The Story of Job: Overcoming Guilt & Self-Pity
Many scholars consider the book of Job to be the oldest source text in the Bible. Whether or not that’s true or not, it’s certainly one of the most puzzling.
Job was a man visited by an assortment of tragedies and setbacks, though we are never told exactly why. Unlike most other Old Testament stories, where good and bad people usually get what they deserve, we are told that Job didn’t deserve what happened to him. He probably lived somewhere between present-day Israel and Iraq, about 1800 years before Christ and about 600 years after Noah.
Job may have been a contemporary of Abraham, and it’s interesting to consider that while Abraham was rewarded for his faithfulness in Palestine, Job had everything he had worked for taken away. Bandits, fire, and a tornado took Job’s children, his servants, and his possessions, all on the same day; he then lost his health, and was covered with an assortment of boils.
The story tells us that the Lord allowed Satan to do all these things to Job - not as a punishment for his sins - but to demonstrate that Job’s integrity was strong enough to endure anything. It gets even worse, because even his friends turned against him. Rather than comforting him in his time of need, they basically told him he was getting what he had coming; if he was afflicted by so many disasters - then ipso, facto - he must have deserved it. By failing to confess his sins and repent, Job had brought these tragedies upon himself, and now by maintaining his innocence, he was only adding to his transgressions, by accusing the Lord of being unjust.
Often when tragedy or illness strikes, even our closest friends don’t know the right thing to say. Partly it’s because they can’t find the right words; they may never have had the same thing happen to them, and so they don’t know how to deal with it. But it may also be that they are afraid of the same thing happening to them.
Rather than comforting Job, his friends were really comforting themselves with the false notion that they understood God’s ways, when in fact they didn’t. They were horrified at what had happened; they didn’t want to believe the same thing might happen to them at any moment. So they tried to reassure themselves with the notion that God would never afflict the righteous (or allow the devil to), even though He always punishes the wicked. It’s a comforting notion, though untrue.
As Job pointed out, the objective evidence seems to say otherwise: The wicked very often seem to go unpunished, while good and decent people can suffer such bad luck at times, that you would think their lives were cursed. It simply isn’t true that the wicked always come to an obvious bad end, and it isn’t the case that God openly and invariably rewards kind and highly principled people - at least this doesn’t always seem to be the case during their lifetime. Nor do good people always lead long and healthy lives, because just as the saying goes, ‘only the good die young.’
We could certainly argue that the good and the wicked will eventually get what’s coming to them on judgment day, in the next life – and in fact Job says exactly that, as he comforts himself with the conviction that - (Job 19:25-26) “ I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” Job believed that the Lord would eventually judge him innocent. Nevertheless, none of us can honestly maintain that everyone will be justly rewarded or condemned for their actions right here, right now, and in this life.
The saying is that ‘virtue is its own reward.’ We can’t expect the world to reward us for doing the right thing. The wicked will very often prosper, and we shouldn’t expect God to strike them down before they get the chance to harm someone else - though they do have the tendency to eventually self-destruct. Life isn’t fair, even though we believe that God is ultimately just. This is something we can only know by faith, and believe in our heart.
Like Job, we can feel completely overwhelmed by misfortune, and by what seem like the basic injustices of life. Often, we can’t shake the feeling that God is somehow punishing us, the same way Job’s friends were trying to convince him of the same thing. The accuser - which is the devil - seems always to have a way of giving voice to his accusations, whether it’s through other people, or through the internalized voice of a morbidly guilty conscience. This is especially true among Christians, many of who see illness or misfortune as a punishment or recompense for sin.
There may also be a part of ourselves that would rather believe that we are being punished. Paradoxically, and like Job’s friends, we can begin to accuse ourselves in order to feel more secure in the world - especially when the alternative seems either that God doesn’t care what happens to us - or even worse - maybe there is no God, and human misfortune is completely arbitrary, like the atheists believe. Seen in this light, blaming ourselves can be seen as a way of avoiding the alternatives. We would rather blame ourselves, rather than believe that God could be cruel or unjust. We would rather feel guilty, rather than live in a world where human suffering was a only crapshoot, without any meaning or purpose. But it’s always wrong to jump to conclusions that are grounded more in all we really don’t know, rather than in what we do.
