Darkness

My spirit is broken; my days are extinct;
the graveyard is ready for me.
Job 17:1

So, one reason why I'd been hesitant to keep up with my Bible-reading plan last week and the week before that was that I'm going through Job and I honestly didn't really know how to read through it. Between the introduction to Job's situation and God showing up at the end, there's a whole lot of dialogue that I've been grappling to be able to understand rightly. I do believe that it's all God's perfect word, so the struggle is not as to whether or not it's accurate or trustworthy, but rather wondering how God intends for it to minister to his people. The confusing part for me is that Job is righteous but at the same time at the end he gets rebuked by God for his attitude in the things he ends up saying. That, and Job's friends (the "miserable comforters") are clearly off. They say things that may seem (or be) true, but in their counsel as a whole, they are totally wrong about Job, God, and the nature of suffering.

I was also getting kind of depressed reading it. (This also kind of happened to me while I was reading Ecclesiastes this time through.) Because I'm following the Bible-reading plan, I'm being forced to go through it a little at a time, not just kind of skim over the parts that are sad/depressing to the happy/resolved parts of the books. I'm still in the middle of Job, but in it God's giving me a deeper perspective this reading through. I've been really blessed by the example of this godly, righteous, God-seeker in the midst of terrible suffering.

I'm seeing that...

1. The Bible understands the falleness of this world, and its effects, like no other book.

Scripture acknowledges the "valley of the shadow of death" that a follower of God can go through in a way that I don't think you can find in any other place. It's not an nihilistic, "this is all pointless" worldview that actually ends up undermining the reality of the pain we go through (if everything is meaningless, isn't pain? Why do we even care if bad things happen? Why does it hurt so much and why do we feel so deeply like we're being torn apart, like "It shouldn't be like this"?) And it's not saying that people always suffer as punishment because of what they've done (where Job's friends have it wrong). Nor does it tell us to deny pain or merely gloss over it.

In Scripture, there is not only an explanation for the suffering in this world and an ultimate promise for a solution, but it's so real. We actually see suffering and pain first-hand. Job is from the onset presented as a righteous, blameless man. He responds in worship to God and acknowledges God the whole time (he's turning to God in prayer during most of it), but I mean, Job curses the day he was born, says that it would have been better for him to be a stillborn child and hopes for death. And it's not just one verse or one chapter, or an acknowledgment of "Job suffered," it's a huge bulk of the book's 42 chapters and in powerfully raw poetry.

2. There really is no hope apart from God. I'm reading a chapter a day and I'm really looking forward to the end. It's kind of what happened to me when I was recently reading through Ecclesiastes (and like I said before, getting depressed) where I felt like all I may hope or find meaning in was being stripped from my heart as I read Solomon's words. As I read Job and it's so dark, the light of Christ is becoming ever clearer and more precious to me.

3. We may never know the "why." Job never does.

4. I need to pray that I would not be one of the "miserable comforters" like Job's friends.

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Here's a good article on suffering from The Village Church: Seven Thoughts On Suffering