The participation with God.
As an Old Testament study, we are on hermeneutical thin ice if we argue that Job believed God could suffer, much less that our suffering made us any more like God. If anything, Job seemed to say quite the opposite, that a transcendent God could never understand our very human suffering, arising as it does from our powerlessness and finitude. Yet in another sense, Job did understand God’s suffering in a way that Elihu never could. Job knew that the death of the innocent and the fat of the wicked were abhorrent in God’s sight, that it caused God pain. The three friends said, “Impossible!”. Elihu said, “God doesn’t even notice.” Job said “Speak for yourself, my God cares.” Otherwise, why would Job have wasted his breath directing his speech toward God? Somehow Job knew God to be compassionate, and therefore a God who concerned himself with Job’s pain.
Many years ago I spent a summer internship in Haiti, in the impoverished, voodoo infested highlands near the capital of Port-au-Prince. One’s first impressions of a person or a place are usually the most profound, and I had an impression of deep beauty and deep pain. The very trees that lined the road flamed with red blossoms, six-foot hedges of poinsettia bloomed all year round. Yet the deforested valleys were scarred with white, where tropical storms had created such runoff that the undercut limestone walls were crumbling into the valley floor, making these streams into rubble strewn wastelands as alien as the cratered moon. The slash-and-burn agriculture had created bedrock deserts out of lush rain-forest. Among the mobs of children were those with mottled red hair, characteristic of protein starvation, due not so much to want, as to neglect. The pain of a culture cobbled together out of a thousand African tribes under the slash of the slavemaster’s whip, finding in fear a religion that unified their many tongues. I stood one night, under a tropical moon so bright that I could tell red from blue, mourning the death of my host’s son, hearing the voodoo drums in the valley, feeling the pain of existence, crying out to God like a woman in labor, wordless tears washing my face–”God, don’t you know?” And though I never heard an answer, my pain was lessened, not because the world had become any better, but because God had heard, because my pain was shared. So it was with Job, when God appeared and he finally knew that God had heard his voice. Suffering, spiritual suffering, is solidarity with God.
The Benefits of Suffering
I have listed above some of the consequences of suffering, but have not yet applied them to the characters of this story. In one sense I really can’t apply it, because I would be putting words into their mouth. Imagine, for a moment, that you have a teary-eyed 3 year old who has just burned her fingers on the stove. After giving her a cup of ice water to hold her fingers in, you begin to tell her the benefits of her suffering. Chances are that she will respond poorly, not believing that you are truly sympathetic. In the same way, I can identify potential benefits, but whether the sufferer actually benefits remains a highly subjective response. Suffering, the same identical suffering, can either bless or destroy depending on the participant’s response.
To the Three
It may seem strange to say that Job’s suffering benefitted these men. They were such bitter enemies of Job’s religion, so intent on tearing down his defenses, so desirous of extracting a false confession, how can we say that his suffering was in any way beneficial to them? As Job tells them himself, “You see something dreadful, and you are afraid”. But it is exactly in showing them their fear, their duplicity, their disloyalty that Job’s suffering provided them a warning, a call to repentance. When Job, at God’s instruction, prayed for his friends, we can see that perhaps this suffering even provided for their salvation. Certainly someone wrote down the story of Job or at least composed and recited it. Surely that someone was present throughout the debates recorded in the book. Could it be that this book is testimony to the transforming power of Job’s suffering in the lives of his friends?
To Job
I am not the first to find some benefit for Job, nor will I be the last to be blasted for trying. Surely the restoration of Job’s fortunes and the birth of 10 more children–even if they were the most beautiful daughters in the land–surely these blessings were not the result of Job’s suffering. Indeed, he might have been even wealthier if he had had the capital to invest. Nor would one expect debilitating disease to make one more virile than before. No, it appears that these blessings were not a result of but in spite of his suffering. If one is to find a silver lining in Job’s trials, then it must lie somewhere between his final complaint and his restoration, somewhere between chapters 31 and 42. I cannot find much encouragement in Elihu’s speech, nor even in God’s. So I am astonished by Job’s reticence to speak in chapter 40.
However chapter 42 perhaps holds an answer that shows Job has finally obtained what he sought. If there is one thing this suffering has done, it has brought Job closer to God. Job answers God’s question “who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?” by replying that he has said things he didn’t understand because they were too wonderful for him. Now this is quite different from his previous complaint. God’s ways had been just as obscure to him then as well, but then they had been dark, heavy, and oppressive; now they are full of wonder. How did this transformation take place? Job’s next phrase indicates that God had asked this very question. “It happened,” Job replied, “when instead of just hearing you, or hearing about you, I saw you. That’s when my whole outlook changed.” Job’s suffering has not only brought him solidarity with God, it brought him into God’s very presence.
To God
If I was skating on thin ice before, now I am surely over my head! How can suffering benefit God? If God is transcendent, dwelling in unsearchable light in whom there is no shadow due to changing, who am I to claim that suffering can modify His already perfect condition? Let me tiptoe lightly around these lethal theological landmines, and say that we are talking not of God’s essence, which is transcendent, but of His interaction with Man, of His communication with Man, which is His concrete revelation. For whatever reason, God has chosen to interact in a causal way when He speaks to us. The court of heaven in Job 1 has convened to hear Satan’s accusations. These accusations and God’s response would not make a lot of sense if the order were inverted or scrambled. Therefore God takes the limitations of human existence into account when He deals with us. Suffering cannot benefit God’s essence, but it will impact on His revelation. Is that impact beneficial?
Let us go back to the “firebreak for evil” section, and ask, “Why does blood guilt pollute the land?” If we believed that God is totally free to enact any legislation He wants governing the spiritual realm, why does His law say that the innocent must suffer to stop another creature’s evil? I can not answer that, other than to say that God’s being is primary, and therefore God’s interaction with Man, His revelation, is limited by His essence. Thus the Bible says, “God cannot lie.” Somehow this question of suffering is tied into God’s essence and where that leads I cannot follow. Recognizing our inability to ask the limitless “Why?”, we nonetheless can still learn something about suffering and God from examining His revelation to us.
In our Augustinian section we argued for the existence of spiritual suffering, of disorder in the heavenly realm. In the section on pain we pointed out that suffering can be a firebreak for evil. Arguing from analogy, what is it that can stop the creeping spiritual darkness, the spreading negation of evil? Is it not a lamp or a light? Well if suffering is a firebreak for evil, could it not also be a spiritual light as well? Slow down, didn’t I just say that suffering is negation of all that is good, how then can it be something good in itself? This is the mystery of grace; that God can make something good out of suffering. But then is it correct to define suffering neo-Platonically as an absence of good? No, it is not entirely correct, and we must look to see what is the nature of this thing that God can use for both good and evil.
The Knowledge of Good and Evil was the title of a famous tree. Like that tree, created by God and declared “good”, suffering can be used for infinite gain or infinite loss. Suffering is the currency of heaven, redeeming sinners (Isaiah 53) and damning them (Isaiah 51). Suffering has been part of the human condition since the Garden, where God planted the tree of pain. And since the Fall, suffering has been the only way back into the Garden, where Adam once conversed with God. The story of Job is an inside-out Garden, a story of a man forced to eat of the tree and gaining knowledge “too wonderful for me” that led him back into God’s presence. The story of Job is a reversal of the Fall, a story in which God beats Satan at his own game. It becomes the archetypal story of victory over suffering and the defeat of death.