Transcript

Well, if we have our Bibles, we'll be referring to the book. We're going to look at the Book of Job now. And I think the Book of Job illustrates, of course, many aspects of suffering. It illustrates, I think, in a very classical way, all the symptoms of somebody who is a depressive. He's a melancholic.  And you'll need to read chapter three of the Book of Job to realize all the evidences of a manic depressive. And certainly when one looks again at chapter 30, at the summary of his own direful lament, that perhaps in the history of literature there has never been anyone who has given us such a dirge concerning the nature of human suffering than Job does.

But the other aspect of Job is that there's an aspect of suffering that perhaps we've never seen. And I suggest that Job helps us to understand that in his own suffering he's pointing to the very mystery of creation. And so we want to look at that aspect as well. A lot of our difficulties about the detail of Job and understanding the Book of Job are, I think, literary. And the first problem we find the Book of Job is that one begins to discover by trial and error that the literary genre of Job is unique. Scholars are now beginning to recognize that there's not ever been a book written quite like Job because it's not Greek tragedy. The whole affirmation and the recovery of Job at the end indicates it's not the kind of thing that Sophocles or the other Greek traditions describe.

They have no understanding of the reality of God and the way that he communicates. And we find at the same time that the poetry of the Book of Job is superb. You know, various translations of the Bible have different usefulness, but the New English Bible version of the Book of Job I think is the best poetic expression of the literature of this book. Other parts of the Bible are not so well dealt with by the New English. It's a more liberal translation. But I think in the Book of Job, their translation of its poetry is unsurpassed. If one looks to see, therefore, what kind of literature the Book of Job is, as I say, we find that it's unique.

There are comparable passages in the ancient world wisdom literature of the ancient near east, such as a Book called the Egyptian Complaint of the Peasant. There's another called the Babylonian Pessimistic Dialogue of a Master and Slave. And especially the Babylonian is neurotic in his depression. It suggests, as they argue together in their dialogue as master and slave do, that really the only value of life is to throw it away is suicide, that life is so utterly meaningless and futile, that the advocacy that is given in that dialogue is suicide. So Job is not like any of this literature. And so it's not a drama, it's not an epic. It's not even a lyric. Although there's a lot of lyricism about the poet.

There's a lot of didactic expression in it all. But it's been recognized that the book is unique because this combination of prose at the beginning, introducing the book, and the prose at the end, and then the vast bulk of it in this form of poetry is. Is itself a marvelous masterpiece. That's unique in the history of literature. And so there's been a lot of eulogy, of course, about putting the Book of Job itself among the greats. If one was to choose the five greatest pieces of literature, Job would be one of them in terms of its literary quality. And yet, of course, we know that the literary structure of Job and the uniqueness of its literary genre is not really what we're talking about this afternoon.

We're concerned about the reality of what Job is seeking to convey to us. Well, as you know, the character of the book is devised around the friendship of three friends of Job. And so we have this prelude where there's this and there's oscillations between scenes on earth and scenes in heaven. In the first two chapters, the scene shifts from earth to heaven to earth to heaven to earth to heaven. So there's an interesting play that is going on between these two universes. One of the things that stumbles us as Christians is what business has Satan got in heaven? We don't associate Satan with heaven. And I think we sometimes can project into Scripture what isn't in scripture. And that's what causes us to make a mess of things. And so one of the things that I found helpful is to recognize that this word Satan that's translated in the first two chapters is not referring to Satan with a. With a capital S.

The word is, in fact, only used five times in the Old Testament, and each time it's not personified. Now, Satan, the New Testament is personified, but in the Old Testament, Satan is simply the Hebrew word for adversary. And it makes much more sense to see Satan in the first two chapters as really being the devil's advocate in the Council of the Almighty. You know, in any good cabinet meeting, you have to have somebody with an opposite point of view in order that decision making will be more clarified and be probably more accurate. And so I think the role of Satan in heaven is the role of one of the King's Council that is taking this alternative perspective. Now, that shouldn't shock our theology. It's simply a question of understanding the meaning of the word and understanding the context in which it's used.

