Beware: it’s a long one.
Many authors do book reviews. I think I will do the same, but just a heads up: I read mostly nonfiction. The majority of what I read (that isn’t the Bible) are commentaries, monologues, and other books on the Bible.
I just finished “Piercing Leviathan: God’s Defeat of Evil in the Book of Job” by Eric Ortlund.
My studies of Job have mainly been regarding the Doctrine of Retribution and suffering, which is what it’s about, but though Eric Ortlund writes on the entire book of Job, his main focus is on God’s response to Job. In my early years, I used to read God’s response and find it beautiful and awe-inspiring. I’d actually not even read the rest of Job, just God’s response to him. So much power and wisdom. Ironically, when one does this, it doesn’t actually seem to answer the issue of suffering. Of course, everything must be read in context. So how does God’s response to Job’s demands/cries bring Job to his knees in repentance and worship? That is the question Eric asks. Because God doesn’t exactly answer Job’s questions. It almost seems like He totally eludes Job and rather humiliates him into repentance on first read. But if you look at it the way an ancient Semite would, you’d understand. This is why it’s so important to read the Bible as it was written to its audience, not as a 21st century westerner.
First: Why did God bring up Job in the first place? The satan (accuser) was questioning God’s policies of governing His creation. In effect, the satan was questioning God’s goodness, His justice, and righteousness. God could have easily shut the satan down like he does in Zech 3, but instead, He entertains the question. Why? Because who else is going to ask this? Us. Other divine council members. The question must be dealt with. And so, the perfect answer is Job. Some people don’t like the thought that God lets the satan put Him or His policies on trial (or to the challenge), in fact, Job also does this too, and Job is still called righteous afterwards. Don’t forget, God also let his subjects murder Him. He has good reasons for these things.
I’ll start with Eric’s beautiful statement on the reason for Job’s suffering in the first place (also regarding the Doctrine of Retribution and Disinterested Righteousness):
…when Satan cannot find any fault in Job’s integrity, he manages to turn Job’s integrity itself into a problem…Paradoxically, the only way to prove the honesty of the relationship is to allow ‘a local suspension of justice’…God temporarily ‘breaches his own justice’ to make unconditional loyalty possible. ‘Inexplicable suffering has a role in the divine economy, for it makes true piety possible.’ (Ortlund, pg.15).
Eric on Disinterested Righteousness:
Do God’s people love and fear him for his sake, as an end in himself? Or is God used a means to some other earthly end, such as having enjoyable lives? Will we enter into a relationship with God in which all we ultimately gain is God? Can we keep the secondary blessings we accrue in that relationship truly secondary and dispensable…The question is a very great one, for a relationship with God for God’s sake only is surely the only kind of relationship that will save us. ‘[I]f we love God for something less than himself, we cherish a desire that can fail us. We run the risk of hating Him if we do not get what we hope for.’ Even more frightening is the possibility that Christians will insult God by treating a person of infinite worth as a means to some other end—all without realizing it (Ortlund, pg 15).
Eric also points out Job’s biggest anguish is not the blessed life that he lost, but his felt rejection from God. This is my biggest fear, for there is no reason to live if I am rejected by God, and Job feels the same way. He says this in his first speech, when he curses not only his own birth, but all of creation, and then calls on chaos (Leviathan) to take over and destroy it (God addresses this in his first speech to Job, proving He is listening even when Job is sure He’s not (take note friends: even when God feels far away, He’s near: watching, listening, even grieving with us. Do we, as parents, not suffer when we have to watch our children suffer- even when it’s their fault, but especially when it’s not?). Because if God is not good and righteous, why live? Why exist? Nothing means anything anymore. Job repeatedly anguishes over his rejection by God, never wishing back his previous blessings, but instead wishing back his relationship with God. How telling!
Eric puts it like this (more on Disinterested Righteousness):
Just as declarations of love between romantic partners, no matter how sincere, are not sealed until the couple pledge themselves before God in sickness and health, for better and for worse, so God sometimes pushes us beyond easier affirmations of love and faithfulness made to him in health and safety to affirm the same when he allows us to suffer some profound loss. Some affirmations cannot remain theoretical forever.
There is a deeper reason why God allows Job to lose everything. The costly affirmations made in terrible pain do more than show the quality of our love for God that exists hidden inside us—they seal and bind us in a relationship with God where God is proven as being of all-exclusive worth. In the same way that the relationship between an engaged couple is externally different after the swearing of vows in marriage, so Christians’ relationship with God takes on profound authenticity when they engage in tear-stained worship of God for his own sake, regardless of what secondary blessings he may take from us. How else will we ever grow up out of our merely theoretical faith into reality with God? If God never pushes us beyond hypothetical statements of the all-surpassing worth of knowing him, how will our souls be saved? How else will God prepare us for eternity, which will chiefly consist in enjoying God himself, for his own sake? Joblike suffering is, contrary to all appearances, a preparation for heaven, when all secondary blessings have fallen away (Ortlund, pg.17). It’s like my favorite quote from an old pastor, which I use in my story: “we only get one opportunity to love Jesus in a way that is costly and rare, and that is while suffering.” (meaning: this life in our fallen flesh and particularly in our suffering. Because in eternity, without suffering, loving God is easy).
