Job and Evil

Don: Job was beset by Satan, the epitome of evil. The Book of Job can be divided into three parts: Part one, consisting of Job 1 and 2, can be described as a prologue. It introduces the dramatis personae and outlines Job’s trials and tribulations. His trials are essentially a metaphor for the existential condition of all humankind. He lost material possessions. He lost loved ones. He lost good health. He lost a good relationship with his wife. He discovered that his friends were not necessarily that.

In part two (Job 3 – 37), which can be described as the dialogue, Job argued with his friends about the reasons for his suffering. His friends espoused the almost universally held view (even today) that God judges sin; therefore Job must have been sinful to have merited his punishment. It brings to mind the saying by Jonathan Swift in 1711 that “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” Job maintains his innocence throughout.

In the concluding part three, which can be described as the monologue, God spoke directly to Job. But he did so not to tell Job what he had done wrong—in Job 1 and 2 God already declared Job to be blameless—but to denounce the misrepresentation of him (God) by Job’s friends, who had tried to speak for God—and that is one of the root causes of evil.

God’s pronouncements were not, however, statements. They were not answers. Rather, they were questions. No fewer than 77 of them. After the relentless beating down of Job by his so-called friends, even Job began to buy into the idea that perhaps God was judging him, and he expressed his own desire to question God. He even threatened to take God to court, though he later realized that this would be futile:

“For He is not a man as I am that I may answer Him,
That we may go to court together.
“There is no umpire between us,
Who may lay his hand upon us both.
“Let Him remove His rod from me,
And let not dread of Him terrify me.
“Then I would speak and not fear Him;
But I am not like that in myself.(Job 9:32-35).

We see in the 77 questions a sort of entrance exam—“You have to get these right if you want to be God.” They can be grouped into three major themes. The first is “Do you comprehend my Creation?” He asks if Job was there when it happened; if not, how could he understand it (Job 38:1-38)? The second theme is “Can you take care of my Creation?” He names six animals and five birds that need managing (Job 38 and 39). The implication was that Job had no right to question the way God took care of him if Job was incapable of caring for Creation. The final theme was: “Can you control the Creation?” He asked Job whether Job could control two mammoth creatures, one a land behemoth and the other a leviathan of the sea.

Job could not answer “Yes” to any of the 77 questions. But the answers would have been irrelevant anyway. The real point was and is that God’s ways are not Man’s ways and that Man is not even able to comprehend God’s ways.

Evil—defined as seeking to penetrate the knowledge of God, to elevate the creature above the Creation, to seek to harness the power of God for personal advantage, as laid out in the temptation of Jesus and Eve—is explicated in Job.

From Job’s perspective it seemed there were only two explanations for his predicament: Either God was in control and was punishing Job for no reason, or God was not in control. God never answered Job’s questions and it seems unlikely he will answer our own great questions of life. Answers would only have served to bring more questions. He could have explained to Job (as he explained in the prologue) that Satan had taunted him, saying that Job only served God because God favored him. He could have explained that he knew Job was a stout-hearted servant who would continue to serve him even under extreme pressure. We can only surmise that had God tried to explain all this to Job, it would only have prompted more questions, as children are won’t to ask their parents never-ending Why?s.

Instead of explaining, God chose to present himself as the Creator, Caregiver, and Controller of the Universe; the only conclusion being that despite his trials Job is in good hands. At least, that seems to be the satisfactory conclusion Job himself reached:

Then Job answered the Lord and said, “I know that You can do all things,
 And that no purpose of Yours can be thwarted.
 ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’
 Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand,
 Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.” 
‘Hear, now, and I will speak;
 I will ask You, and You instruct me.’
 “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear;
 But now my eye sees You; 
Therefore I retract,
 And I repent in dust and ashes.” (Job 42:1-6)

The revelation Job experienced was that he had no need to worry, no cause to complain, no point in questioning God.

If we were in charge of the universe it would run quite differently. We would stop the shootings and the massacres. We would eliminate the alligators. We would stop the droughts and floods and disease. We would stop the suffering. It seems we would be doing God a favor. We are already trying: Despite the man-made and natural disasters, there is still more heroism, more self-denial, more goodness in the world than bad; and it is not just casual but deliberative, deep-seated goodness.

We rely on the promise:

…that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.(Romans 8:28)

Is the pain of evil so overwhelming that the notion of a caring God seems academic at best? That the effects of evil on ourselves and our communities defy the notion of a God in control?

David: I have three comments: (1) God is obviously a Daoist! 🙂 The message of Job is “There’s nothing you can do—just accept things the way they are”; (2) The idea that all things work to the good only “for those who love God” is not borne out by Job’s story, since his wife, who apparently did not love God nearly so much as Job did, was equally subject to his vicissitudes; (3) We know that God cares as much for Job’s wife and friends for the simple reason that he he created them, too; he provided their existence, which they (we) value above all else.

Donald: The notion that we might serve God for our prosperity makes me wonder why we do serve him? What’s the purpose of serving God? Why does God care? Then again, I wonder if we are not asking too many questions. Aren’t we supposed to make do with faith? Why do we try to figure out what’s God’s will is in our lives, then choose a denomination to match our preconceived conclusions, then try to proselytize others to our way of thinking? It doesn’t seem to work anyway: Our denomination, for one, is deeply divided over issues such as sexuality and perhaps even over our Christianity and our faith journey. What’s causing these divisions?

David: The scientifically minded atheist can answer the three fundamental questions God posed to Job by adding time to the equation: Over time, we do understand more and more of the Creation, we find ways (eventually) to take better care of it, and we have increasing control over it. But to me, the key point of Job is that this leaves us, like the child, never satisfied and never in full understanding, care, and control. There will always be questions we and our science cannot answer. A thousand years from now we will certainly know a great deal more than we do today, but we’ll still be faced with mysteries.

Don: There is something deeply rooted in our need to have cause and effect line up. One of the themes of Job, one of the arguments that God is making, is that cause and effect as we understand it scientifically is just not God’s way. We think we can run the universe better than God can. We can eliminate guns and alligators and poverty and so on because we understand and can apply cause and effect in scientifically predictable ways. Yet what seems to be operative in the world and in our lives is that at a certain level there is a lack of predictability, an uncertainty, a mystery, about evil, and science dislikes intractable mystery, uncertainty, unpredictability.

Anonymous: Is unpredictability the basis of evil?

Don: We sometimes identify as evil things that are unanticipated.

David: It’s a matter of the difference between the spiritual and the material. In the material realm, we can understand and control and predict. But we cannot fully understand and control and predict in the spiritual realm, where the sources of Good and Evil exist. Science has made great inroads into understanding how the human mind works, how the neurons are connected, how those connections differ in the brains of psychopaths, and so on, yet we remain no closer than Job was to understanding Good and Evil. Perhaps that is the message of Job: That these are spiritual matters, not material matters.

Don: But we tend to identify evil—falling ill, say, or catching a bullet—as being in the material realm.

David: But the evil is not in the illness or in the bullet.

Donald: Scientifically, we would equate more hours worked with more pay received, but that is not how God treated the vineyard workers. Our way of thinking is materialist; God’s way of thinking is spiritual.

David: It’s also our (at any rate, the non-Daoist!) way of thinking to assert that God allows things—is all-powerful—in the material world. The assertion is belied by the material evidence of murder and massacres and famine. Furthermore, if (as I contend) we have free will, then God cannot be all-powerful since our will can and often does usurp his—at least, in the material realm. God was powerless to prevent Adam and Eve from usurping his will in the Garden.

Don: If God cannot interfere with our free will, is he then off the hook for the problem of evil?

David: I think so!

Donald: These may be disturbing yet stimulating questions to folks brought up inside a religious tradition, who are essentially told what to think.

Don: Our goal in this class is not to disturb the faith of anyone. It is only to encourage spiritual exploration and is rooted in the issue we are discussing: That God’s business is to ask questions, not to provide answers, and this is what makes exploration stimulating. A thousand years from now the answers will be different, but the questions will be the same. A theology or a religion rooted in answers will need constant modification and revision, but religion is just not built to accommodate revision. It has little capacity for change in light of new data and understanding. This is the point of the Book of Job. Job thought he could do a better job than God but was enlightened and changed his mind after God interviewed him for the job of being God!

Michael: There is a deep-seated human need to know and to seek comfort in this world, to know what we are doing and what is being done to us. Life does not provide the answers. People who think they have found the answers are probably kidding themselves. The French philosopher Albert Camus wrote about the absurd contradiction between the way life is and the way we want it to be, and that the only way we can live is to accept absurdity as the only alternative to physical or philosophical suicide (by, for example, turning to religion!) Evil is absurd and annoying, but Camus says that if we stick with life as it is, warts and all, there are occasional breaks in the pattern of absurdity.

David: In one sense, Job did pass the exam, in that he was enlightened by God’s questions. He didn’t get the job, but if God’s purpose was to teach him (us) something, then it was a success all round!

Don: So he passed the exam without answering the questions!

David: The Book of Job doesn’t tell us what happened in Job’s mind, but it doesn’t need to, because what he experienced—enlightenment—happens in our minds (or hearts) too as we read the Book of Job. But we would be no more able than Job to write down exactly what that enlightenment consisted of, because it’s spiritual and not material.

Anonymous: Is enlightenment then vague? Is that what God wants? If we are enlightened, we no longer have a need to ask questions. Faith suffices. We cannot see, yet we believe.

David: One more question! What do we then believe in? In what doe we have faith? To me, the answer (!) is that we have faith in the existence of an unfathomable God—a way, a Dao—of which we are a partial manifestation. But it is not an all-powerful God in the material realm, despite scriptures of various religions that appear to claim otherwise.

Donald: If we had all the answers, there would be no need for faith. So perhaps we strive for answers in order to avoid having to rely on faith!

Anonymous: Faith in a God who is love leads us to hope and to love. We could not ask for anything more valuable.

Don: But who wants to serve a God who is not powerful, who doesn’t answer our questions? We want a God we can call on to supply an army of 10,000 angels when needed. We want answers to eliminate uncertainty but in so doing we would seem to eliminate hope. Religions tend to provide a powerful God with all the answers. Job got a God who had no answers and whose power—if any—was in realms beyond Man’s ken.

David: This was the ultimate message of Jesus as he hung on the cross: “Look at me! If God were all-powerful in the way you want, I would not be here!” But we miss the message, I think.

Don: God’s power, whatever it is, is not something we have any control over; yet the addictive essence of religion—the lesson of Job notwithstanding—is to put God at our beck and call through prayer and meditation and fasting, to leverage God’s power for ourselves or our family or friends or humanity at large.

Michael: It seems to me the road to maturity is more and more getting ourselves out of being the center of the universe, out of our certainties, and recognizing how little we know.

David: It’s interesting that science is also turning away from certainty as it explores the quantum realm, where uncertainty rules. We are understanding that realm more and more but are nowhere near a complete understanding and may never get there. In a thousand years quantum physics may be able to answer questions that today seem to be in the metaphysical or spiritual realm, but there will inevitably be new mysteries that physics will be unable to answer. I am reminded of Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which begins:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

We’ll get many answers, many turtles, but we’ll never get to the turtle at the bottom—if there is one. What we want is what Job wanted: Enlightenment. And he got it, and so can we.

Don: Is it possible to have a religion based on faith? It seems antithetical to the religions we’ve built based on sight, on facts, on proving key texts from scripture. The thought of a religion based on belief without certainty seems strange and uncomfortable.

Donald: In striving for answers are we seeking to be God? I agree that when it comes to the big existential questions we are no further forward than people a thousand years ago. We have more scientific information, but do we have more knowledge of faith?

David: Scientifically, materially, we are light years ahead of them, but in my view we are not one iota more advanced than them spiritually.

Anonymous: Seeking to know God seems to be my greatest enemy.

David: Job’s greatest enlightenment perhaps was the realization that he did not know, could not know, and did not need to know God. Hence, he was a Daoist! 🙂 The one thing we do need is belief, faith, in the existence of God, defined as Goodness. To me, that is spiritually satisfying enough to guide me through my material life. I will stumble on the Dao from time to time, but I believe I will stumble less than I might otherwise do.

Michael: We can’t know that God is Goodness; it can only be taken on faith.

David: Last week you told us that despite being mistreated by society as a whole, disabled people in Palestine seem serene. I have to believe that what is shines through their faces is light reflected from their inner light, from God the spirit, which must be good otherwise they would not be serene. So in this sense, we can see God—Goodness—by sight and not just by faith. But the more important source of enlightenment is inside us, as it is inside them. No scripture made them serene. Peace and serenity exists inside all of us.

Don: After the monologue and Job’s enlightenment, God told Job’s friends:

“My wrath is kindled against you … because you have not spoken of Me what is right as My servant Job has. (Job 42:7)

So God made a judgment on the difference between Job’s understanding and that of his friends. The friends linked their arguments to cause and effect, which is counter to the way God works and in claiming to represent God’s arguments they were committing a kind of evil or at least were very foolish. God condemned as foolishness what they thought made theological sense.

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