Why Have You Forsaken Me?

I want to suggest that Job’s suffering drives him from simple trust to what Solomons and Flores describe as “authentic trust.”  They give this description. 

“Authentic trust does not necessitate the exclusion of distrust.  To the contrary, it embraces the possibilities of distrust and betrayal as an essential part of trust…Building trust means coming to terms with the possibility of breach and betrayal” (Building Trust, page 6). 

It would seem that Job starts out by trusting in the “System” rather than in God.  The system was the view of the majority of Old Testament documents that said you get what you deserve.  The righteous are blessed, and the wicked are cursed.  Since Job has been cursed, he must have done something to deserve his plight.

It should be clear that Job’s friends subscribe fully to the System.  That is why they spend chapter after infuriating chapter trying to convince Job that he should confess, repent, take his punishment and get on with being blessed again.  

It should also be clear that Job subscribes to the same system throughout most of the book.  That is why he has such a problem.  He knows what we know—that the System has broken down.  One who is blameless and upright has been cursed like the worst sinner on the planet.  Something is terribly wrong.

If the system is not broken, then it may be that Job’s understanding is incorrect.  Perhaps God longs for Job to trust God rather than the mechanics of the System.  In fact, the mechanics of the system require no trust at all.  Feed good behavior into one end of the machine and blessings should pop out of the other end of the machine.  That’s not trust.  That’s just good engineering.  Perhaps God is unwilling to settle for such a disengaged relationship with God’s favorite servant.

Solomons and Flores write, 

“To trust is to take on the personal responsibility of making a commitment and choosing a course of action, and with it, one kind of relationship or another.  Trust entails a lack of control, but it means entering into a relationship in which control is no longer the issue.  There is no need to broach the subject of trust with people or things that we can utterly control” (Building Trust, page 45).  

As long as Job relied on the System, Job remained in control of things.  The relationship was static and secure.  But the God we know in Jesus Christ seems unwilling to settle for such an arm’s length relationship with the Creation God loves and for which Christ died.

In a very influential essay published in 1980 and entitled “The Meaning of the Book of Job,” Matitiahu Tsevat suggests that God intends to create a crisis of meaning for God’s favorite servant—a crisis that calls into question the picture of reality that Job and his friends share.  

Both Job and his friends insist on a universe where in the here and now goodness is rewarded and wickedness is punished.  Job’s story calls that description of reality into question in profound ways.  God’s speeches in chapters 38-40 describes at great length the apparent capriciousness of the natural world that God has made.  The System cannot be imposed on that order simply because human beings long for control and predictability.

Tsevat suggests that the mechanical order of the cosmos that Job desires and upon which he depended will not produce the authentic trust which is part of any real relationship with God.  The System is based on selfish piety.  The System fears God “for something”—that is, in order to gain the personal advantages of safety, security and self-righteousness.  A system based on automatic reward and punishment removes all responsibility from human existence.  The system to which Job and his friends subscribe at the beginning is the opposite of trust and is in fact a kind of coercion.

It would seem that in the book of Job, God longs for trust rather than mere obedience.  God desires a relationship rather than mere acquiescence.  God wants a dynamic connection rather than a static reality.  Job may start to approach this understanding, for example, in 13:15, a verse that has a variety of readings.  The NRSV reads the text this way: “See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face.”  

If you read the footnote you will see that there is an alternative translation: “though he will kill me, yet will I trust in him…”  The two translations seek to deal with the Hebrew verb for “to wait” in the sense of “to expect something to happen.”  God pushes Job to the point of engaging in a real relationship with God rather than a mere manipulation of the System.