I don't think that we find evidence in the Old Testament of the personification of evil. And one of the experiences that we find about our own life is that it's only because of our nearness to Christ, who is the personification of all that's good, that we find adversarially the personification of evil. Some years ago, I remember speaking to Dr. Malik about this Charles Malik, and I said, do you believe in the personal devil? And he said, yes, but. But he said, I've only learned to believe in the reality of a personal devil because of the personal reality of Jesus Christ. And the closer I am to Christ, the more I recognize the personal impact that evil has in life. Well, in that context, it's appropriate that it's in the New Testament that we understand Satan with a capital S.

But until the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, it's not a reality that we find in Israelite faith. Now, you may want to raise this later in discussion, but the point I'm trying to make is equate Satan as simply the Hebrew understanding of adversary. In this book, then, we find that following on the five scenes of disaster, because there are five sequences of disaster that follows fall upon Job. And one of the problems of the disasters that fall upon Job is that two of them come from man and three of them seem to come from God. You know, God can't be blamed for these wicked Chaldeans or these wicked Sabeans that rob and plunder and steal. But God is certainly responsible for the. For the wind. He's responsible for that Hamada storm that came out from the east.

He's responsible for the lightning that struck down the house and destroyed his family. And there's the element of disease that then afflicts Job. And again, modern scholarship has assumed that it's the perpetual itch. Have you ever heard of that disease? There's a special name for the skin disease that makes you just itch all the time, day and night, standing up, sitting down, so that you have no rest to your body. In fact, somebody who once wrote, Peter Craigie, who wrote once about Job, said he'd experienced this himself for about a year. It's a nervous complaint. And the torment.

Well, shingles is one mild form of it, and eczema is another form. But it's not that it's something far worse than either of these, but that's the kind of disease that no doubt, Job himself went through. So we're left then with a lot of question marks about what God has got to do with all of this. The book is full of question marks because in other question marks. So we don't know it's literary style in terms of other literature. It's unique, as we said, we've got a question mark now about Satan because that's no doubt the first time that you've heard that questioning. You've got a question mark about the interaction between the natural disasters and the. And these other things that happened to Job. And of course, the book is left in the open.

We don't know whether this is history, whether this is literature, whether this is Mr. Everyman that is being described in a kind of literary form like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, or whether we're dealing with an actual historical event. We don't know the dating. We don't know. People say it's 1600 BC 1300 BC or it may be very late. Some people say it's 3 or 400 B.C. most scholarship says about 1300 B.C. but again, the question mark of chronology and the dating of it and also what is left uncertain is where this literature came from. Is this Hebrew? Was Job a Hebrew? Or who is Job? Well, probably Job is international. He's referring to a situation probably outside of the Commonwealth of Israel.

So the book itself is not necessarily concerned with an Israelite and an Israelite faith. So all of these things are question marks. And also, of course, what is left so profoundly uncertain is what God is doing at the end of the book. I mean, when somebody is neurotic or goes to the psychiatrist for attention, you don't say, let's go to Washington Zoo and have a look around, shall we? And yet that's what God seems to do. You see, he tells him to look at the crocodiles and the hippopotamus and you wonder what kind of psychiatric treatment this is. Although I remember once a psychiatric friend of mine did just that. This person was so neurotic, he says, let's go to London Zoo. And he did and took him round. And I suppose one could learn a bit of gratitude that one doesn't have to apologize for being a giraffe all your existence.

But these are all problems that we're left with. So what I'm trying to do is to intensify the mystery of Job before we look to Job for any easy answer. And a lot of biblical literature is like that. The literature is, as it were, taking us off our perch, knocking us down and saying, your mind that you think is so masterly and masterful is not any help in this story, in this picture or this situation. Well, let's look at the suffering itself. One of the preconditions that we find today in the diagnosis of depression when people do get depressed is largely illustrated, I think, in the first two chapters of the book. Because we start off with somebody who's well integrated.

