Monday 19th May 2008 - Job 7
1 Human life is like forced army service, like a life of hard manual labour, 2 like a slave longing for cool shade; like a worker waiting to be paid. 3 Month after month I have nothing to live for; night after night brings me grief. 6 My days pass by without hope, pass faster than a weaver's shuttle. 7 Remember, O God, my life is only a breath; my happiness has already ended. 11 No! I can't be quiet! I am angry and bitter. I have to speak. 12 Why do you keep me under guard? Do you think I am a sea monster? 13 I lie down and try to rest; 14 But you---you terrify me with dreams; you send me visions and nightmares 15 until I would rather be strangled than live in this miserable body. 16 I give up; I am tired of living. Leave me alone. My life makes no sense. 17 Why are people so important to you? Why pay attention to what they do? [GNB]
These past few weeks I have led a number of funerals of friends or relations of church members. Suffering and death seem so much nearer home at such times and it is easy to see how so many people blame God in various ways for his apparent indifference to suffering that seems undeserved, for catastrophes that seem arbitrary in the way that they happen. And as one thinks of recent events in Burma and China it seems even more difficult to see what God is at. So this week as we explore some chapters in the book of Job, maybe we shall get a little insight.
Job is an upright man, but is subject to suffering that seems quite unimaginable and it seems to him quite undeserved. In fact, the narrator tells us, Job’s plight is undeserved – indeed it seems almost a game. So, from Job’s point of view he has a complaint against God – just like so many in our world today. And he expresses it so bitterly, and from our point of view, with justification.
Does he get an answer?
Like many of our prayers he does get an answer, but it is not at all what he expected, or perhaps wanted. In verse 17, Job finds an answer that both satisfies and yet doesn’t.
Why are people so important to you? Job asks, unwittingly revealing that he can see that God does find us important – important enough to pay attention to what we do.
What a thought! Whatever we do, however much we suffer or however we complain or worry or live our lives – God does pay attention to us. Is that something you can live with today? | 