There are those times that we just have to hang onto to what we know about God, and how we have known Him. The Psalmist says how at those times when (Ps 143:3) “the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground,” that we should, (143.5) “remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands.”
When our faith is tested, we should remember what the Lord has done for us in the past, and how He has always seen us through every difficulty. Or else go to a park or out in the country, and take a walk on a sunny day, just looking at all He has created. God’s creation is beautiful because our Creator is good. When difficulties pile up, we can maintain our faith in God’s kindness and good intentions towards us by meditating on what He has done for us, and at all the beauty of nature.
Faith is ultimately a faith in God’s goodness; it is not a faith that bad things can never happen to us, or that we will always feel good. Rather than weakening our faith, the bad things that happen will only help to strengthen our faith and hope in God, whenever we remember how good God is.
There are things that happen in life that we cannot explain; we struggle to understand why God could have allowed this situation to occur. The reason isn’t because He is punishing us, and He isn’t being unfair either: God is just, and He takes no pleasure in seeing people suffer. We can go around blaming the Lord for this, that, or the other thing, feeling like our life is cursed, or even that we are being persecuted by the devil. We can feel sorry for ourselves, just as Job was doing, and thereby implicitly accuse God of being unfair. But we do this only because our faith is still weak or untested, and we don’t really know God and his ways. To say that God is testing us, is to say that He is deepening and making our faith stronger, just as He was with Job.
Job’s friends argued that guilt was the appropriate response to human tragedy. Their explanation was that Job was guilty of sin, and now God was punishing him. Job, on the other hand, rather than feeling guilty, resorted to a kind of self-pity, which was really just as bad, and potentially even more insidious. Like his friends, Job couldn't understand God’s reasons. His explanation was that the Lord had made some terrible mistake which needed to be rectified; he wanted the opportunity to plead his case and prove his innocence. Job not only judged himself completely innocent of any wrongdoing, but he also implicitly accused God of being apathetic, lazy, ignorant of the facts, or blatantly unfair. When in fact the Lord is omnipotent, omniscient and altogether righteous; He’s always active and in complete control of every situation. He knows everything that’s going on, and He always does exactly the right thing.
Job’s problem was that, like his friends, he presumed to understand and know the ways of God. We can certainly sympathize with Job, much more than with his friends and their empty accusations. After all, it says quite clearly that Job was a good and righteous man, and we also know that his suffering must have been very great. Nevertheless, just because we don’t understand why God allowed something to happen, it doesn’t mean we have any right to judge, or to feel sorry for ourselves. Self-pity is always a judgment about God’s fairness.
The story tells us that God allowed Satan to torment Job to prove his faith and integrity – to prove that his virtue was not simply the by-product of all the blessings God had bestowed upon him. Job was correct in saying that these tragedies were not a punishment for sin, but he was wrong in assuming that God was being unfair, or that a righteous life must always be paid back with an unbroken string of blessings. In that sense - and though he knew differently - Job was making the same sort of assumption as his friends: The idea that worldly blessings are the payment-in-kind for righteousness, while calamity and illness are the inevitable recompense for iniquity. The only difference being that Job saw himself as someone who had somehow - by some tragic mistake - been put in the wrong line, and given the wrong payoff.