At the end of the book of Job, when God says that Job’s friends had misrepresented God, it is because they affirmed the satan. They actually begged Job to just give in and repent just to end the suffering. But ultimately, God is proved righteous and just, as are His policies of governing creation, and Job’s relationship with Him is affirmed and sealed in a deeper way than ever before.
Now I will go to what Eric really focuses on: God’s speeches, though I implore you to read his entire book, for he has great incites into everything up to this point as well. He also has great answers to why God talks as He does (rhetorical questions, out of the whirlwind, challenging but graceful at the same time, and so on).
The first speech is a response to Job’s accusation against God’s ruling: chaos vs order. Remember, the sea is a symbol of chaos for those in the Ancient Near East (ANE).
After all, the watery depths cannot be mapped or divided or tilled, as the earth can; no human can impose any boundary on them. Consider as well how ancient Semites would have known only as much about the sea as they could have learned from swimming in it. To them, it would have felt bottomless, murky, the opposite of fruitful and ordered creation. As a result, when the ocean bursts forth in our passage (38:8) and God sets a limit to it (v.11), we should understand this as God’s action that prevents chaos from destroying his world; exactly the same image is used in Jeremiah 5:22 with the same meaning. God’s self-portrayal is obviously very different from the cosmic destroyer Job imagined (9:5–10) and thus directly answers a central aspect of Job’s complaint: God is the Creator who constrains and limits chaos, not the one who sets it free(Ortlund, pg.71).
But God explains this in an oddly comforting way:
The first is the maternal imagery used. When the sea bursts from the womb (v. 8), God uses clouds as a swaddling band for it (v. 9) A second surprising dimension of this passage is the implication that God’s care for the sea endures even as the sea continues to resist him (Ortlund, pg.72). He also does this with the wild animals that cannot be tamed by humans. YHWH reveals that there is chaos which he allows to remain in creation. The world is not some kind of perfect paradise where nothing is ever allowed to go wrong; one aspect of the order God imposes on his world is to allow for some contained disorder. But this in no way means that God’s world is the violent inner-city ghetto Job has decried, or that the one ruling over it is at best indifferent to injustice and wrongdoing. God both keeps this chaos within strict limits and is far kinder with it than Job has imagined—even to the point of caring for and nurturing it. In fact, since darkness is another image for chaos and death in the Old Testament, the fact that ‘thick darkness’ is used by God for the ocean’s swaddling clothes may imply that God even puts aspects of chaos to use in limiting the power and influence of chaos. As it turns out, God has a much happier purpose for darkness than the one Job called for in chapter 3 (Ortlund, pg. 73).
Lions are for ever dangerous to humans, and no appeal is made to some larger order that justifies their presence in God’s world. The only claim here is that God’s decision about how he rules over both orderly and chaotic elements in creation, both domestic and dangerous animals, is unworthy of the charges Job has brought against it. His decision to feed lions and other predators does not imply predation is somehow good from a larger perspective, but only that God is not the corrupt authority Job has railed against. Quite the contrary: even if we remain a little in awe of some of the terrifying creatures God has made (39:19–25), his kindness far outstrips anything Job has imagined in the debate with his friends.
…this aspect of YHWH’S first speech is as much a challenge to the theology of the friends as it is to Job’s protests. Whereas Eliphaz imagined the wild animals that symbolize the wicked to be quickly punished within God’s retributive justice (4:10–11), God redescribes his relationship with dangerous predators in a way that implies a far deeper kindness on his part to these creatures than Eliphaz ever imagined. God’s world is a very good one, but not one in which all evil is punished neatly and immediately. (Ortlund, pg. 84).
This is not a speech about God’s power and sovereignty, as many say, since Job already asserted God’s power and sovereignty.
But this speech isn’t just about God’s power and Wisdom, as many readers assert. It’s more:
But it cannot be divine wisdom and power in a merely general sense and those divine attributes alone that produce so great a change in Job, for several reasons. The first is that Job credits them to God in 9:4 and 12:13. As a result, if all God is trying to convince Job of in chapters 38–39 is his strength and wisdom, God is trying to convince Job of something Job already believes, and so it becomes impossible to explain why Job stops arguing. Furthermore, God’s power and wisdom are not in themselves a comfort to Job, so an emphasis on these divine attributes alone will not lead Job to worship, but only to a deeper terror of God. We saw earlier how it was exactly God’s power to destroy and skill in running the world (as Job thought he experienced in chs. 1–2) that make God so frightening to Job (see e.g. 9:4 in the context of vv. 4–19). Finally, the friends have already insisted at length on God’s omniscience and omnipotence (11:6–9; 15:8; 25:2). As a result, if God speaks only of the same, it is difficult to see how his speech differs from that of the friends. For these reasons, recourse to omniscience and omnipotence alone is insufficient to explain why Job retracts his argument against God in 40:3–5. (pg. 85).
