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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]
The gospel is never just the gospel: it is always the gospel according to. The good news of God is always filtered through a human being, and this is so because the miracle of incarnation is part and parcel of the gospel itself. Without incarnation, there is no gospel. And incarnation has two aspects: firstly, God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ, which is the great doctrine of the incarnation; and secondly, man in turn must become like Christ, which entails what might be called a 'little incarnation'. In the words of Martin Luther, God wants to make us into a race of Christs.
Thus the Bible is not only the Word of God, it is also the word of Paul, of John, of Jeremiah, and of Job. Part of the good news is that God entrusts His very Self to individual human beings, delighting to express Himself in different ways through the kaleidoscopic range of human character.
No doubt this is why Paul repeatedly referred to the message he preached as 'my gospel' (e.g. Romans 2:16). He freely acknowledged that an element of human interpretation entered into revelation, and at the same time insisted that his peculiar slant did not in any way alter the gospel itself. Did not Paul preach the same message as Jesus? Yet how different they sound! Inevitably Paul drew upon his own experience, his own thought patterns, his own vocabulary, all of which were different from his Master's. Paul was not just a mouthpeice; he was a person in his own right, as Jesus was. Though Jesus Himself could make the claim, "The words I say to you are not just My own" (John 14:10), still, mysteriously, they were His own too. He had His own way of putting things.
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We might go so far as to suggest that if God had, from the very beginning, chosen some other person besides Jesus of Nazareth as the world's Messiah (outrageous as this sounds), then the gospel would have turned out to be completely different from what it is. There would be no babe in a manger, no water baptism, no Sermon on the Mount, no Eucharist, no cross. Of course such speculation is so preposterously theoretical as to be sacrilegious. For the glorious fact is that God did choose this Jesus - hallelujah! And He did choose this same baptism, this Eucharist, and this cross to be the means of grace for the entire human race. There is no other way to the Father but this way, and that is the gospel according to God.
But God also chose Job. He chose this particular man, with all his crudeness and his flagrant weaknesses and eccentricities, to be held up before the Devil and before all the world as a radiant example of saintliness. Does this mean that Job was to be a pattern for all other saints? Does it mean we are to imitate him? Not exactly. For the moment we try to imitate a mere man, we run the risk of suppressing in ourselves that very individuality without which the gospel cannot be incarnated in our own lives.
Paul wrote, "Whatever you have seen in me, put it into practice" (Phil. 4:9), but to copy what we see in a person is not the same as copying the person himself. We cannot have anyone else's spiritual life. We can only have the spiritual life that God gives us, the life that He Himself has personally tailored for us like a suit of clothes or, to choose a more intimate image, the life that He has molded for us like the unique features of our own face. Job is so wonderful and so radical a character that it would be impossible to copy him. But simply by being so much himself, he sets us free to be ourselves. By refusing to be anyone else but who, by the grace of God, he is, he gives us the courage to stand against the terrible satanic pressures of conformity. As John Chrysostom wrote, 'Find the door of your heart, and you will discover that it is the door of the Kingdom of God.'
June 5/2008
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