“Then Job answered the Lord, ‘I know that You can do all things, and that no plans of Yours can be foiled. Who is he who veils counsel without knowledge? I then have expressed
what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me.’” (Job 42:1)
I return to the book of Job every few years. I discover something new with each fresh reading. Of course, as our professor of homiletics, Metropolitan Andre emphasized, the words don’t change, but we do. Therefore, even after we have memorized the Bible, we ought to go on reading it daily.
Judaism is based on the Torah, the Law of Moses. It is consistent, rational and complete. Keep up your part of the covenant with the living God, and He will bless you. Job is a challenge to that theology. It is to their credit and intellectual honesty that the Hebrews have included it in their canon, for it calls into question the consistency of obedience and fulfillment of the several covenants in the Old Testament as the meaning of the Law. Better stated, God is a mystery to humanity. He transcends any rules one sets up in order to comprehend His ways, for He is incomprehensible.
Job was a gentile. A very wealthy pious person somewhat like Noah, he found favor with the Lord. Indeed, the Lord used him as a paradigm of what He had in mind when He created the human being. But the Lord permitted Job’s faith to be tested. His entire estate, all that he owned, was destroyed, along with all of his children. He was left wracked with sores, brooding over his miserable plight, and even his wife told him to give up, curse God and die. But he refused to do so.
His friends visit to console him. They offer sensible advice. Think deeply, they say, and recall whatever it was that caused the Lord to send such afflictions to assail you. Surely you must remember something so traumatic. Repent, and the Lord will forgive you. Job says that he’s done nothing wrong. To confess a sin he is not guilty of would be a lie. They leave him, and a fourth friend visits. One thinks that normally in the order of most tales, he will offer a solution; but it’s just more of the same. All four friends might be considered good Jews. Sin, confession, repentance and forgiveness are the ongoing themes throughout the Bible. It’s the staple of the relationship between God and mankind.
Finally, Job decides to confront the Lord head on. All of us can identify with the scene, because none is without the experience of pleading with the Lord for some answer to whatever he has felt to be unfair or irrational. In a word, why? And the answer is not what Job hoped to hear. It’s indeed no answer at all, because the Lord confronts Job with questions of His own. Job has not a single reply to any of them, because they demonstrate the incomprehensibility of the Lord’s ways. Behind the wonders of nature lies the mystery of a Creator who has brought everything into being. If Job cannot work out how He did it, what chance has he of understanding the even more complex structure of man? Job at least realizes what he doesn’t understand, and that too requires wisdom. More, he comes to grasp the realization that he has no way of comprehending the greater mystery of the Lord, His creation, His ways, and His essence. True religion is not philosophy. We normally explain Judaism, Christianity and Islam as revelations of a transcendent deity Who is by definition indefinable. He remains a mystery beyond all understanding. Were He able to be described, He would not be God at all, for He is above all description. Yet just to say that is in a way the beginning of philosophy.