A Book of Job Reflection
The Book of Job is probably my favorite Biblical book thus far. The definitive largest factor contributing to my opinion is that the book poses the question that is all too often avoided in scripture: why? In pretty much every other book of the Bible, we are implicitly or explicitly expected to take what is written as absolute fact, with any errors arising from human limits of comprehension. After all, God is infallible, his wisdom and power without rival, and his judgment final and absolute. However, the Book of Job invites the reader to ponder with its protagonist, what is the justice behind God’s judgment, if there is any? In fact, the book opens with a “perfect and an upright” Job who God boasts of to Satan and the other sons of God (Job 1:8). Despite clearly being fond of Job for his righteousness and loyalty, God allows Satan to take away everything that Job knows and loves as well as afflict Job with “sore boils” out of what seems to be whimsical curiosity (Job 2:7). For God, it seems almost a game, a form of entertainment, to toy with Job and test his faith. There is no sin that Job commits making him deserving of such afflictions. In fact, the only rhyme or reason for God’s tests seems to be a sort of divine bet in which Satan and God disagree on what happens to God’s most loyal follower when you push him to his limits. From this perspective, it seems as though the book pushes us toward the conclusion that God’s actions, in many situations, are arbitrary, or at the very least, serve a purpose beyond human comprehension. From our perspective, we can never know if our daily punishments are for sin or God’s curiosity and entertainment, but I venture to say that it doesn't really matter.
I want to avoid a sort of strict argumentative essay, so I may jump around a little bit, but my favorite argument against God’s absolute justice is God’s own mention of the carnivores he provides meat for in his “answer” to Job from the whirlwind. Among God’s many rhetorical questions highlighting the insignificance of Job in comparison to Himself, He makes specific mention of His role filling “the appetite of the young lions” and providing “for the raven his food” (Job 38: 39-41). Obviously, lions and ravens are carnivores who have to eat the meat of other animals to live. But, is it not interesting that God would endow with life certain creatures who need to take the lives of other creatures to survive? In a truly just world, would not God only take the lives of the wicked animals? The argument can be made that carnivores only hunt wicked prey, but I find this to be incredibly unconvincing unless you define ‘wicked’ as ‘unlucky’ or ‘subject to natural selection’. In other terms, why would carnivores be made if God’s ideal creation is a paradise like Eden where there is no unjust death? This calls to mind another interesting question as old as Creation itself: why did God make the subtil serpent? I would be hard-pressed to argue that the serpent was not meant to be a carnivore, and even if we assume that the serpent somehow was not a carnivore in the garden of Eden, why would God make a “subtil” creature capable of tempting Adam and Eve in a literal paradise? (Genesis 3) All this to convey the confusion arising from trying to reconcile a perfectly just world governed by God with the world that we live in today. However, this confusion disappears if you accept that God’s decisions may be arbitrary or even just beyond human understanding. Creatures that eat other ‘innocent’ creatures as a requirement for living may seem cruel in our conception of justice, but it simply may be a natural order of things established by God for reasons we can never know. Furthermore, perhaps God meant for some creatures to be more subtil than others as that would establish, again, a more natural order to existence. We may not know why such orders are natural, but we can accept them as being so by assuming God’s reasoning is far above our own.
With this frame of reference, Job’s suffering is easier to digest because we have so many other examples of cruel and unjust happenings to compare it to. The only difference is that before we are not given explicit reasoning behind God’s actions, but in Job, we know that Job’s suffering is a sort of divine game that Job did no sin to deserve. However, Job’s suffering could still serve a purpose that we can understand. While the Book of Job predates Christ, the stories of the two individuals are strikingly similar. For instance, Christ is the son of God who himself does not sin during his life, but the whole point of his mortal life is to suffer for the redemption of all of humanity’s sins as a sinless individual. In a similar manner, Job does not sin but instead is punished solely because of his lack of sin in order to test his faith if he is treated like a sinner. Logically, Job starts questioning the human notion of God’s judgment, saying that “He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked”, and what’s more, God seems to support Job in his conclusion (Job 9:22). Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, Job’s three friends, spend the entirety of the dialogue in the Book of Job maintaining that God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous without fail, so being that Job has been punished, he must have sinned. However, as God ends his “answer” to Job from the whirlwind, he speaks to the three friends with kindled wrath, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42: 7). Even after seemingly rebuking Job for questioning His justice, God agrees with Job on His punishment of “the perfect and the wicked” and says that the three friends are wrong for believing in punishment strictly for the wicked. What is interesting is that here, God only calls out the three friends and not Elihu as being wrong in their arguments, implying perhaps that Elihu’s argument has merit despite being similar to that of the three friends. This could just be a bit of slippage as Elihu’s speeches likely could have been a late addition, though perhaps God agrees with Elihu on arguments such as, “He delivereth the poor in his affliction, and openeth their ears in oppression”, which Herbert Marks interprets to mean punishment is a form of moral discipline (Job 36:15). Either way, God clearly maintains that punishment serves more of a purpose than simply chastising the wicked, so perhaps the point of Job suffering as a sinless individual is to serve as a lesson in God’s mysterious ways. This very lesson is why I believe the Book of Job has become so important to the victims of such tragedies as the Holocaust through which millions of seemingly innocent individuals suffered and/or died. It helps those who feel punished unfairly or abandoned find comfort in a continued faith in God. Even if His purposes or goals are unknown or seem counterintuitive, God has a plan, and the punished innocents may even be repaid twofold for their suffering as Job was.