He's got everything made for him. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East. We're told in verse three, chapter one. He's a family man who cares deeply for his children. And so there's this touching little insight in verse five, that early each day he offered up a sacrifice for his children in case any of them had sinned and cursed against God. So he's got a deep moral concern for the well being of his children. And then it's all taken from him, verses 14 to 19, his wealth and his children. And then he's stricken with this form of dermatitis in chapter two, verses six and eight. And in the length of all that, he tells us that he loses sleep in chapter seven, verse three, there's a very graphic description of his.I've been.

I have been allotted months of futility. Nights of misery have been assigned to me, so that when I lie down, I think, how long will it be before I get up? The night drags on, I toss about until dawn. Insomnia is graphically described in chapter seven, verse three. And so, as a result of losing everything, of finding his world collapsing, of no longer having a worldview that makes sense, and his own wife has forsaken him and told him, look, curse God, that's the end. There's nothing left for you to do. Then in the nature of a Greek tragedy, you've withheld the juggernaut. Now just hurl your defiance to the heavens and take the consequences. That's it. Well, he doesn't. But he does find that, as Sarah was saying to us this morning, we have breaking points. And Job goes into his breaking point.

He enters in medical language into a dysphoric mood. And this dysphoric mood, which is spelled D S Y P H O R I C, characterized by four emotional conditions which are described for us. First of all, he's sad. You know, sometimes we go through a form of suffering that is such an intensity of sadness. And so in chapter 30, in verse 28, he says, I go about blackened, not by the sun, it's not suntan. This draining of his face in a dark, deep countenance of sorrow and sadness. Is that where he says, I stand up in the assembly and cry? That's a very vivid expression of what happens to a manic depression. Somebody who's got a stiff upper lip, who's got it all made and is all controlled, suddenly finds that he bursts into tears in a public gathering. Where before it was totally the opposite of his behavior.

He would have been so self-controlled and so brave. This is chapter 30, verse 28. Chapter 30, yes, the end of the book. One Jewish scholar, rather, has translated this phrase. When I stand up before people, I burst into tears. And then he tells us in chapter 16, verse 16, about the nature of his tears. My face is red with weeping, dark shadows ring my eyes. And of course, the darkness of his sadness is being portrayed. And one of the things, too, that we find with, of course, as we've said this morning about suffering, is that the tendency of suffering is to isolate us, to alienate us. And so in chapter 30, verse 29, he says that he's terribly alone.

He says, I have become a brother of the jackal and a companion of the desert owl. I think it's T.S.Eliot in The Waste Land who describes about the drip, drip, not of water, but which he confuses with the longing for satisfaction, of thirst in a dry place. But it's really the bird that's making the noise, but it's a desert bird. And so Job finds himself the companionship, the companion of the desert owl. And so what he's really telling us is that in the deadly silence and solitude of such intense alienation that one goes through in suffering, the predators of death are his only companions, the jackal and the owl. And his own voice is compared with the wail of the jackal.

His cry is like the mournful screech of this desert bird. What vivid description we have there then of this intense alienation and the sadness that is associated with such suffering. And secondly, and another emotional feature of Job is that fear and hopelessness and despondency overwhelm him. He says in chapter 30, verse 15. Terrors overwhelm me. My dignity is driven away as by the wind. My safety vanishes like a desert cloud. There's no rain there. The cloud evaporates. My safety is like that. It's gone. And so he describes his experience as one of panic, because there's a dreadful panic that ensues when we have such dreadful fear. And so the next two lines recapitulate his whole spirit of hopelessness. And so he repeats what he's already said in chapter seven, verses six and seven.

