When God Responds

We wait a long time to hear from God in Job's poetic section. Job and his friends have lots to say in chapters 3-37. LOTS to say. All of this speechifying happens without God's response. It's an odd feature of this part of Scripture.

But when God does respond, it's a lengthy and dramatic speech "out of the whirlwind." God's speech is utterly overwhelming.

In one sense, God's response is off-topic. God does not speak directly to Job's chief complaint about suffering and the injustice of it all. Instead, we hear a series of questions, an extreme number of questions in fact. So, it can feel off-putting to wait so long for answers about suffering, only to receive more questions.

"Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?" (Job 38:2, NRSVUE)

This is the third in a four-part series during May about the book of Job.

These rhetorical questions seem to rebuke and invite the reader simultaneously. They position God as the Creator, Designer, and Governor of the world. And they remind Job of his role as a human within the created world. They also greatly expand the book's moral discourse by zooming out to a broader theological context that includes the cosmos.

How do you hear these speeches from God in chapters 38-41?

"Almost all commentators draw attention to the ambiguity and obliqueness of the divine speeches. Pages upon pages have poured from critics who puzzle over how and in what way the divine speeches serve as a reply to Job." Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, 235.

No matter how we understand God's words here, it is Job who will get the last word in the poetry section of the book. We will turn to those enigmatic words next week.

Summer Reading – Steinbeck's East of Eden

Let's read a classic piece of literature in this space this summer: John Steinbeck's masterpiece, East of Eden.

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Human are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. This is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?” (411)

We will kick off the 8-week series (it's a long book!) on Monday, June 1, with an introduction to the book and the series. No need to read ahead before June.

Here's the reading schedule:

Week of June 1-7: read chapters 1-8
Week of June 8-14: read chapters 9-14
Week of June 15-21: read chapters 15-19
Week of June 22-28: read chapters 20-24
Week of June 29-July 5: read chapters 25-30
Week of July 6-12: read chapters 31-39
Week of July 13-19: read chapters 40-48
Week of July 20-26: read chapters 49-55

A Benediction (Or Miscellaneous Thoughts)

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