God’s Grace and God’s Glory
The story of Job is well known. His life is in turmoil. Step by step he has lost just about everything that he has — possessions, health, friends and family. Few readers could claim such a catalogue of horrors, yet in lesser ways most readers will not find it difficult to identify with his feelings and his basic question about God.
There are many ways (not mutually exclusive) of putting it. Why me? Why suffering? Why suffering for good people? And for Job, who never claims that he was perfect nor even suggests that a modicum of suffering as a corrective or as a chastisement may be out of place, why suffering so disproportionate to his deserts?
It is not only unbelievers or even those on the fringe of the church who bridle as they ask the question. Believers at the heart of the church go to their minister or father confessor and ask the same.
Such answer as there is seems at first glance to be akin to those politicians who either never hear the question or deliberately use it to explain their own position. In this case, God seems to be telling Job either that he is asking the wrong question or that if he really wants an answer he is looking in the wrong place. He needs to start somewhere else. But where? The wilderness. Earth. The whole created order.
To the Israelites God and nature (including the earth of which humanity is part) were not two separate entities. and the whole created order is not a single entity but a process, always dependent on the creator who sustains life. Understanding Godthe voice of earth. therefore and the way in which he works requires us to understand nature for it is through nature that we find him. Listening for the voice of God means listening to For Job and for us this calls for a new humility.
Notice too the contrast with traditional interpretations of Genesis 1 (where humans are the crown of creation) and here (where human beings are largely ignored in the scheme of things). Job’s cosmos is not anthropocentric and God’s primary occupation is monitoring the mysteries of the creation. That very factor leaves Job (and us) with a new set of questions to think about.