TILL HE COMES Blog

“Go to church and sin!
    Attend Bible studies and multiply your sins!
Volunteer to clean the church.
   Faithfully tithe your 10%.
Praise Jesus for all He has given you.
   Thank God for your many blessings.
For these are the things, Oh Christian, you love to do,”
    says the Lord God.  

“I hate your pot lucks.
    Nor do I delight in your Christian concerts.
Though you give generously to support the building fund,
   And donate faithfully to the Christian organizations,
I will not even look at these many gifts.

“Cease your many sermons,
    Stop writing your faithful blog.
Get out of your pew,
   Put away all your Christian books.

“When you fast, I will not listen.
   Though you cry out, I will not hear.
I will not accept your offerings
   And sacrifices of praise.

“Take away from me the noise of your many songs,
   Your numerous prayers are an abomination!
Quit playing the guitars, banging on the drums, 
   And raising your hands in praise.
Stop trampling the parking lots 
   In your eagerness to get to church.

“Sunday morning, Sunday night.
    Wednesday evening, Friday morning.
I hate all your meetings.
   I despise your numerous studies.
They are all evil in my sight.

“Instead, let justice roll down like a waterfall,
    And righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
   I want you do justice, love kindness,
And walk humbly with your God.”

———————————

Offended? Try these:
Isaiah 1:12-13
Amos 4:4-5
Amos 5:21-24
Jeremiah 14:12
Hosea 6:6
Micah 6:6-8

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I have long thought that nothing in culture is so good that it can be accepted “as is.” Also, nothing in culture is so twisted and evil that it is beyond the scope of redemption. God can take anything and turn it around to bring glory to Him. God can take anybody and raise them up to glory and honor. Each one of us is the perfect example.

However, while I believe that everything is redeemable, not every aspect about everything can be redeemed.  

Last week, I read the following comment by N. T. Wright who says it much better than I: “Christians are neither chameleons, changing color to suit their surroundings, nor rhinoceroses, ready to charge at anything in sight. There is no straightforward transference between any item of ordinary culture and the gospel since all has been distorted by evil; but likewise there is nothing so twisted that it cannot be redeemed, and nothing evil in itself.” (p 7).

So look around. Who have you given up on? Who is “beyond reach”? Who is “too far gone”? What places, countries, customs, events, holidays, and festivals have you written off as “of the devil”? Take those, and begin to think and pray about how God might want to redeem them for Himself.

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In the first several posts of this series I raised the question about how God deals with Job in the book of Job, why I am asking the question in the first place, and some of my preliminary thoughts on a possible solution. In this final post, I will state the tentative solution itself. Of course, some of the recent comments on the previous posts have been making me rethink even this tentative solution. You all are awesome!

Tentative Solution

The primary problem we seem to have with how God treats Job is that Job doesn’t know what is going on. It would be one thing if Job were in on the divine wager: “Psst…Hey Job! God here. I’m gonna teach that pesky Satan a lesson, and I need to use you. You’ll probably lose everything, including your kids, get real sick, and everyone will tell you just to curse me, but hang in there, and I’ll reward you. What do you think? Shhh! Here comes Satan! Wink once for yes, twice for no!”

If that had been the case, and Job had agreed, we might view Job as more of a hero than a victim. (Of course, there would then be the issue of Job being willing to let his kids die…but we’ll leave that alone). People all the time are asked to do hard things for the family, or their country, sometimes at great personal cost. If they agree, they are rightfully viewed and treated as heroes.

So if Job was really God’s champion as I suggested in the previous post, then why didn’t God let Job know what was going on?

The reason, I believe, is that He couldn’t! To tell Job what was going to happen to him would be cheating. Satan, if he found out about it (which he probably would have – he’s a crafty creature), would have cried “foul!” He could have accused God of stacking the deck. (Bullet pointed out that God’s foreknowledge kind of does this too. It’s an interesting point. However, notice that Satan didn’t seem to think that God knew what Job was going to choose. Hmmmm…).

So the problem is that to truly be a champion for the challenge that Satan proposes, Job must necessarily be ignorant of what is going on behind the scenes. God cannot tell Job what is going on, because that would ruin the terms of the challenge.

Here is one possible solution: Since the Bible clearly reveals that we are in a war, anyone who chooses to follow God knows that he or she may be called up to the front lines. When one chooses to follow God, they are, in a sense, enlisting in God’s army, or at the bare minimum, signing up for the Army Reserves. And just like in the Army, those who serve in the hardest areas move up in rank and responsibility. The higher you go, the harder your assignments get.