The first speech isn’t the end, and, as we see with Job’s response (hand over his mouth) in comparison to his response to the second speech, this first one is not complete and doesn’t provide Job closure. And so God continues, moving from His plan of creation to His justice:
…while God’s first speech investigated his plan for the natural order, his second quickly moves to the supernatural as we read of the preparation of the divine warrior (40:9–14) and his warfare against the two monsters Behemoth (40:15–24) and Leviathan (41:1–34; I use the word ‘warfare’ because of the sword of 40:19 and the spear, harpoons and battle of 41:7–8). God’s second speech also advances upon the first in that it will concern Job more personally (Ortlund, pg. 104). Humiliation is not the desired response, but awe and trust in an active and just God is desired. However, if Job wants to insist he has a better idea than the Almighty of what justice looks like, God clearly shows him what is needed to confront human sin fully—a radiant power Job clearly does not possess. Job stands with the rest of humanity in needing a Saviour on high to act on his behalf (40:14). In other words, the question of verse 14 is sincere: God is not merely ‘pulling rank’, but describing what the execution of justice in the world really entails. If there is an irony in this verse, it is one meant in Job’s favour, for Job really does have a Saviour who will thunder in the heavens on his behalf. This is God’s justice, which Job has been denying (v. 8) (Ortlund, pg. 109).
Eric includes and extensive argument of how Behemoth and Leviathan being a hippo and a crocodile don’t satisfy or fit. These are chaos monsters, symbols of supernatural evil. God describing them so intrinsically shows his describing of their implications. In other words, God knows all about this evil and the suffering it causes:
YHWH’S extended descriptions of the monsters’ fearsome and dangerous prowess implies to Job that God understands how greatly Job has suffered. Indeed, to the extent that God is revealing to Job his real enemy, we see that it takes a revelation from God to show the true extent of the evil that God sometimes allows to overtake his saints. This is never stated, however; the comfort of which Job will later speak (42:6) nowhere surfaces in YHWH’S speech. But as the descriptions of Behemoth and Leviathan clarify for Job his real enemy, the more fearsome and sinister YHWH makes these creatures appear, and the more God hints to Job that he understands how profoundly Job has suffered under their power. In fact, there is a sense in which only God sees the true dimensions of Job’s suffering (Ortlund, pg.146).
These “chaos monsters” and their descriptions are foreign to us 21st century westerners, but Job and his friends knew exactly what God was talking about. We know this because of Job’s reaction.
God’s plan for his world is to allow evil—even evil that exists in massive malevolence, which humans can grasp only through symbols. Even as this evil is revealed, however, God assures Job that it is kept within strict boundaries (38:8–11) and he will one day eradicate it (40:19; 41:8), scouring all evil from his creation (Ortlund pg. 146-147).
Eric then goes on to answer several questions such as:
First, why does God only imply the monsters’ defeat instead of explicitly describing it? Every other text in the Old Testament describing the raging waters or the monsters that live there speaks of the defeat of the enemy and the re-establishment of God’s blessed rule over all things. The proportions of Job 40–41 contrast sharply with this, containing hints of the battle but focusing instead on the creatures’ habitats and prowess. Why is this? Furthermore, why is the Leviathan speech so exceptionally long, especially when descriptions elsewhere in the Old Testament are typically so brief? Finally, since Job already knows about Leviathan (3:8), what is new in YHWH’S speech about the creature? What does God say to Job in his second speech that Job does not already know?
He also addresses what God’s speeches do not say:
No assurance is given in Job 40–41 that God uses evil to good ends (Gen. 50:20) or that he works all things out for good (Rom. 8:28). Nothing is said about how the joys of the eschaton will completely outweigh and resolve whatever trauma God’s saints suffer in the present age (Rom. 8:18; 2 Cor. 4:17–18)… Furthermore, God does not unfold his purposes to Job in allowing evil in his world in such a way that Job can verify according to some hypothetical independent standard of judgment that God is right to allow some evil in his present administration of all things and agree with God in that decision. All God does is imply to Job that he is aware of the problem far more deeply than Job is, and will address it one day—that is all. (Ortlund, pg. 152).
Eric goes into much detail about this.
I found this book a very satisfying study on the book of Job. It brings some closure to my constant studies on suffering and God’s wisdom. We may not understand God completely, but we can to some degree-that He lets us. It has also strengthened my faith and trust in Him, that He is a good God, that He is personal and cares for us even in the midst of our suffering. I absolutely love how God is so gentle with Job despite all Job’s accusations, and how God vindicates him. God is not offended, intimidated, or easily angered. He’s patient, compassionate, just, and righteous. He is trustworthy. He does not just allow us to suffer, but He joins in with us, as evidence of Him becoming flesh and then allowing Himself to be murdered, accused. He allowed Himself to be challenged/trialed by the accuser and even by Job for our understanding. It’s good to study these things now, because I can fall back on it when I’m in the midst of suffering and unable to read and study when emotions run too high.