Monday, June 26, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Listening for the words of Job
Our soul waits for the Lord, who is our help and our shield. May your kindness, O God, be upon us who have put our hope in you.
At the Joplin Super 8, I read a chapter of Job from their Gideon Bible. Not only do they have bibles there, which is rare these days, they also have new big screen TVs and a subscription to TCM (Turner Classic Movies). And it is not expensive. I have stayed there often on my 23 trips (and counting) back and forth to Illinois from Austin.
It was Job 28 actually, in The Message, about finding precious metals in the ground (“miners penetrate the earth’s darkness, digging away, searching in the suffocating darkness. Far from their homes, they cut a shaft and are lowered into it by ropes. They tunnel through the rock and find beautiful gems. They discover the origins of rivers, and bring earth’s secrets to light.”)
Wow, I never read that before, did I?
But, where is wisdom, Job asks despairingly. He can’t find it, and he doesn’t believe anyone will find it, and I guess part of him wants to go digging in the tunnels and never come up, since all his children and family have been killed. He’s in a killing field, and he has no way out, the words God spoke to Abram just a faraway echo, nearly lost in the hills:
I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you. And Abram went as the Lord directed him.
Job’s wife told him, “Curse God and die.” Job replied, “I know my redeemer lives.” But as he spoke he was, the text says, hanging on by “the skin of his teeth.”
Driving from Peoria to Urbana I listened to the rest of the book. Job’s friend Elihu runs Job through a gauntlet of guilt and praises God in several speeches. Then God himself speaks, “from the eye of a violent storm.”
“Pull yourself together, Job. Up on your feet! Stand tall! I have some questions for you, and I want some straight answers.”
Where were you when I formed the earth?
Job and his friends must know they are in for it. I hold my breath. God is angry.
Tell me, since you know so much! Who decided on its size? Certainly you’ll know that!
God gives no quarter.
Do you presume to tell me what I’m doing wrong? Are you calling me a sinner so you can be a saint? Do you have an arm like my arm? Can you shout in thunder the way I can? Go ahead, show your stuff.
The wonderful thing is how Job does not avert his eyes, nor does he minimize either his mistakes or his shame. And God blesses him for it.
My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. And the Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part. Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. And so Job died, an old man and full of years.
Back in Urbana I spent a couple of hours with a friend and her very new baby girl and then another friend who still pitches softball in his 77th year. Their lives are sometimes blessed and sometimes not. Like me, like all of us, they keep on praying, and keep on looking up at God with the very precious words Job taught us, “I know that my redeemer liveth.”
And we won’t any of us have to live 140 years before we approach the gates of Heaven.
(Genesis 12, Psalm 33, Hebrews 4, Matthew 7)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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