renewing my mind

I'm not quite done with our friend Job just yet, but I wanted interrupt our regularly scheduled posting to share with you a class that Kaari and I are taking at our church right now called The Truth Project.

The Truth Project is a 13-week video/discussion series which looks at some of the biggest and most basic questions facing us as human beings living in a world of competing philosophies and worldviews, a world that is increasingly antagonistic to God. The course is led by Del Tackett, an engaging, intelligent, and gracious instructor.

This series asks some big questions: What is truth? What do I believe? How do I know that what I believe is really real?

Here's a teaser:

What I love about this course is that it's not about rote memorization or learning the answers to get a good grade on a test. It's about inviting the kind of inner transformation that can only come about by the renewing of the mind.

reflections on job: part 4 {the mystery of God in the shadows}

I'll admit it: once upon a time, I thought Job just needed to suck it up. You know, why couldn't he basically pull himself up by his bootstraps and take it like a man? Yeah Job, I know it stinks, but it's temporary and you know this. Just trust God. I mean, how hard is that?

Add a few years, a dash of experience, a lot of tears and bake it all in the ovens of humility (fired by a few less-than-pleasant experiences of my own) and I think better of him now. Measuring sticks of suffering aside, he experienced several profound personal losses, one succeeding the other with scarcely a breath in between. After bearing the losses of his wealth, children, and property, after being afflicted with sores from his scalp to his heels, after bearing with the words of a wife who wants to see his suffering end even at the cost of rejecting God, he still offers praise. I don't know if I could do that. I think I could be pious about it all for maybe a minute, but when the reality of the loss and the pain set in, I am not sure that praise is what would rise to the surface of my soul.

In reading the text, we have the distinct advantage of having more of a bird's eye view than he did. We see God and Lucifer in conversation, the accuser bartering with God for how he might tempt Job to defy God altogether. We see and know the enemy. And we see that God really isn't at all worried about how it will turn out.

I'm no expert, but I'm guessing Job was knowledgeable about the stories of the creation and the fall of man. I'm fairly certain he knew about Adam and Eve, the deception and temptation, and how man was cut off from God with just one little bite of fruit. He must have known there was an enemy. But still, if Job's friends are any indicator, popular theology of the time sought to explain the dilemma of human suffering by stating that if you're good, God blesses you and if you sin, God punishes you. Therefore (conclude his friends), Job must have done something offensive of which he needs to repent. Nowhere in their explanation is the enemy mentioned.

It's amazing how quickly I forget what is true when my feet are to the fire. And maybe Job also lost sight of the fact that God is good and just and has our best in mind; that He is our defender and rescuer and redeemer and His eye is always upon us; that nothing that happens to us happens apart from His permission and that we are more protected and safe than we realize. And it also seems he lost sight of the fact that there's an enemy who takes the best possible advantage of the fact that we so easily forget about him.

The enemy operates in darkness and deception and trickery. He is good at averting our gazes from where they should be. He wants us to forget that there is something more true than anything else. The enemy wants us to call God into question and to place Him on the witness stand. He wants us to think God caused our pain and maybe even enjoys watching us suffer. He wants us to think that if God really loved us, He wouldn't let this happen. And if God really doesn't love us, then we may as well give up and go home. He wants us to direct our anger at God, to accuse Him of causing, allowing, and perpetuating our pain. He wants us to wonder if our lives of faith and devotion are an elaborate sham. He wants us to abandon our faith not in a quiet, unassuming way, but in a fist-shaking, screaming-match, throat-scraping, very public, broadcast-on-the-5-o'clock-news, there's-no-doubt-about-it way.

The enemy's design is to hem us in, to shorten the range of our vision until we cannot see beyond the boundaries of our own pain. In drawing our attention away from God, he takes us captive and makes us his hostages. It's like Stockholm syndrome in a way: we align ourselves with our captor, agreeing with the deceptions and doubts he drives into our hearts. Unable to retaliate in any other way, desiring to protect ourselves, we turn those doubts and deceptions into weapons and direct them at God. He's supposed to be our protector and rescuer, right? If He's so good and our pain is so bad, why does He not come and save us? And when God does not answer, our agreements with the enemy begin to take root even more deeply. It is a dark and lonely place to be and the questions and doubts continue to cut off our souls from the light of day.