Self pity is a haughty spiritual condition wherein we assume to be in a position to judge God and His ways. Instead of accepting God’s will for our life, we presume to be able to judge ourselves completely innocent, and instead of seeking God's comfort, we try to comfort ourselves with the notion that God, or the world, is being unfair. We set ourselves up as judge and jury over the will of God, even though though the Bible says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” [Jer 17:9)
Though Job may indeed have been a very good and righteous man, his goodness in no way came close to God’s. As the Psalmist says, (Ps 16:2) “O my soul, thou hast said unto the LORD, Thou art my Lord: my goodness extendeth not to thee.” As Jesus also pointed out, (Mt 19:17) “there is none good but one, that is, God.” So rather than expecting nothing but blessings, (Lu 17:10) “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” If Job’s friends were presumptuous for judging Job, how much more presumptuous was Job, for judging the ways of God?
What if Job and his friends were wrong (as they certainly were)? What if God sends it to rain on both the just and unjust, and He causes His sun to rise on both the evil and the good (as He certainly does). What if God’s blessings should not be thought of as ‘payment-in-kind’ for our righteousness - as if they were something that we should expect and demand from Him, like wages for services rendered? What if His blessings are always a manifestation of God’s underserved mercy and grace, whether or not we think we are better than other people? And what if people suffer tragedy and illness in much the same way – not necessarily because we deserved it or had it coming to us(though there are certainly consequences to sin), but because God has reasons of His own? What if the meaning of human suffering - just like the logic of God’s grace - must always remain somewhat of a mystery to us, since it's outside the range of our control and understanding?
Job didn’t realize that God had allowed Satan to afflict him in order to prove how upright and faithful God believed him to be. But even that explanation doesn’t fully explain to us why God would have needed to prove anything to the devil. It’s the sort of explanation that gives way to a hundred more questions concerning the mystery of evil and the dilemma of human suffering. As it should, because the story of Job was never intended to fully explain the mystery of human suffering, or to map out and explain Satan’s role in God’s plan of salvation. It was only meant to show us how much we necessarily don’t know about God and His ways. We may think we know more than Job, but we really don’t.
All we really know is that when tragedy or illness strikes, the temptation to blame ourselves, blame other people, blame the devil, or hold God at fault, will always be very high. Why is that? Because as human beings, we want to understand what is going on, to get our mind around what’s happened to us. We want to be in control, and we’re more afraid of situations that we can’t understand. We don’t want to feel as if our lives are out of (our) control, even though they are to a large extent, especially when illness or tragedy strike. Nor do we want to give that control completely over to God, even though we need to, and in the end we must.
Instead, we employ all our powers of logic and reasoning to try to regain some measure of control - or at least the illusion of control that comes by apportioning blame. Unfortunately, the more we give into the temptation to blame ourselves, blame God, or blame other people, the more miserable we make ourselves, the further we are from God’s comfort, and the further we stray from the truth. The only way out of the trap the devil has set for us is by faith, and by trusting God unconditionally. Faith is the antidote to guilt and self-pity.
If we go around playing the blame game, we are only showing our ignorance by desperately trying to take control of a situation that can only be overcome by faith. Faith in God means trusting in a wisdom more perfect than our own, one that never fails or misses the mark. True wisdom is relying upon the wisdom greater than ours, rather than leaning too heavily upon our ignorance.
Certainly there are consequences to sin, and we should do whatever we can to avoid whatever consequences we can by repenting all our sins, whenever and wherever we can. But knowing God is realizing that He doesn’t punish people in the cruel and vindictive manner that many religious people would like us to think. To know God is to know that, even though we may never understand the ways of God through the faculty of human reasoning, we can know God by faith, and so come to love God as completely and unconditionally as He loves us. Knowing God doesn’t mean intellectually understanding all His ways, or understanding why everything happens like it does; it means understanding and experiencing how much God loves us, and this is especially true whenever things go very wrong, and for no apparent good reason.
So that when terrible things happen one after another (as they sometimes do), we can lean on Him time and again, more and more, and so come to rest more completely in Him, by trusting in His understanding, His love, and His good intentions towards us; rather than accusing Him in our heart of being unfair, or else feeling distant because we think God is punishing us. Understanding that even through our greatest trials, God has made a way that will lead us even closer to Him. Just as happened with Job.