All of us who follow God need to have this sort of mentality. I think Job had this mentality. I doubt he became “the most righteous man on the face of the earth” through a life of ease and comfort. He (like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, and the Prophets) probably became the man he was through many toils, trials, and troubles.

So when it came time for God to choose a champion, He had a good man for the job (pun intended). Job didn’t know exactly what was going on, but I believe He knew that whatever God was doing, it was part of the ongoing war, and the best thing Job could do was remain loyal. So Job is truly a hero after all.

Some Final Thoughts

I know this answer is not fully satisfactory. That’s why it’s tentative.

However, with this perspective on the book of Job, I am now viewing the book as a paradigm for human history. In some sense, we could be a grand “experiment” to answer some Satanic challenge to God. Maybe God created humans just to prove something to Satan (I’m not sure what), and be a lesson to angels (fallen and unfallen). If so, then we are God’s champions, and part of the fight is that God cannot let us in on the terms of the wager lest it affect our behavior and thus, the outcome.

In a similar way, Job is also the Bible in summary. In the Garden, all things were at peace, and Adam and Eve enjoyed life. Then Satan shows up and destroys everything. At the end of the book (both Job and the Bible), everything is restored – even better than it was before! In the meantime, there are tests, trials, and people coming around to tell us to just curse God and die.

Well, that’s all for now. It is 11:55pm, so although this post needs lots of polishing and editing (and probably lots of clarification), I’m headed for bed.

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Many people have difficulties with how God treats Job in the opening chapters of the book of Job. I raised some of these questions is my opening post of of this series, and then last time, explained why I was asking these questions in the first place. Now I want to begin to propose a solution to this dilemma. This post contains some background premises that form the basis to my tentative solution. I will post the conclusion tomorrow.

The Background Premises

First, I do believe that the events described in the book of Job truly did happen in history. However, if you believe Job is simply a parable, a story of fiction to make a point, I won’t argue with you. However, since I also believe the Bible is inspired by God, even if Job is just a story, I still have to ask why God inspired the author to write the story in the first place. We still have to ask ourselves what the story says about how God deals with humans, and what is going on behind the scenes in some (but not all) of the tragedies and difficulties of human life. In a way, the author is trying to answer the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”

Second, I do believe (as some of the comments noted) that the book of Job is the earliest book of the Bible. It was probably written during the reign of King David or King Solomon, but had an oral tradition that went way back to before the time of Abraham. This is important because I believe (as I think Flo pointed out), that in a way, the entire rest of the Bible was written to provide an answer for the questions raised by the book of Job. This means that if you have problems with how God treats Job, you are reading the book correctly! If you don’t have problems with how God treats Job, let me suggest you have a poor view of what kind of a God we worship! I believe the book is supposed raise questions about God and His dealings with His creation. And the answers to these questions are found in the rest of Scripture.

Third, one my favorite things to study is the historical/cultural background of the books of the Bible.  Reading Job from this perspective, it seems that the opening chapters of Job are like a call for champions from two warring tribes. In the Ancient Near East (ANE), sometimes battles could be fought and won simply by sending out a single champion from each opposing side to engage in mortal combat (remember David and Goliath?). Satan chooses the circumstances of life as his champion, and God chooses Job. The goal is to get Job to curse God. However, unlike such contests in the ANE, the victor of this battle does not gain mastery over the other (that contest comes later during the Satan vs. Jesus battle).

This battle theme permeates the entire Bible (e.g., see Eph 6:10-20). God is a God at War. This earth is the war zone. We are not here on planet earth as part of a vacation cruise through a cosmic wonderland, but instead find ourselves in the middle of a battle between two powerful enemies: God, the Creator of all, and Satan, who wants to be God. This is part of the reason we find so much wrong with our world.

Fourth, this war is not about us. Too much of our theology is man-centered. I sometimes hear it taught that since God is love, and He is a relational God, He created us because He wanted to have a relationship with part of His creation. How egotistical and self-centered of us! I’m not saying God doesn’t want to have a relationship with us, but that is not the primary reason He created us. I’m sure I’ll get some people calling me a heretic for saying such a thing, but the fact of the matter is that as humans, we always want to put ourselves at the center of everything. Remember when the church taught that the earth was the center of the universe and the sun, moon and stars all orbited around us? Guess what? God does not orbit around us either.

I do not think God created us so that He could battle Satan for our souls. That just seems foolish and petty. This battle is not about our souls, as if whoever gathers the most souls wins. Instead, I believe this war is about God trying to teach something to Satan and his angels. Satan, of course, is trying to prove God wrong. (By the way, isn’t it interesting that the created being in the universe who knows the most about God believes that God can be wrong and that God can be defeated? What does that say about Satan’s theology? What does it say about ours?) There are hints throughout Scripture that God created us to teach the angels (cf. 1 Pet 1:12). What are we teaching them? I have some speculative ideas, but I’m not getting into them here.

