Nobody knows who wrote the original Book of Job. Nor does anybody know who wrote the various added parts of the Book of Job. It is divided into five clearly delineated sections. The first part is the first two chapters, which are written in prose, and the content in them is never mentioned again. They are the original ancient story. The second part is the longest; it is 29 chapters of poetry, and it tells of the advice three purported “friends” gave to Job regarding his rapid string of horrendous misfortunes. We might note: With friends like those, who needs enemies? The 29 chapters are followed by seven chapters of poetry in which a man named Elihu speaks to Job. He is only marginally more comforting than the first three men who tried to comfort Job. Then there are three chapters of poetry in which God Himself speaks to Job in the midst of Job’s affliction. Finally the last of the 42 chapters of this magnificent, perplexing, and thought provoking book returns to prose. It may or may not have been the conclusion of the original story.
Likely there never was an historical person named Job, but if there was, he was not a Hebrew. Gentiles don’t make big appearances in the Hebrew Bible. Nevertheless, the people who chose the particular books of the Hebrew Bible decided to include one of the longest books in the whole collection about a highly-admirable if also hugely unfortunate Gentile. Many scholars claim the basic story of Job came from somewhere in southwestern Asia in the early or mid-second-millennium, which is to say, probably Persia or thereabouts, and perhaps between 1800 and 1500 BCE. As the story was expanded in the Hebrew Bible, it became essentially an epic poem, like the Illiad or Odyssey or Beowulf.
“There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job,” the story starts out, “and that man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job1:1). It is very important to keep that in mind as we go through this whole perplexing tale. We are not going to focus on the contest between Satan and God for Job’s allegiance; that, as far as I am concerned, is simply a literary device to describe how an upright man dealt with unspeakable calamities. And anyway, I discourage everyone from believing in the devil. It is an utterly unproductive and misleading leap of faith. But the Persians were the first people to believe in the devil, and the original story of Job was their story, so we’re stuck with Satan.
As we learned in our third reading today from this book, in short order Sabeans, who were enemies of Job and his family, took all his oxen and donkeys, and killed all his servants; fire from heaven killed all his sheep and the shepherds; Chaldeans (which is to say, Iraqis) stole all Job’s camels and killed the camel keepers; and finally, all Job’s children were killed when a fierce wind destroyed the house in which they were having a party. Thus we may deduce that a very fine and wealthy man suddenly lost everything near and dear to him, except his wife. However, as we shall see next week, she also added to his woes. Nevertheless, as it says in the last verse of the first chapter, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.” Keep that in mind in all four of these sermons: Job, Misfortune, Good Luck, & God. Job never blamed God for what happened to him. He questioned God, he queried Him, he wondered about Him, but he never blamed Him.
What are we to conclude when disaster strikes? Is culpability the key issue? Or are we better advised to look elsewhere in order to move forward?
The Greek dramatist Sophocles said, “The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.” But Job was not the cause of any of his adversities, which were indescribably enormous. He had done nothing which should result in the disasters which befell him. Who, then, was the culprit? According to the story, it was Satan who was behind this sudden litany of calamities. However, assuming that explanation will not suffice in most instances of misfortune, if indeed in any at all, where can we turn for succor or solace when troubles sweep over us? That is the question which the book of Job is intended to address.
On a sunny but chilly day in November of 1863, a crowd of twenty thousand people gathered in a new cemetery which had been created outside a small town in south-central Pennsylvania. For three days in early July five months earlier, many thousands of men had died there in ferocious fighting. After the primary speaker at the occasion of the dedication of the cemetery had spoken for over two hours, a tall man, dressed as usual in black, began one of the most famous speeches in American history. It lasted for all of three minutes. “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he said.
The Gettysburg Address refers to the greatest internal calamity our nation ever faced in its nearly 250-year history. Abraham Lincoln knew there was no point in attempting to determine ultimate culpability. “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hallow this ground.” Those who died at Little Round Top and the Devil’s Den and Cemetery Ridge and the Wheatfield had already shed their blood to accomplish that task. “It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have so nobly advanced. It is rather for us …that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people , shall not perish from the earth.”
Sometimes it may seem as though there is no hope. “Has not man a hard service upon earth, and are not his days like the days of a hireling? …My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope. Remember that my life is a breath; my eye will never again see good” (Job 7:1,6-7).
When the worst conceivable catastrophe has descended, God alone can provide the way out. When everything collapses, placing ourselves under the sovereign love of God alone can rebuild the necessary structures for us to recommence. But it is excruciatingly difficult to do that! When it feels as though nothing could possibly be worse, we want answers from God more than the mere presence of God! And in such moments, no answers may be forthcoming, and God’s presence may also seem completely to have evaporated. And then what? But --- “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrong.” He didn’t understand why his world had suddenly and totally fallen apart, he could perceive no reason or rational explanation for how he might have deserved what happened, he only knew inexpressible agony and suffering, but it was not in his nature to sin or to charge God with wrong.