Job was a man visited by an assortment of tragedies and setbacks, though we are never told exactly why. Unlike most other Old Testament stories, where good and bad people usually get what they deserve, we are told that Job didn’t deserve what happened to him. He probably lived somewhere between present-day Israel and Iraq, about 1800 years before Christ and about 600 years after Noah.
Job may have been a contemporary of Abraham, and it’s interesting to consider that while Abraham was rewarded for his faithfulness in Palestine, Job had everything he had worked for taken away. Bandits, fire, and a tornado took Job’s children, his servants, and his possessions, all on the same day; he then lost his health, and was covered with an assortment of boils.
The story tells us that the Lord allowed Satan to do all these things to Job - not as a punishment for his sins - but to demonstrate that Job’s integrity was strong enough to endure anything. It gets even worse, because even his friends turned against him. Rather than comforting him in his time of need, they basically told him he was getting what he had coming; if he was afflicted by so many disasters - then ipso, facto - he must have deserved it. By failing to confess his sins and repent, Job had brought these tragedies upon himself, and now by maintaining his innocence, he was only adding to his transgressions, by accusing the Lord of being unjust.
Often when tragedy or illness strikes, even our closest friends don’t know the right thing to say. Partly it’s because they can’t find the right words; they may never have had the same thing happen to them, and so they don’t know how to deal with it. But it may also be that they are afraid of the same thing happening to them.
Rather than comforting Job, his friends were really comforting themselves with the false notion that they understood God’s ways, when in fact they didn’t. They were horrified at what had happened; they didn’t want to believe the same thing might happen to them at any moment. So they tried to reassure themselves with the notion that God would never afflict the righteous (or allow the devil to), even though He always punishes the wicked. It’s a comforting notion, though untrue.
As Job pointed out, the objective evidence seems to say otherwise: The wicked very often seem to go unpunished, while good and decent people can suffer such bad luck at times, that you would think their lives were cursed. It simply isn’t true that the wicked always come to an obvious bad end, and it isn’t the case that God openly and invariably rewards kind and highly principled people - at least this doesn’t always seem to be the case during their lifetime. Nor do good people always lead long and healthy lives, because just as the saying goes, ‘only the good die young.’
We could certainly argue that the good and the wicked will eventually get what’s coming to them on judgment day, in the next life – and in fact Job says exactly that, as he comforts himself with the conviction that - (Job 19:25-26) “ I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.” Job believed that the Lord would eventually judge him innocent. Nevertheless, none of us can honestly maintain that everyone will be justly rewarded or condemned for their actions right here, right now, and in this life.
The saying is that ‘virtue is its own reward.’ We can’t expect the world to reward us for doing the right thing. The wicked will very often prosper, and we shouldn’t expect God to strike them down before they get the chance to harm someone else - though they do have the tendency to eventually self-destruct. Life isn’t fair, even though we believe that God is ultimately just. This is something we can only know by faith, and believe in our heart.
Like Job, we can feel completely overwhelmed by misfortune, and by what seem like the basic injustices of life. Often, we can’t shake the feeling that God is somehow punishing us, the same way Job’s friends were trying to convince him of the same thing. The accuser - which is the devil - seems always to have a way of giving voice to his accusations, whether it’s through other people, or through the internalized voice of a morbidly guilty conscience. This is especially true among Christians, many of who see illness or misfortune as a punishment or recompense for sin.
There may also be a part of ourselves that would rather believe that we are being punished. Paradoxically, and like Job’s friends, we can begin to accuse ourselves in order to feel more secure in the world - especially when the alternative seems either that God doesn’t care what happens to us - or even worse - maybe there is no God, and human misfortune is completely arbitrary, like the atheists believe. Seen in this light, blaming ourselves can be seen as a way of avoiding the alternatives. We would rather blame ourselves, rather than believe that God could be cruel or unjust. We would rather feel guilty, rather than live in a world where human suffering was a only crapshoot, without any meaning or purpose. But it’s always wrong to jump to conclusions that are grounded more in all we really don’t know, rather than in what we do.
