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 Award winning author Mike Mason brings profound and arresting insights on the life of faith. We commence a new series that are edited excerpts from his book 'The Gospel according to Job' (Crossway Books, 1994) Mike, a regular contributor to canadianchristianity.com, is perhaps most well known for his book 'The Mystery of Marriage.' that won the ECPA Gold Medallion award.
[other pieces by Mike Mason]
Job's response to his friends' callousness is a heart rending plea for mercy as he groans, 'If only my anguish could be weighed!' (6:2) His point is that Eliphaz seems to be arguing for a kind of balance-scales theology, a tit-for-tat religion in which we do things for God and then He does things for us in return. Just as virtuous deeds can, according to this view, be traded with God for tangible benefits, so all of Job's misfortune should be able to be set right by a proper, formal repentance. Thus everything about the spiritual life can be computed, totaled up, and kept straight and tidy.
But suffering is not like that; it is not tidy and mathematical.
And neither is grace, and neither are any of the great mysteries of the kingdom of heaven.
By their very nature spiritual realities are untidy.
Think how shocked Jesus' disciples were when He first began teaching them about the need to drink His blood! 'This is a hard teaching,' they complained. 'Who can accept it?' (John 6:60) The mysteries of eternal life are untidy because they are infinite and immeasurable. The blood of Jesus could not be kept neatly inside His body. What was meant to cover the whole earth could not be contained for long in an earthen vessel. As Peter wrote, 'You know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect' (1 Peter 1:18-19). Things that are perfect and eternal overflow the world's containers; they upset the world's apple carts; they invalidate the world's balance scales. After all, it is not as though the atoning sacrifice of Jesus merely outweighed the sin of the world; much more, the cross of Christ canceled sin entirely.
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No balance-scales view of God's judgment can ever account for such a wonder. Similarly, no human effort of will, even the will to repent in dust and ashes, can ever conciliate God or take even the tiniest step towards Him. As Paul wrote in Romans 11:35 (paraphrasing God's own words to Job in 41:11), Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? The love of God is not a matter of calculation and accountancy. The trouble with Job's friends is that their thinking leaves no room for anything unmerited. Not only is the cross not at the center of their theology, it is not there at all.
The trouble with Job's friends is that their thinking
leaves no room for anything unmerited.
While Job holds to faith alone in the midst of his suffering, his friends seem to do the very opposite, seeking to avoid suffering altogether in the name of faith. As Job summarizes their attitude, 'You see something dreadful and are afraid' (6:21), we might as well face the fact that it is Job's suffering, and his suffering alone, which turns his friends against him, and which so often turns us away also from those who desperately need our love.
How easily we distance ourselves from other people's pain! We are so good at rationalizing and accounting for suffering, so poor at doing anything about it, and so devastated when it is our own turn to suffer. Anyone who has wrestled with serious illness in a hospital room, and received visitors, will know that between the sick and the well, between the paralyzed life of the sufferer and the full, energetic outer world of the visitor, there exists a vast and nearly uncrossable chasm.
But is the word uncrossable really a word in the Christian vocabulary? No, it need not be. Because of the cross of Christ, every chasm has already been crossed, every alienation bridged. If Job's counselors were alive today and could read about themselves and their suffering friend in the Bible, they would realize that this book is the Calvary of the Old Testament. They would see that the key to the suffering of Job, and indeed to life itself, is the cross. They would realize that suffering, far from being something avoidable, can be the very heartbeat of life and the door to Heaven.
May 29/2008
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