No Good Answers

Job 38:25-27, 41:1-8, 42:1-6

 “No Good Answer”

31 July 2016 St. Andrew’s Military Chapel Singapore

We started off a few weeks ago with the phrase, “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” Now we get to enjoy the last few moments of the story and hear the familiar “and they lived happily ever after.” Right?

To quote Lee Corso, “Not so fast my friend.”

For chapter after chapter, God speaks to Job in a whirlwind and addressed Job’s complaints. Job finally got the audience with the creator he desired the whole time. He gets the chance to make his case, to have all of his pressing questions answered.

But, like a skilled criminal defense attorney, God redirects our focus and avoids ever answering the key questions we ask when hearing Job’s tale of woe.

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Why do people miss the cries of those who suffer?

Why does God allow suffering to continue even after people plea for help?

Not a single word about those questions. Just a bunch of poetry about who created the world. Or is it?

God never directly answers the pressing questions we have about Job’s story and that can be quite frustrating for our modern minds that want answers and reasons for everything. Much like the children we know and love who constantly ask why, we too want to know the why for any decision or event that impacts our lives. Answering why helps eliminate the unknown and can help us best process the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The answers help us to define the world on our terms

But, perhaps our understanding of the world isn’t the way in which God views the world. Perhaps we are looking at the world from the wrong perspective.

Based on his questions of Job, God views the world a bit differently than we tend to see the world and our place within it. We like to view ourselves as the center of, not just a part of, creation. So we seek order that fits our purposes and desires. We desire predictability and answers to our questions no matter the subject.

But, Job learns differently about creation. From inside the whirlwind, inside the chaos, God explains what is so fascinating about creation. In fact, its so fascinating that God describes the majesty of creatures humans deem insignificant or odd. God takes delight in all of creation and, because it is created by God, it is unpredictable.

 Humanity isn’t the best at dealing with unpredictability. If fact, unpredictability tends to make people nervous. So, why would God create and love an unpredictable world? Annie Dillard helps answer this question when she writes, “What is going on here? The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork—for it doesn’t, not even inside the goldfish bowl—but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle.”

Much like the platypus, suffering doesn’t make much sense to us. Humanity is constantly looking for the theory of everything to order and explain all of creation. Suffering is disorder and disrupts our neatly ordered world.

Job never gets the answers to why such suffering entered his life. Nor was God ever going to provide easy answers to Job’s life or ours. We are never meant to understand God’s plan because as much as we hate to admit it, God is God and we are not. God is creator and we are created.

One of my Old Testament professors in Seminary, Ellen Davis translates Job 42:6 differently than what I read earlier. She reads it as, “therefore I recant and change my mind concerning dust and ashes.” And this is a key change of words. For Job isn’t repenting from asking hard questions of God. In fact, God appreciated him asking the questions, even if they were the wrong questions.

 God blesses Job for not following the bad theology of his friends and continuing to seek God in the midst of his suffering. God grants Job his audience and allows Job to see God through creation. Truly seeing creation changes Job and he allows himself to live into the unpredictability of creation. He starts to love with abandon, even breaking with cultural norms by the way he names his children as well as by honoring his daughters equally with his sons.

I can’t say why we suffer, I can’t explain why God doesn’t step in and stop it, nor can I fathom why God even allows it in the first place. God was there with Job in his suffering and his questions and he is there in ours as well. So, because of Job I know that God is there with me in my suffering. It may take a while for me to see through my pain and notice God beside me.

However, we can open our eyes to the bizarre wonder of creation all around us. So that, like Job, we finally are able to see the God of whom we have only heard for far too long.