DO GOOD AND BAD BOTH COME FROM GOD?

(Preached on Sunday, October 5, 2003)

But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak.  Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”  In all this Job did not sin with his lips.                                        -Job 2:10

 

So there it is.  Job puts the question out there in all it boldness and bald-faced starkness.  “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God and not the bad?”

That is the question that haunts each of us, in one fashion or another, in the deep hours of the night.

What will be our stance toward all this when the going gets tough? 

When life doesn’t go as predicted, when internal or external forces interrupt the anticipated outcome of life, there are bound to be troublesome questions.

 

The story of Job strikes right at the heart of a commonly held view among religious people.  It is in the Hebrew scriptures and still popular today among many Christians — serve God and you will be blessed; serve false gods and you will be punished.

But life doesn’t always work out that way, does it?

And then the questions come: Why do the good suffer and the bad prosper?  What are we to do when life no longer makes any sense?  Where is God in the midst of all this pain and suffering, chaos and meaninglessness?

 

Job is one of the most honest books in the most honest book of all, the Bible.

Job takes head on some of the most frightening, deepest, most poignant questions confronting mortal human beings.

And Job doesn’t flinch. 

While it may not provide the answers, and it is a very good bet that it will not provide the answers that we might expect, or that we might like, we can be certain of one thing: Job will be extremely honest with us.

 

One reason we know Job is honest is the depiction of God from the very beginning is not very flattering.

I mean, come on, how flattering is the idea of God playing with our lives in the form of a friendly wager on our response to having our lives destroyed?

We human beings always struggle with our understanding of God, especially the God of the Bible, the God of Moses and the Jews and the Prophets and Jesus.

Conventional wisdom has always suggested that the true marks of deity are complete power and unqualified love, and the true God is held to possess both without reservation.

But that view always runs into trouble when held up against lived reality and human experience.

The life we live does not work as nicely or as well as conventional pop theology might anticipate.

On the one hand there are the deep disorders that seem vested int he created order itself — all the way from hurricanes and tornadoes, to epidemics of ravishing diseases and unearned disabilities.

On the other hand, there are waves of injustice in the world so deep and so dense, such as the terrible brutalities of the Nazi holocaust, the killing fields of Cambodia and Rwanda, the ethnic cleansing of Yugoslavia. 

Such realities raise severe questions about God’s power and God’s love. 

As Archibald MacLeish stated it in his prizewinning play “J.B.”: “If God is God he is not good.  If God is good he is not God.”

 

The biblical faith, though, the faith of Israel, the faith of Jesus, always holds in tension God’s power and God’s love.

It does so in an extremely honest manner that admits that there is also something troubling, something enigmatic, something endlessly disturbing and problematic about God.

This is not a God that fits neatly into any box.

This is a God who is both extremely jealous and wonderfully merciful.  This is a God who is too lively, too engaged, too rich and full of dramatic power ever to be channeled into neat systematic formulations.

This leaves God well beyond popular, safe, conventional religious views, but makes a way whereby every aspect of lived human life may be brought into the sphere of God’s holiness.

In other words, no aspect, not one, of life is outside of God.

In this richness, which goes well beyond normal church theology, everything is taken seriously, nothing is denied, and faith is the risk of letting all of life be open to God’s holiness, impinged upon by God and thereby transformed.

 

So, even as Job is extremely honest about this holy, mysterious, enigmatic God who is always at least slightly beyond our comprehending, yet, nevertheless, is always right there in the midst of us, Job does begin to offer us some understandings and some possible answers.

Let me stress they are only the mere hints of answers, but let me offer what some of them might be.

 

One hint of an answer is that God trusts Job.  That is suggested in the rather strange dialogue God has with God’s servant, “the adversary.”

God offers up Job as a prime example of God’s human creation because God trusts Job’s integrity and faith.

That theme is present throughout the scripture, for the stories of the Bible are not only a story of our faith in God.

They are also magnificent, tear-inducing stories of God’s faith in us.

We learn to trust as we realize we are being trusted.

We become responsible as we understand we are being handed responsibility as a gift.

The Bible describes a history created by God and human beings, each exerting power, sometimes in concert with one another, sometimes in opposition to one another.

We are God’s children, and like any good parent, God chooses to let her children go; let us be free, let us create just as God has created.

One hint of an answer is that God trusts us to deal with the world as God has created it, with both good and bad.

 

Another hint of an answer is in Job’s reply to his wife.

When she urges him to “curse God and die” he calls her on her foolishness and declares his faith: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?”

The young hospital chaplain was given the job of informing an African-American woman that her son had been tragically killed in an automobile accident.  She received the shocking news with shrieks of anguish, doubling over in grief and pain.  Then, suddenly, she straightened up and declared firmly, “It is the will of the Lord!”

This seemed to bring her composure and strength, but the young chaplain, in later reporting the incident to colleagues, shared that he was personally trouble that this woman believe that God wanted her boy to die.

And African-American chaplain on the staff immediately responded, “That’s not what she meant!  In our community, when chaos breaks into our lives, we believe it is important to affirm that God is still in control.  To say that something is ‘the will of the Lord’ doesn’t mean it is what God wanted to happen.  It means that even this has been taken into account.”

Not a fully satisfying answer, but like the answering question of Job, an answer based firmly in trust and faith in God, even if we don’t fully understand.

 

Finally, another hint of an answer growing out of Job’s reply in faith is that of the pastoral counselor who specializes in the treatment of addictive disorders.