To tie all of this into a recent picture by JWST, I would like to call attention to yet another picture of my favorite astronomical entity: the Pillars of Creation. The cool thing about this picture is that it is taken in the mid-infrared spectrum instead of the near-infrared spectrum, making young stars harder to detect but allowing for more gas and dust to be detected. I have talked on this topic before, but this week I feel it is especially appropriate given my pictures of the same astronomical entity, in different electromagnetic wavelengths, in back-to-back blog posts; at first it is really weird to look at JWST photos and realize that they will never look quite as they appear to the naked eye because they are taken in the infrared spectrum. In many ways, this makes the pictures seem ‘fake’, or better yet, ‘artificial’, but this argument falls apart when you realize that the visible spectrum itself is rather arbitrary. It is simply the extremely limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum that natural selection led humans to be able to detect because that set of wavelengths would be most useful in the survival of a person. The Pillars of Creation the last two weeks show this especially well because not only are they taken in the infrared spectrum, but they are taken in different parts of the infrared spectrum and are still different. As I said earlier, the mid-infrared hides many of the young stars present within the Pillars of Creation while making gas and dust within the pillars more visible. This does not make the Pillars any less beautiful, just different. On top of that, you probably noticed that the coloring of the two pictures is different with this week’s being slightly more “ghostly”, but this difference actually is artificial as humans add coloring to JWST images to differentiate pictures taken in different wavelengths, make analysis of images easier, and to just make images more pleasing to look at. The point is that human perception is not the end all be all, especially when you consider how much more there is to the universe and reality than we could ever perceive. Considering this, I don’t believe it matters that I could never look at the Pillars of Creation as they are depicted by JWST; the pictures are beautiful all the same. Similarly, humans may never be able to discern a divine sense of justice, but this does mean that a divine sense of justice does not exist or that a perfect sense of justice in our eyes is perfect in the eyes of God. Perhaps then, the Book of Job is meant to help us abandon our human perception of God and simply trust in His plan even if we can’t understand it while admiring the beauty of God’s creations reflected perfectly by JWST.
I want to avoid a sort of strict argumentative essay, so I may jump around a little bit, but my favorite argument against God’s absolute justice is God’s own mention of the carnivores he provides meat for in his “answer” to Job from the whirlwind. Among God’s many rhetorical questions highlighting the insignificance of Job in comparison to Himself, He makes specific mention of His role filling “the appetite of the young lions” and providing “for the raven his food” (Job 38: 39-41). Obviously, lions and ravens are carnivores who have to eat the meat of other animals to live. But, is it not interesting that God would endow with life certain creatures who need to take the lives of other creatures to survive? In a truly just world, would not God only take the lives of the wicked animals? The argument can be made that carnivores only hunt wicked prey, but I find this to be incredibly unconvincing unless you define ‘wicked’ as ‘unlucky’ or ‘subject to natural selection’. In other terms, why would carnivores be made if God’s ideal creation is a paradise like Eden where there is no unjust death? This calls to mind another interesting question as old as Creation itself: why did God make the subtil serpent? I would be hard-pressed to argue that the serpent was not meant to be a carnivore, and even if we assume that the serpent somehow was not a carnivore in the garden of Eden, why would God make a “subtil” creature capable of tempting Adam and Eve in a literal paradise? (Genesis 3) All this to convey the confusion arising from trying to reconcile a perfectly just world governed by God with the world that we live in today. However, this confusion disappears if you accept that God’s decisions may be arbitrary or even just beyond human understanding. Creatures that eat other ‘innocent’ creatures as a requirement for living may seem cruel in our conception of justice, but it simply may be a natural order of things established by God for reasons we can never know. Furthermore, perhaps God meant for some creatures to be more subtil than others as that would establish, again, a more natural order to existence. We may not know why such orders are natural, but we can accept them as being so by assuming God’s reasoning is far above our own.