It rained hard in Washington, DC on the morning of March 4, 1865. By noon, when the second inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as president began, the sun shone brightly for a few moments, but then dark clouds rolled in again. Lincoln noticed Stephen Douglas was in the assembled crowd, but he did not see a man standing behind him on the capitol steps. The man was an actor whom Lincoln had seen perform at Ford’s theater the previous September. His name was John Wilkes Booth. “Fellow-countrymen,” said Mr. Lincoln, “At this second appearing to take the oath of presidential office, there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at first…. On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avoid it.”
No one can detour around the results of calamity when it has wreaked its havoc upon its victims. The most intense joy and the most intense sorrow live long in our memories, but the weight of the sorrow can overwhelm us if we allow it to take control of our senses and our spirit. It is at the genesis of intense sorrow where the first two chapters of the book of Job begin their woe-filled narrative.
But listen: It is precisely because Job was such a righteous man that he felt the most piercing sorrow! It is because he knew he had done nothing to warrant his collection of disasters that the disasters seemed like a particularly burdensome enigma to him! Hitler or Tojo or Saddam Hussein or Muammar Khadafi did not and could not feel what Job felt, because when their worlds collapsed, they knew in their deepest being that ultimately they were responsible for it. But Job was innocent of both great recklessness and indiscretion.
Later Job said of God, “Behold, he will slay me; I have no hope; yet I will defend my ways to his face” (Job 13:15). But you see, God has no quarrel with Job’s behavior or his righteousness. In truth, at least according to the two opening chapters of this profoundly penetrating book, God has no quarrel with Job at all. Job’s troubles were not explained by God; they were explained instead, according to the opening chapters, by the actions of Satan. That may be a powerful literary device, but it is, in my opinion, as I said earlier, bad theology. Nothing good comes from focusing on anything about the prince of demons. However, in a burst of homiletic generosity, I am going to give Beelzebub a pass, and move on to other things.
Job wants to know why bad things happen to good people. It is a very natural and understandable question. Whenever such tragedies occur, we devoutly want an explanation. For 28 chapters, three of Job’s friends give him a relentless interpretation of his woes: He has these troubles because he has sinned. It is as simple as that. Bad things never happen to good people, the three utterly inept “comforters” insist. As ferociously as they come at Job with their corroded theology, he comes right back at them with gallons of spiteful spleen. It is a Mexican standoff long before there was a Mexico.
The three, incidentally, are identified as Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. As has been noted from many pulpits, Bildad is the shortest man in the Bible, because, you see, he is Bildad the Shuhite. A little play on words, get it? It’s like the first mention of baseball in the Bible, which is found in Genesis 1:1: “In the big inning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Or the first mention of tennis: “Joseph served in the court of Pharaoh.” (Actually I have never located that verse, but I remember some preacher eons ago telling all three of those cheesy puns. I would have been far better off if I had remembered more lofty things, but I didn’t.) However, Job, Misfortune, Good Luck, and God are weighty subjects, and we need some relief from the burden now and then. And, as other preachers have said, a sermon illustration is like window; either it sheds light or it lets in air. No light is being shed here, but maybe some fresh air, for the moment, is wafting in upon us by these pathetic puns.
The catastrophes which engulfed Job seemingly all happened within a few hours. Could anyone ever have that may disasters descend in such a short time? Again I remind you this is not to be taken literally. It is a story, an epic poem, and it addresses a factor all of us face from time to time, but thankfully quite infrequently: What explains misfortune? Or what, for that matter, explains good fortune or good luck? Does chance govern existence? What a horrible thought!
The sixteenth President of the United States continued, referring to his first inauguration in 1861. “While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it with war – seeking to dissolve to Union and divide the effects by negotiation.”
Perhaps in one way or another, most human calamities are, to one degree or another, our own fault. Not ours personally, necessarily, but the fault of human error. We miscalculate. We misinterpret. We make mistakes. “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”
“When sorrows come,” said Shakespeare, “they come not single spies, but in battalions.” Everyone and everything that mattered to Job was gone in a colossal and catastrophic flash. He was certain it wasn’t because of defective actions, or defective thinking, or even because of defective faith. Then what did cause it?
Job was Lincoln, and Lincoln was Job. Job also was Calhoun and Clay, Grant and Lee, Jackson and Sherman.
Four hundred teenagers boarded a large sea-going ferry for a brief voyage to an island described as South Korea’s Hawaii. Over three hundred of them never made it.
The Great Emancipator: “One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” But to this day, seven-score-and-ten years later, many millions vehemently deny it.
Sometimes calamity seems inevitable, and we have no choice other than to deal with it. But how? How? That was what Job wanted to know. And that’s also what we want to know.