There are those times that we just have to hang onto to what we know about God, and how we have known Him. The Psalmist says how at those times when (Ps 143:3) “the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath smitten my life down to the ground,” that we should, (143.5) “remember the days of old; I meditate on all thy works; I muse on the work of thy hands.”
When our faith is tested, we should remember what the Lord has done for us in the past, and how He has always seen us through every difficulty. Or else go to a park or out in the country, and take a walk on a sunny day, just looking at all He has created. God’s creation is beautiful because our Creator is good. When difficulties pile up, we can maintain our faith in God’s kindness and good intentions towards us by meditating on what He has done for us, and at all the beauty of nature.
Faith is ultimately a faith in God’s goodness; it is not a faith that bad things can never happen to us, or that we will always feel good. Rather than weakening our faith, the bad things that happen will only help to strengthen our faith and hope in God, whenever we remember how good God is.
There are things that happen in life that we cannot explain; we struggle to understand why God could have allowed this situation to occur. The reason isn’t because He is punishing us, and He isn’t being unfair either: God is just, and He takes no pleasure in seeing people suffer. We can go around blaming the Lord for this, that, or the other thing, feeling like our life is cursed, or even that we are being persecuted by the devil. We can feel sorry for ourselves, just as Job was doing, and thereby implicitly accuse God of being unfair. But we do this only because our faith is still weak or untested, and we don’t really know God and his ways. To say that God is testing us, is to say that He is deepening and making our faith stronger, just as He was with Job.
Job’s friends argued that guilt was the appropriate response to human tragedy. Their explanation was that Job was guilty of sin, and now God was punishing him. Job, on the other hand, rather than feeling guilty, resorted to a kind of self-pity, which was really just as bad, and potentially even more insidious. Like his friends, Job couldn't understand God’s reasons. His explanation was that the Lord had made some terrible mistake which needed to be rectified; he wanted the opportunity to plead his case and prove his innocence. Job not only judged himself completely innocent of any wrongdoing, but he also implicitly accused God of being apathetic, lazy, ignorant of the facts, or blatantly unfair. When in fact the Lord is omnipotent, omniscient and altogether righteous; He’s always active and in complete control of every situation. He knows everything that’s going on, and He always does exactly the right thing.
Job’s problem was that, like his friends, he presumed to understand and know the ways of God. We can certainly sympathize with Job, much more than with his friends and their empty accusations. After all, it says quite clearly that Job was a good and righteous man, and we also know that his suffering must have been very great. Nevertheless, just because we don’t understand why God allowed something to happen, it doesn’t mean we have any right to judge, or to feel sorry for ourselves. Self-pity is always a judgment about God’s fairness.
The story tells us that God allowed Satan to torment Job to prove his faith and integrity – to prove that his virtue was not simply the by-product of all the blessings God had bestowed upon him. Job was correct in saying that these tragedies were not a punishment for sin, but he was wrong in assuming that God was being unfair, or that a righteous life must always be paid back with an unbroken string of blessings. In that sense - and though he knew differently - Job was making the same sort of assumption as his friends: The idea that worldly blessings are the payment-in-kind for righteousness, while calamity and illness are the inevitable recompense for iniquity. The only difference being that Job saw himself as someone who had somehow - by some tragic mistake - been put in the wrong line, and given the wrong payoff.
Self pity is a haughty spiritual condition wherein we assume to be in a position to judge God and His ways. Instead of accepting God’s will for our life, we presume to be able to judge ourselves completely innocent, and instead of seeking God's comfort, we try to comfort ourselves with the notion that God, or the world, is being unfair. We set ourselves up as judge and jury over the will of God, even though though the Bible says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” [Jer 17:9)
Though Job may indeed have been a very good and righteous man, his goodness in no way came close to God’s. As the Psalmist says, (Ps 16:2) “O my soul, thou hast said unto the LORD, Thou art my Lord: my goodness extendeth not to thee.” As Jesus also pointed out, (Mt 19:17) “there is none good but one, that is, God.” So rather than expecting nothing but blessings, (Lu 17:10) “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” If Job’s friends were presumptuous for judging Job, how much more presumptuous was Job, for judging the ways of God?
