God has an effect on human beings. The light of his glory is a potent spotlight on the true condition of a man’s soul. God will have the same effect on all mankind, eventually.

Job 42:5-6:

“I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
   but now my eye sees you;
therefore I despise myself…”

But God is gracious. Some will be able, along with Job, to finish this verse.

Job 42:6:

“…and [I] repent in dust and ashes."

Praise God for his grace in illuminating his Word to his church and allowing us to ‘repent in dust and ashes’ while it is still called “today”.

People have a lot of different ideas about God and Jesus and the Christian life. Many of them may not necessarily be right, but people can still have a fruitful walk while believing and adhering to them. The rightness or wrongness of our theology isn’t what makes us Christians. God makes us Christians through our faith in his redeeming power.

But I think there is at least one disposition that is a kind of prerequisite. Whether it’s understood with this language, or in a less concrete or intellectual sense.

It’s from the end of Job where God is rebuking Job and his friends for their presumptuous attitudes.

“Who has first given to me, that I should repay him?
    Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine”

Christians must believe that God is all and that we have no claim that we can stake before him. We cannot believe that God owes us something. This would be contrary to grace, which is the only ground our salvation stands on.

We know from the rest of scripture that Job wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t ultimately blameless. But he was innocent of the crimes his ‘friends’ accused him of. The calamity that befell him wasn’t the result of his sin, but God’s prerogative. But his friends continue to come at him with theological sounding arguments, which amounted to condemnation of him in his difficult life situation.

Job responds to them. Job 16:2-5:

"I have heard many such things;
    miserable comforters are you all.
Shall windy words have an end?
   Or what provokes you that you answer?
I also could speak as you do,
   if you were in my place;
I could join words together against you
   and shake my head at you.
I could strengthen you with my mouth,
   and the solace of my lips would assuage your pain.”

I think that Job’s words are echoed in many, many who have been bruised and burned by Christians and our American Church culture. Difficult situations and challenges have befallen them and rather than patiently and quietly empathize and encourage, we attempt to define and classify, and ultimately solve the problem with a kind of spiritual algorithm.

But this is a problem. Because it amounts to very little more than judgment on our part.

I think the human experience is vastly complicated and confusing. Even for the one experiencing it, let alone those around him. Although spiritual as it may be, I think we err when jumping to conclusions about other people’s struggles and difficulties.

Although there is a time for careful examination of each other’s struggles, and there is a time for instruction, exhortation and rebuke. I think most of the time, it’s not. But rather, grace, patience, love and empathy.

Job 10:1-3:

"I loathe my life;I will give free utterance to my complaint;
   I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God, Do not condemn me;
   let me know why you contend against me.
Does it seem good to you to oppress,
   to despise the work of your hands
    and favor the designs of the wicked?”

The book of Job is kind the of go-to book for people in the midst of trials. But I think that Job presses on the major difficulty we all have underneath our trials: Why?

In the flesh, “just because” isn’t a satisfying answer. And some wager between God and the Devil seems even less settling. I think we would like to find comfort in understanding our plight. But I suspect that it’s an unreasonable request. As the book of Job affirms over and over again, God is not like us. He doesn’t think like us. He doesn’t operate like us. The difficulty we experience in this life is not something we’re probably going to get to understand. Maybe ever.

So, while the story of Job is often used to comfort the distressed, I think the Gospel, in all of its simplicity, should really go much farther in achieving that goal.

Job 5:7:

“For affliction does not come from the dust,
   nor does trouble sprout from the ground,
but man is born to trouble
   as the sparks fly upward.”

Because I cannot say it better myself, Matthew-Henry shares his thoughts on what seems like cutting poetry:

“We must not attribute our afflictions to fortune, for they are from God; nor our sins to fate, for they are from ourselves. Man is born in sin, and therefore born to trouble. There is nothing in this world we are born to, and can truly call our own, but sin and trouble. Actual transgressions are sparks that fly out of the furnace of original corruption. Such is the frailty of our bodies, and the vanity of all our enjoyments, that our troubles arise thence as the sparks fly upward; so many are they, and so fast does one follow another. “

I’ve written about how much I like storms before.

But today’s was different. I had gone outside to spend some time in scripture. I thought that the gentle rain and faint thunder would add a nice ambiance to the experience. For several minutes I read quietly and listened to the rain. Then, it seemed like out of nowhere, there was a flash of light and crack of thunder so intense that I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anything like it.

I’m a grown man and it sent my heart racing—not just because it was startling either. It was the kind of sound you could feel in your chest and joints and bones and you just knew there was real danger associated with it.

Within seconds the the rain became a downpour and I was no longer being kept dry under the porch overhang.

My heart was still pounding and I was still left anxious from the now much more aggressive storm. Then, as quickly as it came, it silent. No rain, no thunder. And I started thinking, as cliché as it might be, this phenomenon really does just scream, “God is here”. It’s no wonder whatsoever that so many of the Psalms use the imagery of storms and thunder and lightning to illustrate God and his movements.

I think for that flash, I got a small taste of what it means to ‘fear the Lord’.

He loads the thick cloud with moisture;
   the clouds scatter his lightning.
They turn around and around by his guidance,
    to accomplish all that he commands them
    on the face of the habitable world.

(Job 37:11-12)

Some people call death the great equalizer. But, I think there’s really a much greater equalizer: Birth. Think about it. Indeed all will die. But, where they die, in many cases how they die, and for many, many people when they die, is all very much dependant on status—financial, social, spiritual. So, yes, all will face death, but their status will bear heavily on that occasion.

But birth, birth is another story. All who are alive were born. But no one who is alive had any say in their birth. Some are born the rich and affluent, while others are born to the poor and destitute. Who can really claim greatness in the lot that was given to them?

Job expresses this idea in Job 31:13-15:

“"If I have rejected the cause of my manservant or my maidservant,
   when they brought a complaint against me,
what then shall I do when God rises up?
   When he makes inquiry, what shall I answer him?
Did not he who made me in the womb make him?
   And did not one fashion us in the womb?”

“Did not he who made me in the womb make him?” Job’s point is, although they may have been born into a less than desirable situation and he was born into another, the fact remains that the position was assigned by God, not chosen by him.

It seems to me that maybe, if we could allow this concept to penetrate our hearts and minds deeply, we would find our own prejudices more difficult to stomach.