Today's passage is Job 12.
Job begins his response to Zophar by sarcastically saying he knows all that Zophar says and Zophar is not his superior. Even though he is righteous, Job says he has become a laughingstock. He says evildoers are not punished, and animals, birds, fish and the earth itself know this.
He goes on to affirm the power of God to control the forces of nature, make and unmake priests and counsellors, raise up nations and destroy them, take away the rationality of leaders and send them into trackless wastes.
Job does three things in today's passage.
First, he proclaims his righteousness again.
Second, he sarcastically destroys Zophar's unreflected parroting of a truth which he says even fish, birds, animals and the ground itself know is false.
The "truth" is that God protects and rewards the innocent while punishing the wicked. Third, he affirms the absolute power of God.
Job is right in two of the three.
He's wrong about being righteous and he ironically clings to the truth Zophar had earlier mouthed but which has just been proved false by direct observation of life.
If he's righteous, then according to his beliefs and Zophar's he should not be in his present circumstances of bankruptcy, loss of children and suffering from disease.
There are only two logical conclusions for Job.
Either he is not righteous or there's a different system from good-rewarded-evil-punished going on.
If he's not righteous, then Job is unaware of where he went wrong.
If there's another system operating where good is not rewarded and evil not punished, then what is the nature of God aside from irrational, absolute and incomprehensible power?
And if God is only power and no upholder of righteousness and justice, then what is the difference between the forces of nature and God?
If there is no difference, then God is not God but incomprehensible forces.
And if God is merely an anthropomorphization of bewildering natural forces, then there is no God.
For Zophar, the situation is not simple.
For him to preserve his God of justice, Job's circumstances must make Job guilty.
But Job's determined insistence on his innocence throw Zophar's theology into nonsence.
For Job, the situation is worse.
He's suffering beyond endurance on every level of humanity.
This is supposed to mean he's guilty.
But he insists on his innocence even as he affirms an omnipotent God of increasingly dubious justice.
How can a God of justice be rescued from a world of unmerited and irrational suffering?
The answer is Jesus.
Through Jesus God rescues himself from man's philosophical dilemma by rescuing mankind from sin's demand for death with his own death on the cross.
With his death, Jesus confirms that suffering is redemptive, and God's justice is beyond the limits of man's justice because God's justice is concerned with salvation.
God is saved in the act of saving mankind through Jesus. Justice serves salvation. Suffering is redemptive, ripping the curtain of right and wrong.
Don't ask the fish. They don't know about love.
Eight years ago at about this time I remember sitting at my desk in a small apartment in Siheung staring at the wall, my Bible lying open on the desk between my elbows.
I had left a much smaller room in the YMCA a few months earlier.
I had a job now. But everything was just the same.
Hurt, suffering, emptiness, meaning missing, and understanding absent. I was still Job. I wasn't getting anywhere because I kept asking the fish.
It was when I asked Jesus that the world changed years later.
I can't believe it took me so long to ask him.
My problem was that my ears were plugged and I couldn't hear him saying, "Ask me."
Lord, forgive my long stubborness to your call through suffering. Thank you for giving me this time of unmerited but desperately needed meditation on your word. Help me reach my mother from this hospital bed through my testimony. Give my your understanding for mine is broken.