I am certain that not even God would dare minimize or make light of anyone's pain. And while this may sound ridiculous at first, I believe that the only thing to do is the one thing the enemy doesn't want us to do and fix our gaze on the face of God, to know and affirm:

The LORD is righteous in all his ways
and loving toward all he has made.
The LORD is near to all who call on him,
to all who call on him in truth.

Psalm 145:17-18


Without knowing why and without being trite or overly pious about it, without intending to be the least bit dismissive, I believe the greatest act of defiance against our enemy is to worship our God.

Even so, a number of weighty questions remain.

God is unbearably quiet in most of the text of Job. And as I sit in my own pile of ashes in a way, I'm wondering about what I can learn from Job by turning his story over and over in my heart. I wonder what He is doing in the shadows as He listens to Job's friends all but accuse him of some vile sin time and again. I wonder what was in His heart as He watched Job scrape at his sores with bits of broken pottery. I wonder what He was thinking as Job and asked why?, over and over again. I wonder how He held himself in silence when Job requested an audience with God so Job could make his case. I wonder how His heart felt as He counted and collected Job's tears.

But He is there. He is present, hidden by the shadows. And He is not done with Job ... not yet. Not even close.

reflections on job: part 3 {asking questions & making a case}

Why is life given to a man

whose way is hidden,

whom God has hedged in?

For sighing comes to me instead of food;

my groans pour out like water.

What I feared has come upon me;

what I dreaded has happened to me.

I have no peace, no quietness;

I have no rest, but only turmoil.

Job 3:23-26

This is at the end of Job's first speech since the onslaught of his pain and loss. His friends have come to be with him and seeing how much he is suffering, sit with him on the ground in silence for seven days (2:13). Just sitting. Just being present with him. Seven whole days and nights (and we all know that when you're in the thick of it, the nights are the hardest).

These first words out of his mouth are heavy with sadness: he laments the day he was born, wondering why he did not perish at birth (3:11), or why he is given life when his days are so bitter (3:20-21). There is no rest, nor is there any escape for him in his waking or living hours; death seems to be the only way out.

His friends, being the good Jewish boys they are, seek to explain to Job his pain. A very simplistic way of summarizing their theology is that if you're good and obedient, God blesses you. If you offend God, he curses you. They tell Job that God is disciplining him and that he should evaluate himself closely and confess his sin to God, do his best to make amends and live a righteous life. Job maintains before his friends that he has not offended God, that he has not exacted any injustice. In fact, Job desires to "speak to the Almighty / and to argue my case with God" (13:3).

From chapters 3 through 31, Job and his friends go round and round with arguments and answers to arguments. Job maintains his integrity and his friends try to convince him that his suffering is God's chastisement for him. When Elihu shows up in chapter 32, he tries to put both Job and his friends in their places: his friends are unable to answer Job's arguments or prove him wrong. To Job, he says that God does no wrong or evil toward any man (34:10), but "those who suffer he delivers in their suffering; / he speaks to them in their affliction" (36:15).

If I were Job, I'd be asking: How? How is he delivering me in this suffering? From what is He delivering me? How is He speaking? God has not said a thing.

I'm struck by the fact that in this span of more than thirty chapters (and who knows how many days and nights), God is alarmingly silent. While the pain continues and while his friends argue and while Job wonders and asks and maintains his integrity, God is quiet. The suffering continues, and Job wants to make his case before God, who does not answer him. At least not yet.

This song is one that has stayed with me since I first heard it about ten years ago. There is some comfort in knowing that Christ did not spare himself from any aspect of our human lives, including suffering; in His last moments He knew what it was to feel like God had disappeared, extricated Himself from the scene completely. But even in light of this, the questions continue and we wonder why, and when it will stop. Job asked, and I think no matter what kind of suffering we face, his questions are representative of those we ask when we are hedged in, when the pain just won't stop.

Please, God. Please. Answer me.

This song has no answers. But I love that in it, the questions I'm sometimes too afraid to ask are said out loud. There's a certain not-aloneness in that, and an inherent permission to feel the same.

NOTE: For some reason, the music doesn't want to embed in the post. I've put the song over on the sidebar.


Rich Mullins
"Hard to Get"