When I consider the person and experience of Job, I am always struck that his story is in some sense a part of our own. Though few have known the intensity of Job’s affliction, many have known the urgency and agony of loaded questions aimed at the heavens. Religious or otherwise, seldom can one fail to recall a time marked by such restlessness, a yearning for answers amidst hopelessness, confusion, or lament. For many, it is the tender age of adolescence; for others it is the inquisitive years of college, the emptiness of a midlife crisis, or, like Job, the impenetrable fog of tragedy.
Sitting in the dust and ashes of my own confusion, like Job, a thousand questions once seemed to define my journey. And also like Job, I discovered that the sort of peace that transcends understanding is not at all a matter of dumbing down the questions or forgetting them and the lament they harbor altogether. Often, rather, a disruption in the interrogation comes with an unexpected exchange of seats and in the form of a question from God. For me, as for Job, it was: Who are you?
If the whole story of Scripture is held together as one, at heart is the convicting jolt that the journey to honestly knowing God cannot exist apart from the journey of honestly knowing one’s self. I remembering praying fervently that God would just show me what I needed to know: Lord, show me who you are so that I can learn to see You. I also distinctly remember the thought occurring to me that maybe God really did know me better than I knew myself. It was as if God responded: Let me show you who you are so that you might learn to see Me. After all, as C.S. Lewis once asked, “How can we see God until we have faces?”(1)
In one of his books from the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis describes the great Aslan tearing the costume off the child in front of him. The child writhes in pain from the razor sharp claws that feel as though they pierce his very being. With mounting intensity, Aslan rips away layer after layer, until the child is absolutely certain he will die from the agony. But when it is all over and every last layer has been removed, the child delights in the freedom, never before realizing the extra weight of the costume that he carried.
The end of Job’s story holds a similar transformation. As the once-questioning Job finds himself completely powerless to respond to God’s own stifling questions, he seems to see a part of himself for the first time. But not in terms of condemnation as some conclude. Job indeed sees the façade and the masks he has spoken behind, the partial veil that covered his eyes even as he questioned in anger and agony. But he also sees in mystery and reverence the one who stands before him. And it is this vision that moves him to admit he may have spoken out of turn. This is not the image of a child who has finally given up the exasperating fight with the parent who simply spoke louder. “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,” says Job, “things too wonderful for me to know.” It is a child not repenting for his lament or his questions, but realizing that God is God and that this somehow, mysteriously, transforms both the questions… and questioner.
Job’s agonizing story is not our own, and yet there are parts of his questioning, lamenting posture before God that offers a sense of human solidarity and the disrupting hope of a restorative God in the fragile midst of that humanity. After all of the suffering and death early in the book, at the end of the book, Job has seven more sons and three more daughters. Old Testament professor Ellen Davis makes the important note that this is not a “replacement” of the children Job lost, as if that were even a possibility. Rather, she suggests that the “clearest expression of the renewal of Job’s mind” is “his willingness to have more children.”(2) Job knows all too well the realities of loss and human fragility. And yet, he pours himself again into the lives of fragile, mortal children. Davis powerfully concludes: “This book is not about justifying God’s actions; it is about Job’s transformation. It is useless to ask how much (or how little) it costs God to give more children. The real question is how much it costs Job to become a father again. How can he open himself again to the terrible vulnerability of loving those whom he cannot protect against suffering and untimely death?”(3)
Job’s story does not give us a direct answer to that question. And yet, the two images of Job that come at either end of his story hint at the sort of transformation only a creative God could achieve, a God whose love can arise even from the whirlwind of a thousand questions.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) C.S. Lewis, Till We have Faces, question taken from book’s title and theme.
(2) Ellen Davis, Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 141.
(3) Ibid., 142.