I am an avid Bible reader, and have been one since 1995; by the grace of God. Indeed, this is where it all started for me; i.e. where the love of theology has come from. But I’m afraid this reality about who I am doesn’t come through enough in my posts; so in an effort to remedy that I’m hoping to post reflective posts on wherever I’m at in my Bible reading at that point. I’m currently in the book of Job, and one of my favorite passages of Scripture is found in Job 19. Let me share the section I’m thinking of, and you’ll see the passages I particularly like emboldened. I will share more on the other side.

¹³ “He has alienated my family from me my acquaintances are completely estranged from me. ¹⁴ My relatives have gone away; my closest friends have forgotten me. ¹⁵ My guests and my female servants count me a foreigner; they look on me as on a stranger. ¹⁶ I summon my servant, but he does not answer, though I beg him with my own mouth. ¹⁷ My breath is offensive to my wife; I am loathsome to my own family. ¹⁸ Even the little boys scorn me; when I appear, they ridicule me. ¹⁹ All my intimate friends detest me; those I love have turned against me. ²⁰ I am nothing but skin and bones; I have escaped only by the skin of my teeth. ²¹ “Have pity on me, my friends, have pity, for the hand of God has struck me. ²² Why do you pursue me as God does? Will you never get enough of my flesh? ²³ “Oh, that my words were recorded, that they were written on a scroll, ²⁴ that they were inscribed with an iron tool on lead, or engraved in rock forever! ²⁵ I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. ²⁶ And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; ²⁷ I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me![1]

I don’t really want to try and wax eloquent, but I do want to share from the heart as I reflect upon this passage.

Job obviously was no stranger to human suffering, indeed, we might call him a ‘type’ of the Suffering Servant; in fact I think we’d have exegetical (intertextual) warrant for that. But look at the depth of his suffering given poetic voice in the passage I’ve shared; like many of the Psalms Job moves from utter despair to utter hope. What I love the most about Job’s hope is the contrast we see between the God that he has come to know through his suffering with the God that his “friends” throughout the pages of Job presume to know as the true God. Indeed Job seems to have the same conception of God that his friends have, in the beginning, but as we progress through the book we see an intimacy forged, and knowledge of God gained in and through the suffering Job experiences. It’s as if everything else is torn away, and Job is shorn down to his bare bones; what he finds there is the hope of the Incarnate God (Deus incarnandus). This seems to be an inescapable observation, that is that Job had an idea of the ‘incarnation’ (maybe thinking back to the Genesis theme of God walking in the cool of the garden, and projecting that out proleptically as a real and coming hope). Job also seems to have an understanding of the resurrection; this is all amazing to me. Ostensibly Job is one of the earliest books of the Bible, at least the history it covers, and yet here we have a man who somehow knows the Covenant God, Yahweh, and somehow has an idea about incarnation and resurrection.

What I’m impressed with most is the idea that death and suffering, in God’s economy, within his covenant with humanity (typified in Israel) leads the submitted person to the reality that our only hope is the incarnation and the resurrection of God in Christ for all of us. I see this as the ‘depth dimension’ of what Job is about; that suffering and death only lead us deeper into God. As the Apostle Paul opined ‘he had the sentence of death written upon him so that he wouldn’t trust himself but in the One who raises the dead.’ Job had this same Pauline expectation and hope driven into him through the death and suffering he was pushed up against.

This reality, at least to me, is not the most comforting thing. I mean it does portend that we will and must go through all types of tribulation as we enter the kingdom of Christ, in the kingdom come who is Christ; but then there is this ultimate type of hope. And even in the immediate as Paul also knew, and Job came to know, God’s grace is sufficient and heightening even in the deepest depths; so elevating, in fact, that we get to see God’s face, his glory, in Christ in ways we never have before. For Job this meant that he got to know God in a personal and relational way, contrary to his friends who walked away from the experience only frustrated by the fact that all they were able to do was project a god from their own insecurities that in the end was found wanting by the true and living God.

There is something to be said for suffering before God. It isn’t that we can say it desirable, or easy; or even part of what God ultimately desires. The most we can say about human suffering is that it isn’t something that is absent in God; he is present with us in the deepest of ways because he freely and graciously elected the human predicament for himself to not be God without us but with us in Jesus Christ. In other words, human suffering (death), and all the angst and alienation we experience in our daily lives, to one degree or another, has come to have ultimate and immediate value because God has freely chosen that his life for us be cruciform in shape. He can sympathize with our weaknesses in ways that no one else can. I know that from experience, and I’m sure many of you do as well.

Job is one of the most Christ anticipating books in the canon of Scripture; at least I think so. And now you can see why I might think that.

[1] Job 19, NIV.