What if Job and his friends were wrong (as they certainly were)? What if God sends it to rain on both the just and unjust, and He causes His sun to rise on both the evil and the good (as He certainly does). What if God’s blessings should not be thought of as ‘payment-in-kind’ for our righteousness - as if they were something that we should expect and demand from Him, like wages for services rendered? What if His blessings are always a manifestation of God’s underserved mercy and grace, whether or not we think we are better than other people? And what if people suffer tragedy and illness in much the same way – not necessarily because we deserved it or had it coming to us(though there are certainly consequences to sin), but because God has reasons of His own? What if the meaning of human suffering - just like the logic of God’s grace - must always remain somewhat of a mystery to us, since it's outside the range of our control and understanding?
Job didn’t realize that God had allowed Satan to afflict him in order to prove how upright and faithful God believed him to be. But even that explanation doesn’t fully explain to us why God would have needed to prove anything to the devil. It’s the sort of explanation that gives way to a hundred more questions concerning the mystery of evil and the dilemma of human suffering. As it should, because the story of Job was never intended to fully explain the mystery of human suffering, or to map out and explain Satan’s role in God’s plan of salvation. It was only meant to show us how much we necessarily don’t know about God and His ways. We may think we know more than Job, but we really don’t.
All we really know is that when tragedy or illness strikes, the temptation to blame ourselves, blame other people, blame the devil, or hold God at fault, will always be very high. Why is that? Because as human beings, we want to understand what is going on, to get our mind around what’s happened to us. We want to be in control, and we’re more afraid of situations that we can’t understand. We don’t want to feel as if our lives are out of (our) control, even though they are to a large extent, especially when illness or tragedy strike. Nor do we want to give that control completely over to God, even though we need to, and in the end we must.
Instead, we employ all our powers of logic and reasoning to try to regain some measure of control - or at least the illusion of control that comes by apportioning blame. Unfortunately, the more we give into the temptation to blame ourselves, blame God, or blame other people, the more miserable we make ourselves, the further we are from God’s comfort, and the further we stray from the truth. The only way out of the trap the devil has set for us is by faith, and by trusting God unconditionally. Faith is the antidote to guilt and self-pity.
If we go around playing the blame game, we are only showing our ignorance by desperately trying to take control of a situation that can only be overcome by faith. Faith in God means trusting in a wisdom more perfect than our own, one that never fails or misses the mark. True wisdom is relying upon the wisdom greater than ours, rather than leaning too heavily upon our ignorance.
Certainly there are consequences to sin, and we should do whatever we can to avoid whatever consequences we can by repenting all our sins, whenever and wherever we can. But knowing God is realizing that He doesn’t punish people in the cruel and vindictive manner that many religious people would like us to think. To know God is to know that, even though we may never understand the ways of God through the faculty of human reasoning, we can know God by faith, and so come to love God as completely and unconditionally as He loves us. Knowing God doesn’t mean intellectually understanding all His ways, or understanding why everything happens like it does; it means understanding and experiencing how much God loves us, and this is especially true whenever things go very wrong, and for no apparent good reason.
So that when terrible things happen one after another (as they sometimes do), we can lean on Him time and again, more and more, and so come to rest more completely in Him, by trusting in His understanding, His love, and His good intentions towards us; rather than accusing Him in our heart of being unfair, or else feeling distant because we think God is punishing us. Understanding that even through our greatest trials, God has made a way that will lead us even closer to Him. Just as happened with Job.
posted by R. Stephen Hanchett at 12:25 PM
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