You must have done something wrong to deserve this." Is Job still righteous or has he lapsed into unfair accusations against God? As I've been reading Job, I've been reminded that reading the Bible is not a flat experience, in which we easily figure out what the Bible wants me to think or do about x, y, or z. Have you ever heard the Bible characterized as a "rulebook for life" or as "God's playbook"? Those descriptions suggest that we can go to the Bible and find a simple, straightforward set of instructions about how to live the way God wants us to live. There are some texts in the Bible that fit that description better than others; the 10 Commandments are pretty straightforward, aren't they? But on the whole, the Bible is so much more complicated and complex than a John Madden football diagram. With a book like Job, you can't just lift any old verse and put it on a plaque, let alone conclude that that verse is the Bible's final word on suffering. Job has to be read from beginning to end in order to discover its overall point, and even then it provides much subtler and mysterious "answers" to those deep questions than most of us would like.

As the book goes on, I will write some more about what we might conclude or learn from Job, but for now I want to affirm that reading Job may seem complicated and troubling, especially compared to Genesis, which, while it wasn't all sweetness and light, was a more straightforward narrative compared with Job. Tomorrow I'll share some thoughts on how our reading of Genesis might help us read Job.

A classic John Madden diagram

Marc Chagall's Job in Despair

Sorry, John, I'm afraid reading the Bible is not always as easy as coming up with a winning play... Meet your new BFF, Job. He looks like a barrel of laughs, right? Just don't try to cheer him up; he hates it when his friends do that.