With this frame of reference, Job’s suffering is easier to digest because we have so many other examples of cruel and unjust happenings to compare it to. The only difference is that before we are not given explicit reasoning behind God’s actions, but in Job, we know that Job’s suffering is a sort of divine game that Job did no sin to deserve. However, Job’s suffering could still serve a purpose that we can understand. While the Book of Job predates Christ, the stories of the two individuals are strikingly similar. For instance, Christ is the son of God who himself does not sin during his life, but the whole point of his mortal life is to suffer for the redemption of all of humanity’s sins as a sinless individual. In a similar manner, Job does not sin but instead is punished solely because of his lack of sin in order to test his faith if he is treated like a sinner. Logically, Job starts questioning the human notion of God’s judgment, saying that “He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked”, and what’s more, God seems to support Job in his conclusion (Job 9:22). Eliphaz, Zophar, and Bildad, Job’s three friends, spend the entirety of the dialogue in the Book of Job maintaining that God punishes the wicked and rewards the righteous without fail, so being that Job has been punished, he must have sinned. However, as God ends his “answer” to Job from the whirlwind, he speaks to the three friends with kindled wrath, “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (Job 42: 7). Even after seemingly rebuking Job for questioning His justice, God agrees with Job on His punishment of “the perfect and the wicked” and says that the three friends are wrong for believing in punishment strictly for the wicked. What is interesting is that here, God only calls out the three friends and not Elihu as being wrong in their arguments, implying perhaps that Elihu’s argument has merit despite being similar to that of the three friends. This could just be a bit of slippage as Elihu’s speeches likely could have been a late addition, though perhaps God agrees with Elihu on arguments such as, “He delivereth the poor in his affliction, and openeth their ears in oppression”, which Herbert Marks interprets to mean punishment is a form of moral discipline (Job 36:15). Either way, God clearly maintains that punishment serves more of a purpose than simply chastising the wicked, so perhaps the point of Job suffering as a sinless individual is to serve as a lesson in God’s mysterious ways. This very lesson is why I believe the Book of Job has become so important to the victims of such tragedies as the Holocaust through which millions of seemingly innocent individuals suffered and/or died. It helps those who feel punished unfairly or abandoned find comfort in a continued faith in God. Even if His purposes or goals are unknown or seem counterintuitive, God has a plan, and the punished innocents may even be repaid twofold for their suffering as Job was.
To tie all of this into a recent picture by JWST, I would like to call attention to yet another picture of my favorite astronomical entity: the Pillars of Creation. The cool thing about this picture is that it is taken in the mid-infrared spectrum instead of the near-infrared spectrum, making young stars harder to detect but allowing for more gas and dust to be detected. I have talked on this topic before, but this week I feel it is especially appropriate given my pictures of the same astronomical entity, in different electromagnetic wavelengths, in back-to-back blog posts; at first it is really weird to look at JWST photos and realize that they will never look quite as they appear to the naked eye because they are taken in the infrared spectrum. In many ways, this makes the pictures seem ‘fake’, or better yet, ‘artificial’, but this argument falls apart when you realize that the visible spectrum itself is rather arbitrary. It is simply the extremely limited part of the electromagnetic spectrum that natural selection led humans to be able to detect because that set of wavelengths would be most useful in the survival of a person. The Pillars of Creation the last two weeks show this especially well because not only are they taken in the infrared spectrum, but they are taken in different parts of the infrared spectrum and are still different. As I said earlier, the mid-infrared hides many of the young stars present within the Pillars of Creation while making gas and dust within the pillars more visible. This does not make the Pillars any less beautiful, just different. On top of that, you probably noticed that the coloring of the two pictures is different with this week’s being slightly more “ghostly”, but this difference actually is artificial as humans add coloring to JWST images to differentiate pictures taken in different wavelengths, make analysis of images easier, and to just make images more pleasing to look at. The point is that human perception is not the end all be all, especially when you consider how much more there is to the universe and reality than we could ever perceive. Considering this, I don’t believe it matters that I could never look at the Pillars of Creation as they are depicted by JWST; the pictures are beautiful all the same. Similarly, humans may never be able to discern a divine sense of justice, but this does mean that a divine sense of justice does not exist or that a perfect sense of justice in our eyes is perfect in the eyes of God. Perhaps then, the Book of Job is meant to help us abandon our human perception of God and simply trust in His plan even if we can’t understand it while admiring the beauty of God’s creations reflected perfectly by JWST.
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