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle. That is to say, they go in and out as God, life just flash by. And they come to an end without hope. And so Job thinks of his life as like the wind, it's gone. A very short breath, and it's over. And so Job enters into the depths of despair over this. Then, thirdly, the third phase, this dysphoric mood, is irritability. One of the most poignant and human touches in the book of Job, I think, is in chapter 30, verse 1, where now they mock me, men younger than I, whose fathers I would have disdained to poot with my sheepdogs. There's a form of suffering that we go through where people that we would never have associated with now, the ones who mock us and who transcend over us, they rise above us. And says Job in his pride, because it's hurt pride that's saying this. He says, my father wouldn't have even made them look after the sheep, after the sheep.

We wouldn't have put them there. And yet now they stand over me. And so there is an intense suffering that occurs when people that we were never bothered with socially are the ones who now taunt us and torment us. So now they plague me. I can never get them out of my thoughts. And so, of course, this intensifies the bitterness and the resentment and the depression that goes further still in the situation. And so Job says, how I long for the. For the months gone by, for the days when God watched over me. How I wish, he says in chapter 29, verse 2, for the good old days.

But the good old days are no longer. And then he goes back in reverie, you see, in chapter 29, to the good old days. He says, when I went to the gate of the city and took my place in the public square, he was a man of importance. He was a dignity. He was. He was one of the rulers, one of the elders. He says, I glute back to the days in chapter 29, verse 7. When I was somebody. But the nature of the suffering is that one becomes nobody. In those days, he says in chapter 29, verse 8, the young men stepped aside. Yes, they were reverent to me. When they saw me coming, the old men rose to their feet. Then I was somebody. In those days, the voices of the nobles were hushed in my presence.

Their tongues stuck to the roof of their mouth in their awe of my presence and majesty. Verse 10. Whoever heard me spoke well of me, and those who saw me commended me because I rescued the poor when they cried, and the fatherless that I assisted. So I was a great philanthropist. I was admired. But now I'm nobody. All that has changed drastically. You know many people in Washington. As I remember once in just before Carter became president, one of the people eminent in the government. She told me how she was terrified of falling into the abyss. What she meant was falling off her perch. Politically, it was gone. But how much worse all this is when it's combined with all the other things that one has suffered. And then the fourth trait of this dysphoric mood is that it leads therefore to helplessness and utter discouragement. And so in chapter 30, verse 22, Job, you snatch me up and you drive me before the wind.

I'm tossed around like a straw in the wind. I'm like chaff that the reapers have tossed up and blown away. God's making a plaything of me, and I feel so completely helpless. There's no resistance left. There's no staying power within me. And so he really gets scared. There's nothing worse than being, as it were, like a cock on the. On the. The waters of the Niagara Falls. I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer. I stand up, but you merely look at me impassively. So, chapter 30, verse 20. Well, these are the conditions, then, for an intense dysphoric depression.

This is the kind of thing that happens when somebody is driven to suicide. Intense sadness, heightened fears, a sense of hopelessness, deepest despondency, intense irritability with other people and the darkest expressions of discouragement. How can anyone survive through this? And then we find that there are further criteria which give us such a vivid picture that you might think this is a hospital case study. Today there are physical symptoms that Job is expressing. He talks about the physical symptom of digestion and a poor appetite. Chapter 30, verse 27 tells us, the churning inside me never stops. His stomach is all just absolutely wheezy, and he's constantly sick and he can't keep his food Down. And Elihu later, of course, discerns this, because in chapter 33, verse 20, this very wise counselor we'll see later on, speaks about Job.

That his very being finds food repulsive and his soul loathes the choicest meal. You see, he does have ulcers. That's what it's got to. Or it may be that he's got all the symptoms of anorexia, you see, of self hate through all that he's gone through. And then secondly, we find that there are sleep difficulties, that there's nocturnal pain, and this constant self reproach that so bedevils him through the night that he can't sleep. And so in chapter 30, verse 17, he says, Night pierces my bones. My gnawing pain is never at rest. Or as another translation puts it, my veins never rest, they're pulsing so vividly. And so there's a deep restlessness of the soul that disturbs the whole physical metabolism of his body. And he says in chapter seven, verse four, when I lie down, I think his mind's going wheeling fast. And I think, how long before I get up?

The night drags on and I toss until the dawn. And so the combination of his skinach with his insomnia to drives him crazy. And meanwhile it's as if his skin is clothed with worms and scabs, My skin broken and festering. And so in chapter 30, verse 17, Job says, the night pierces my bones. I have quoted that verse to you already. And he has a persistent nightmare that in his great power, God is throwing me into the mud, reducing me to dust and ashes. Job has the fear that God has discarded him like an old cloak and is now a worthless rag. And so in chapter 33, verse 15, Job speaks of how in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on men as they slumber in their beds, God speaks and terrifies men with dire warnings.

So Job saying, God's haunting me with nightmares so that he is constantly disturbed by muscular skeletal pain and the dreams of self reproach. There's a third thing that's very interesting about this situation. That is that Job suffers from sexual impotency. Certainly we find all the evidence of his reduced drives. So in chapter 31, verse one, he says, I have now made a covenant with my eyes not to look lustfully. He says, it's all over as far as that kind of life is concerned. I have no further interest in women any longer. How do you think I could ever look a maiden, in view of all that I'm suffering is really what Job is arguing. Do you think there could ever be any place for love making in Belsam or in Auschwitz? And then we also find, fourthly, that Job is suffering recurrent thoughts of death.

Death is close to him and never far from his mind. And so in chapter 30, verse 23, he says, I know you will bring me down to death to the place appointed for all living. And so he recapitulates the soliloquy of chapter three, which is one of the most depressing passages of all Scripture. He curses his origins. He curses the very roots of his existence. He longs for death to finish it all. May the day of my birth perish on the night it was said, a boy is born, for that day has turned into darkness. May God not care about it. May no light shine upon my birthday, he says. Or he says in verse 10 of chapter three. If only God had shut my mother's womb against me so that I had never been born. Why did I not perish at birth? Why did I not die in the womb?

Why were there knees to receive me and breasts that I might be nursed? For now I would be lying down and at peace I would be asleep in the grave and at rest. Chapter 3, verse 13. So Job is really saying, why wasn't I stillborn? Why was I not like an infant that never saw the light of day? Verse 16. Why has birth been a mockery to my life? The remarkable thing is, of course, that all this kind of detail is only just being researched after the war, psychiatrically and in the Proceedings of medical journal of 1944. The Clinical Nature of Manic Depressive Equivalence, it's called. It was published in the Transactions of the American neurological society in 1946.

All these traits that we've just been describing have accurately been documented since then. So there is what it is the truth of that kind of situation. And then, of course, what follows out of all this is the alienation of between the patient and the doctor. One of the things that sometimes, as we've already heard expressed in our session together, that when one is in the nursing profession, one of the most intense forms of suffering that the doctor or the nurse may have is the total withdrawal of the patient. So they're not able to really have that human touch or relate in this kind of way. And of course, this is the irritation that Job has with his three friends. They were there to help him. They were there with kindly intent.

But first of all, they didn't recognize that there are forms of suffering that are so intense that even the comfort, the would be comforter can be an irritant because there's a feeling that it's so superficial and so inadequate and it's so out of reach of where the person really is. So we have to be sensitive sometimes to some intention forms of suffering which are so intense that you're better to keep your mouth shut. Anything you say is going to make a mess of things. And so that seven days of silence was the best thing that those friends did. And they might have continued if they'd been wise.

One of the things that therefore, we find that is important for us is to look at Elihu, who is the. The fourth friend who comes on the scene. And, you know, the Bible is full of examples of showing us that those who are qualified are disqualified. That God uses the younger son for the seed royal, as he did with Jacob and the continuity with David, rather in the continuity that was to follow. But in the patriarchs, we have the same story of Jacob. And it's very interesting that the person who really helps Job is the unqualified. He's a young man. And I think that should help us today to realize, not that we want to scorn the professional skills of the healing profession, but I don't think we should necessarily take somebody with a qualified degree in psychology or psychiatry with too much seriousness.

They may be very helpful, but they may not. It may be that God springs up in Elihu, who knows the Lord and who can give us, from common sense, much more help than from his degree. And so Elihu is that kind of lay counselor who we don't look for that provides this kind of help. And let me show you some of the things that Elihu does. The first important thing that Elihu does is to indicate his own humility. He's not God. He's not playing God. And he realizes at the same time that if one is near to God, one can be a spokesman for God. And that's all Elihu is pretending to be. He's a young man, and that's why he's kept his silence. And what a silence he's kept. I mean, he's been. He's been infinitely patient to think of the rigmarole of three dialogues that he's listened to from three friends.

That's nine speeches plus job speeches. He's listened through 12 speeches before he opens his mouth. So he's been at it for several days, listening, and then he starts speaking. Now, what's going to help us to break through the alienation of Depression. Well, there's only one way in which you can comfort somebody in that position, and that is that you establish a bond of equality. You're not standing over them, you're alongside of them. You see, the priest and the Levite couldn't do this. But it was the good Samaritan who came where he was. And so it was with Elihu. He says in chapter 33, verse 6, I am just like you, before God. I too have been taken from the clay. And so that bond of equality is where we start.

We start with that recognition. And then secondly, he reassures the patient that he has nothing to fear from him. Chapter 33, verse 7. No fear of me should alarm you, nor should my hand be heavy upon you. Don't be afraid of me. Then thirdly, Elihu listens to and completely understands all the complaints of Job. He hasn't been sort of biting his lip in impatience listening to all that Job said. He's taken it all in. He's listened with the heart. He has understood exactly what Job is talking about. And he's not dismissed his words as meaningless or foolish or irreverent. You have said in my hearing, says Elihu, I heard the very words, I am pure and without sin. I am clean and free of guilt. Yet God has found fault with me. He considers me his enemy. And what really Elihu is doing is he's seizing on the assassination problem. That's exactly it, says Job.

That's exactly the problem that I'm facing. And you've heard that. And you know, Elihu could have had every excuse to get lost in all the flood of language that came out. A lot has been said, but that is exactly the heart of the matter. And Elihu focuses on that. And so one of the essential things that we need in being empathic, we with the sufferer, is to get to the heart of the matter and understand exactly what is the heart of the whole problem. Then fourthly, you see, when you've seized the heart of the matter, you've seized the bull by the horns, if you like. Then Elihu, fourthly, has the courage to confront Job and to tell him where he's wrong. Oh, Job, your complaint. I understand. I hear that. But you're wrong. Something wrong in what you do.

But I tell you, says Elihu, in this you are not right, for God is greater than man. Chapter 33. And so in verses 12 to 13 and later verses 14 to 18, we find that Elihu says, if I really care for you, if I love you, I'll speak The truth. But, you know, we can only have the right to speak the truth when we have enough love to do so. Just as we're reminded in the New Testament that we're to speak the truth in love, it means that only those who love most deeply can speak most truthfully. And so sometimes we have to say, you know, I don't love that person enough to tell them the truth. And so we refrain from the truth because light without love burns and destroys. So there has to be light and love. And so this essential reality has to be communicated within that empathic framework of love.

Then, fifthly, we find that Elihu assumes responsibility on behalf of the patient. You don't just say, you know, that's what's wrong with you. Now stick it and get up yourself. But we find that Elihu takes responsibility. And so he says in verses 32 to 33 of chapter 33, if you have anything to say, answer me. Speak up, for I want you to be clear. But if not, then listen to me, be silent, and I will teach you wisdom. Now, he's not saying this arrogantly. He's saying, if you really don't understand, then you've got to trust me that I understand. You see, you're blind with bloodshot eyes. You can't see reality because you're all beclouded by all the pain that you're going through. And somebody who really is so profoundly hurt that they're stumbling around like a drunken man, you have to say, look, I know the way. Let me guide you.

But one does that with the authority of care and love in that communication. Then the sixth thing about Elihu is that he then presents to Job a reassuring and a realistic prognosis. God, he says, does all these things to a man twice, yes, even three times, to turn back his soul from the pit that the light of life might shine on him, that he might be enlightened with the light of the living. And so he's simply saying, take courage. There's hope, there's progress. And, you know, whenever we have a counseling session with somebody that is depressed, we should never leave them without hope. Do you know the reason why we are, as Christians, most hopeful when we've lived in the light of resurrection?

Where we can be the deepest counselor is because we've seen how God has turned our lives inside out and upside down. Where we were weak, now we are strong. We see what God has done for us. And it's only that. It's not optimism. It's not a buoying up of False optimism. Cheer up, old boy. It won't be too bad. It's the realization, yes, I was where you were. I was in that mess. And I've seen profoundly how God has so wonderfully blessed my life. I can give you hope because of that. And then we find, seventhly, that Elihu then demonstrates that cure depends clearly upon God's intervention. So we have to assure the patient that help is available to cure the depression. Yet if there's a dazed man or angel on his side, is a mediator one out of a thousand to tell a man what is right for him, to be gracious and to say to him, spare him from going down to the pit.

I have found a ransom for him. Then his flesh will be renewed like a child's. He will pray to God and find favor with him. He will see God's face and shout for joy. He is restored by God to his righteous state. Chapter 33, verses 23 to 26. And so Elihu is describing the comforter who works with a client in a positive way to finding a cure, but who accepts that the outcome is only the grace of God. You know, when it comes to the ultimate help and rescue we can give to people, it then all depends on the presence of humility, of asking for help. Where there's pride, there's damnation for closing the door on the possibility of God's blessing. So ultimately, all healing depends on the humility to accept the grace of God. So we find that Elihu is like this mysterious Melchizedek.

Elihu is a forerunner, like John the Baptist, a defender of God and the honor of God. And Elihu's resources and his counseling abilities all stem from the fact that his dependence is upon God, not on his cleverness, not on his insights, but his dependence upon God. And we find that in our counseling situations that we will constantly find ourselves nonplussed. We'll find ourselves incapable of knowing how to prescribe a solution or how we can get to the essential reality of it all. And then we'll discover that we have to say, oh, God, help me, guide me. And it amazes us sometimes when we hear ourselves saying things and we say, well, did I say that? Was that my counsel? And we recognize, no, it was the grace of God. It was his spirit. And Elihu had that kind of humility to see that kind of thing. And then the final thing that we find that is so good about Elihu is that the comforter never will overestimate his own ability and wisdom.

One of the marks of the True counselor is one who says, well, I didn't say that. I didn't give you that help. It's the grace of God. Don't thank me, thank God. And so we read that Elihu says in chapter. 36, verses 22 to 26, he says, behold, God is exalted in his power. Who is a teacher like him, who is prescribing. Is past finding out. And so what Elijah does, and all good counseling sessions should end with, we point away from ourselves to the living God, to the healer of all broken hearts. And the sheer mystery of healing is it's always a mystery, it's always a miracle. We might provide conducive attitudes and environment in which this can take place. But the miracle of healing is always a mischief. We don't know how it happened. We never will know. Something clicked. Something happened. But we know that it's all of the grace of God. And so Elihu has grasped in his humility a truth that the three friends never understood.

They equated their own understanding with God's righteousness. Whereas Elijah says, you can never do that. God and his righteousness are beyond all our understanding. His ways are path finding out. And so Elijah, I think, suggests the right kind of counseling treatment to give to somebody who is a manic depressant, someone who is suffering intensely and who affirms the limitations that any counselor should have. That is to say that he is never a healer. He can only be a facilitator for that healing process. And so here we have a timeless medical masterpiece that gives us an unexcelled standard of clinical observation and which indicates the medical intervention which is unsurpassed today in clinical practice.

But of course, the Book of Job has more to tell us than that. And I just want to conclude with what it's also telling us. And that is beyond this clinical approach that we, all of us, need somehow, somewhere to relate to. There has to be also a theological understanding of suffering. And we find that the difficulty about explanations is that they can only be empirical. That is to say, they're limited by our experience and by our observations. And so, you know, there's a marvelous verse that we find in the first chapter, the second chapter of the First Corinthians, 1 Corinthians, chapter 2, verse 9, where Paul is telling us that the cleverness of the wise is foolishness with God. And he's telling us in that verse, that eye have not seen nor ear heard, Neither hath attended the heart of man. The things which God hath prepared for Those who love him.

Now, I think we have in that verse the description of the three friends of Job. Because if we look to see what the basis of their arguments are, we find that Eliphaz, who is the elder of the 3 and who starts first in the dialoguing, he tells us in chapter four, verse eight, that really he's basing life on what he has seen, even as I have seen, is his basis. And he's reminding us that a lot of people who are empiricists in our explanation about reality. And so everything has to be based on what the eye is seeing. And then we find that Bildad, he bases his focus in chapter 8, verse 8 on tradition. He says, consider the former age and hear what the fathers have to say to you. Look at the authorities and they'll tell you, listen to them.

So he's using his ear to listen to what is traditional wisdom. And then we find that Zophar in chapter 20, verse 2, tells us very honestly that when he's pressed to explain the basis of his arguments, he says, my thoughts caused me to answer intuition. So you have then Eliphaz the observer, Bildad the traditionalist, and Zopha the one who's intuitive. And isn't that exactly what Paul is contradicting? He says, I have not seen nor ear heard, neither has it entered the heart of man. The things which God has prepared for those who love him. An ever fast by the Spirit of God, a spirit of humility, spirit of dependence, but of closeness, knowing the ways of God transcends all of this.

Just as we find that the wisdom of Christ, which is really the wisdom of Elihu, is what is so beautiful, the summary of all of this. And so the way off center, the arguments and tedious framework in which they are looking at things is not going to help at all. And so we're led to this conclusion. But when we come to the end of the book and we look to see what exactly God is doing in his intervention, I think there are two things, and I'm sure you know this book is inexhaustible. So all I'm just doing is just touching on a few fragments. There's so much more to explore. But there are two things that I've seen in a very fragmentary way. And the first is, as we were sharing this morning, that Job does depend a lot of his attitude.

His argument is based on his understanding of Mish pat, this word that really is the arch key, the keystone for reality. Everything has to be done in mismatch. In righteousness and justice. But the problem with Job is that he sees God projected in terms of human justice. You know, if Job is dealing in a human situation, in a human context, with human interpretation, then he might well have said, God, you're going to be arraigned in the court of law, and I'm the accuser. And I'm going to judge you on the premises of human wisdom, human justice. And it's not fair, it's unrighteous. You're not conforming to the canon of human justice, but this is what you're doing to me. And the big mistake that Job makes is that the righteousness of God is bigger our concept of righteousness.

That is why in the Lord's Prayer, we're taught to pray thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Whereas what we do is to pray thy will be done in heaven as it is on earth. It's a complete reversal that is required. And all through our lives, the problem of self will and the problem of our own education and the problem of all our intelligence is that we want to project into the heavens the things that we appraise and evaluate on earth. And it doesn't work. And so all of us need the spirit of docility and brokenness. And this is why so often we suffer so intensely, because really, God is breaking us to see that that framework and that attitude is false and falsifying reality. And so this seems to me the first thing that is the dilemma of Job.

Then the second thing that God is teaching, I think, is that. God is saying, the mystery of my governance of the universe is far vaster than the little time scale with which you see things. So let's go to the zoological gardens and look at these monstrosities. What is the raison d' etre of the leviathan and the behemoth? Why should God create if his creation is good? