Sovereignty, Pseudo-Truth, & The Book of Job
I feel like Job is one of the most misrepresented books in the Bible.
I do not understand how you can read the book of Job and come to the conclusion that the moral of the story is patience. Have you ever read the book of Job?
Approximately twenty of the forty-two chapters are Job moaning, cursing the day he was born, and defending himself.
Man, I love the book of Job. Legitimately, no sarcasm here.
Because just like David in the Psalms, Job shows that a real relationship with God isn’t always pretty, it isn’t always easy, and God can 100% handle your anger, frustration, despair, and your hurt.
What I love is that Job doesn’t turn away from God. He keeps coming to him with his misery. He doesn’t close his heart off because God allowed him to be hurt. He keeps coming back with his questions, his agony, his frustration, his despair. Even when life didn’t seem worth living, he recognized God as his only hope.
May we always run back to The One who saves.
The second thing I love about Job are his friends. They always get a bad rap, like they were the bad guys, but they were just real people. They were legitimately there to help.
They sat in mourning with their friend for seven days saying nothing.
The problem is that after a while, when they couldn’t help and Job’s situation wasn’t getting better, they turned to rationalization and their own limited human understanding, which only made things worse.
Unfortunately, anyone who has experienced any kind of long-term suffering can tell you that this is totally relatable.
And then I love that Elihu, who had been sitting in silence for almost 30 chapters, finally speaks. I love that he waited to speak because he was young, but could not sit in silence because he was burning up with truth.
“Then the anger of Elihu the son of Barakh’el the Buzi, from the family of Ram, blazed up against Job for thinking he was right and God wrong. His anger also blazed up against his three friends, because they had found no answer to Job but condemned him anyway.”
Job 32:2-3
And the stage is set to show us what the book of Job is all about:
God is sovereign.
He exists outside of time and space, he designed and brought all things into being— everything we see and understand, the things we see yet do not understand, and all that we do not even know of yet. He sustains all life and all things have life through him. He is the ruler of reality and he is singularly sovereign.
In our emphasis on God’s grace, love and mercy, we forget to honor and be humbled by his justice, authority, and majesty, which are beyond human comprehension or rationale.
Elihu was right– although Job was not to blame for his misfortunes, he was guilty of one thing:
Job was holding onto his own self-righteousness.
He was convinced that he had done nothing wrong and that God was wrong to punish him unfairly. (And honestly, can you blame him??)
But God is God and we are nothing but a bit of dirt with some life breathed into it.
We are human and fallible and even when we are good we are not even close. There will never be a time when we aren’t completely reliant on God’s mercy.
Who are we to question God’s ways?
After Elihu’s six chapter reproach of Job for thinking he was more righteous than God, God finally speaks, and for the remaining five chapters He humbles Job with questions that only the God of the universe could answer.
“Then Adonai answered Iyov out of the storm:
“Who is this, darkening my plans with his ignorant words? Stand up like a man, and brace yourself; I will ask questions; and you, give the answers! Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. Do you know who determined its dimension or who stretched the measuring line across it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Job 38:1-7
He is sovereign. And when we don’t understand his ways, we need to understand just how much we don’t understand.
And we need daily reminders of who God is.
Which brings me back to pseudo-truth.
Job’s friends (and Job himself) said a lot of things that were true about God, but their conclusions were faulty.
And let me tell you, there’s a lot of that going around today, too.
And it looks right and sounds good and preaches well.
And it’s not 100% wrong.
But it is not truth. Because anything less than the truth is pseudo-truth.
Pseudo
adjective
Not actually but having the appearance of; pretended; false or spurious; sham. Almost, approaching, or trying to be.
Dictionary.com
“The prefix pseudo is used to mark something that superficially appears to be (or behaves like) one thing, but is something else.”
Wikipedia
It’s important to be able to recognize pseudo-truth. Because it is EVERYWHERE and because it will work… until it doesn’t. The top advice for relationships, parenting and being a successful anything often starts with truth but ends up taking you down roads of faulty thinking that lead to disastrous consequences.
Pseudo-truth will self-empower you, comfort you, flatter you, cajole you, and coddle you. It sounds like exactly what you need, but it pumps you up just to see you crash and burn. And then it will shame you, guilt you and control you.
God’s truth will humble you, convict you, purify you, challenge you, encourage you, heal you, protect you, comfort you, and above all, it will always bring you back to Him.
Because more than he wants you to be righteous, God wants your heart. Righteousness for the sake of being righteous is legalism, not relationship.
So let us learn from Job and lean into God in our hurt and our questions and disillusion, not away from Him.
Let us quit pretending to understand the mind of God, and instead of judging and blaming or walking away, just be present with those who are suffering.
Let us be wise to recognize pseudo-truth, and be faithful to speak God’s truth instead of spreading false hope and captivity.
And let us remember that He alone is God. He alone is sovereign. And we can not even begin to comprehend all that we do not know.