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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 launches into the very heart of his argument as he poses the central riddle of this book: How can a mortal be righteous before God? (9:2) It seems odd to hear this question from Job, whose entire case against his friends rests upon his confidence in his own righteousness. But while the friends ask this question ironically, not believing there can be any answer (see 4:17; 15:14), Job asks it in deadly earnest, implying not just that there must be an answer, but that without an answer all is lost. In taking this position
Job commits himself to doing exactly what the gospel does:
to put righteousness within human reach.
Job's reply to his condemning friends might be paraphrased as follows:
Your theology is right, as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough.
The exacting God you describe is one whom no human being could ever satisfy. No, there must be more to Him than that. There must be something more to the mystery of godliness than cold, mathematical justice.
It is easy enough, Job argues, to sit in an armchair and make true statements about God but what are you going to do when the living God shakes the earth from its place (9:6) and your armchair with it? Trying to defend oneself against such a God is more hopeless than trying to win a game of chess against the most advanced computer: Though one wished to dispute with him, he could not answer him one time out of a thousand (9:3). Later in this chapter Job expresses the same truth in exquisite paradoxes:
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Though I were innocent, I could not answer him (v. 15); Even if I were blameless, my mouth would condemn me (v. 20).
Job is valiantly seeking to expand his friends' vision of God (and his own too) so that together they can stop clinging to pat answers. Without really foreseeing the full implications of his own line of argument, Job is proceeding exactly as any preacher of the gospel must proceed. That is, he is establishing the fact that the chasm between man's sin and God's holiness is so impossibly vast that all human attempts to bridge it are utterly useless. Yet for this very reason, Job contends, there must exist something else, something besides virtue or sacrifice or even correct theology, that is acceptable to this God as righteousness.
Job's faith, in fact, consists precisely in this that as unapproachable and enigmatic as this Deity is, he knows there must be some way to approach Him and to stand before Him. Just because He is so great and wonderful, there must be some means of gaining His approval and of having Him say, 'Well done, good and faithful servant!' (Mt. 25:21).
Job is right. There is a way to delight our Father's heart but it is not through bending over backwards to be good. In his prophetic soul Job knows that it is not our business to try to make ourselves perfect, as the Buddhists do, but rather to have faith in the perfection of the Son of Man, who alone is full of grace and truth (John 1:14).
God's delight is not in a life of undeviating virtue, but rather in seeing the most twisted and chaotic life turned in humble expectation towards Him. The truly righteous person, it turns out, is the one who places no expectations upon himself. From God he expects everything, but from himself he expects nothing because he knows he is but dust.
The freedom of the gospel is freedom from all demands, all pressure. This freedom Job has, and it is what so perplexes his friends. The friends are like those whom Paul warns of who spy on the freedom we have in Christ (Gal. 2:4).
Nothing is more maddening to such people than to pour all their energy into doing all the right things, only to end up hopelessly entangled in them, and then to be confronted by someone who is doing it all wrong yet who is free.
July 17/2008
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