These four things are some preliminary ideas that helped form my tentative solution to the Job Problem, which I will post for your consideration tomorrow.

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On Friday, we looked briefly at the Parable of the Four Soils and how it applies to all people.

Ideally, if we are good planters for the Kingdom of God, we want to be planting seeds in the best soil. It is this soil that gives a 3000%, 6000%, or 10,000% return on your investment. But who is that soil? If you look in the average church, we think that the good soil is the rich, powerful, pretty people. Those with seminary degrees and big smiles. But rather than getting big returns from these people, it seems they take and demand more than they give and serve. Hmmm…maybe they are not good soil after all.

Then I started to think about soil. What makes good soil? When I was young, my mom had some flower gardens, and every spring, she would go down to the lawn and garden store, and buy bags of “Manure” to put in her gardens. One year I asked her, “Mom, what is manure?” She said, “It’s cow poop.” What made mom’s garden grow? Poop.  

What makes good soil? Good soil is that which has a lot of nutrients in it. Good soil is that which has a lot of fertilizer. Excuse me for putting it this way, but I am becoming convinced that the good soil people are those who have a lot of sh*t in their lives. Which people are these? The people we would normally think of as “bad people.” Sinners.

And yet in most of our churches, we work hardest to keep these people out. We say “come as you are” but the super fine print says “only when you can act like us, talk like us, and look like us.”

But when we look at Jesus, who did He pick to work with, minister to, and pour His life into? Tax collectors, sinners, thieves, murderers, prostitutes, drunkards. Why? He knew a good investment when He saw one. In bad people, Jesus saw fields upon fields of rich, fertile soil just waiting to be planted. Bad people make good soil.

So who are you and your church trying to seek after, love, and embrace?

(P.S. Credit goes to Neil Cole and his book Organic Church for most of this idea. Buy this book and read it!)

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OK, this crisis series is starting to depress and bore me, so this will be my last post on it. I’m learning more and more every day, and so I am realizing the series could go on forever. But I want to move on. So in this post, I will close with three things: Some advice for those who have friends facing a crisis, some advice for those facing a crisis, and a story my wife ran across yesterday which sums it all up for us.

1. For those who have friends facing a crisis.

If you have a friend facing a crisis, just go be with them. Just listen to them vent. Don’t chide them for their emotions, fear, anger, hurt, despair. Please don’t quote Scripture unless they ask you to. Don’t offer theological truths which you think will help them. Don’t ask them what sin they might have committed to make God discipline them. In other words, don’t throw rocks. If you are afraid of saying the wrong thing, don’t say anything at all.

Most of the time, hurting people just want others to be there. If you see something tangible that they need, offer to provide it for them, food, clothing, money, helping hands, resources. The only intangible aid you should offer is prayer, and only say “I’ll pray for you” if you are also thinking of ways to be an answer to your own prayers.

Though our crisis is not catastrophic, my father died when I was two, and my mother says that what I have written above holds true in that sort of crisis as well. A friend of mine lost his brother in a hiking accident a few years ago, and he confirms this as well.

2. For those facing a crisis.

One of the things that bothered my wife and I initially is how when we shared with others that we were going through a crisis, they responded by sharing a crisis that they were facing or had faced in their own lives. Our first reaction was, “Don’t try to turn this around to you. I’m the one in pain!” But then we realized, “Wow, how self-centered is that?”

Yes, pain hurts, and sometimes life stinks. But it’s this way for everybody at times. And one way to get over your own pain, fear, hurt, and disappointment, is to realize that it’s part of life, that others are facing it too (and many of them much more than you are), and that you can either have a pity party for yourself, or try to help others through their own pain, which in turn helps you. And to help others through their own pain, go back and look at point number one above.

3. A Story

One day a Rabbi stood on a hill overlooking a certain city. The Rabbi watched in horror as a band of Cossacks on horseback suddenly attacked the town, killing innocent men, women, and children. Some of the slaughtered  were his own disciples. Looking up to heaven, the Rabbi exclaimed, “Oh, if only I were God.”

An astonished student, standing nearby, asked, “But, Master, if you were God, what would you do differently?” The Rabbi replied, “If I were God I would do nothing differently. If I were God, I would understand.”

Like it or not, I think the Rabbi is right. The best we can do in a crisis (and maybe the most we should do) is simply say, “I don’t understand.”

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