Revisiting Job
Every so often it happens to me that I stumble across some
piece of information, some minor observation, which forces me to reexamine
matters I had thought settled comfortably years ago. Particularly, when this happens with biblical
scripture, the result for me is a happy period of study, familiarizing myself
with this new question and scriptures long ignored. Whether the matter concerned critical
doctrines of faith, or more often details and elements surrounding the stories
I grew up with, there is this welcome feeling of being lost in the hunt for
something new and interesting; of exploring and adventuring; of something that
inevitably brings old stories to life.
The problem for me is that the further I go back in
scripture, the more so many stories take on a mythical quality. I’m modern, they are ancient. Different technologies, patterns of living,
ways of thinking. I work on computer
networks, they herded sheep, or cattle.
I live in a townhome, they a mud-brick house or pack-up-and-go tent. There’s a great host of disparities that stretch
the need for proper biblical exposition to help us understand the environment
and the times, as often a necessary context for appreciating the story. Miracles only add to this divide because
although we speak often of what God does in our lives, how he has led us,
changed us, changed our circumstances – although we can see what is generally a
subtle hand leading us, smoothing our paths, even healing us – it’s not the
same dramatic moment in time as the miracles we read about. We are largely a secular and modern society, wholly unaccustomed to experiencing or even admitting the possibility of divine intervention in daily life. We are accustomed to deconstructing everything into a naturalistic model. Magic is a slew of simple tricks, elaborately staged. Angels and demons seem to exist as peripheral, in concept only, but are not part of real life. This is the impact of modernism and naturalism: that we are by nature skeptical of (and alienated from) everything that does not have an immediate natural explanation.
As Christians, trying to stay biblically based, we run into
stories that read as myths to us. The
difference between those like me who believe in a biblical inerrancy of
scripture, and those who don't, is that when we read about the parting of the Red Sea (for example),
we don’t believe it is simply metaphor or analogy, but somehow it did
happen. But we have no idea what this
looked like. It is so far disconnected
from our reality that we simply stumble on the details as written, put up some
(any) picture of this in our mind, and automatically move on to the parts we
can understand. Others will spend years
of their life studying the events, the details, in the hope of digging out more
pieces of the puzzle to make it seem less other-worldly.
It is here where questions about the scriptures are due, are
necessary. Not so much about inerrancy
itself – we assume it happened – but where our mind just wants to accept a myth
and move on, to instead question: what in heaven happened?
My latest bone to chew on, like Bentley at home, gnawing
obsessively as the world around him fades, starts in the Book of Job. What in heaven happened to poor Job? A question that I haven’t asked since I first
heard about him over 20 years ago.
Why? Because I knew it was a
story about Godly patience, and fortitude, and living righteously despite all;
an example for me. And so, even if I
would strongly claim as fact that it must be real because it is in scripture,
nonetheless it seemed no more real than some children’s stories. You take the lesson and move on.
So what happened to Job?
And for some clues, I owe something to a handful of people out there who
noticed some of the oddities in the book and instead of moving on, sat on this
verse or that and asked “what happened?”
Particularly, a gentleman named Barry Setterfield (known to me for
pointing out things very much against the grain of common thought but
nonetheless interesting) lit the first of several sparks. Perhaps it is time to treat Job as a
historical account, rather than simply a story of moral weight.
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