It all happened in one day. One day he could choose his tee time at the nicest golf course in the country; the next he couldn't even be the caddie. One day he could Learjet across the country to see the heavyweight bout at the Las Vegas Mirage. The next he couldn't afford a city bus across town.
Talk about calm becoming chaos...
The first thing to go is his empire. The market crashes; his assets tumble. What is liquid goes dry. What has been up goes down. Stocks go flat, and Job goes broke. There he sits in his leather chair by his soon- to-be-auctioned-off mahogany desk when the phone rings with news of calamity number two: the kids were at a resort for the holidays when a storm blew in and took them with it.
Shell-shocked and dumbfounded, Job looks out the window into the sky that seems to be getting darker by the minute. He starts praying, telling God that things can't get any worse... and that's exactly what happens. He feels a pain in his chest that is more than last night's ravioli. The next thing he knows, he is bouncing in an ambulance with wires stuck to his chest and needles stuck in his arm.
He ends up tethered to a heart monitor in a hospital room, his only companion the beeps and alerts of medical machines.
Not, however, that Job lacks for conversation.
First there is his wife. Who could blame her for being upset after the week's calamities? Who could blame her for telling Job to curse God? But to curse God and die? If Job didn't already feel abandoned, you know he does the minute his wife tells him to pull the plug and be done with it.
Then there are his friends. They have the bedside manner of a drill sergeant and the compassion of a chain-saw killer. A revised version of their theology might read like this: "Boy, you must have done something really bad! We know that God is good, so if bad things are happening to you, then you have been bad. Period."
Does Job take that lying down? Not hardly.
"You are doctors who don't know what they are doing," he says. "Oh, please be quiet! That would be your highest wisdom."1
Translation? "Why don't you take your philosophy back to the pigpen where you learned it?"
"I'm not a bad man," Job argues. "I paid my taxes. I'm active in civic duties. I'm a major contributor to United Way and a volunteer at the hospital bazaar."
Job is, in his eyes, a good man. And a good man, he reasons, deserves a good answer.
"Your suffering is for your own good," states Elihu, a young minister fresh out of seminary who hasn't lived long enough to be cynical and hasn't hurt enough to be quiet. He paces back and forth in the hospital room with his Bible under his arm and his finger punching the air.
"God does all these things to a person — twice, even three times — to turn them back from the pit, that the light of life may shine on them."2 Job follows his pacing like you'd follow a tennis player, head turning from side to side. What the young man says isn't bad theology, but it isn't much comfort either. Job steadily tunes him out and slides lower and lower under the covers. His head hurts. His eyes burn. His legs ache.
And he can't stomach any more hollow homilies.
Yet his question still hasn't been answered: "God, why is this happening to me?"
So God speaks.
Out of the thunder He speaks. Out of the sky He speaks. For all of us who would put ditto marks under Job's question and sign our names to it, He speaks.
- For the father who holds a rose taken off his son's coffin, He speaks.
- For the wife who holds the flag taken off her husband's casket, He speaks.
- For the couple with the barren womb and the fervent prayers, He speaks.
- For any person who has tried to see God through shattered glass, He speaks.
- For those of us who have dared to say, "If God is God, then...," God speaks.
He speaks out of the storm and into the storm, for that is where Job is. That is where God is best heard.
God's voice thunders in the room. Elihu sits down. Job sits up. And the two will never be the same again.
"Who is this that obscures My plans with words without knowledge?"3 Job doesn't respond.
"Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer Me."4
"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you know so much."5
One question would have been enough for Job, but it isn't enough for God.
"Do you know how its dimensions were determined, and who did the surveying?" God asks. "What supports its foundations, and who laid its cornerstone as the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?"6
Questions rush forth. They pour like sheets of rain out of the clouds. They splatter in the chambers of Job's heart with a wildness and a beauty and a terror that leave every Job who has ever lived drenched and speechless, watching the Master redefine who is who in the universe.
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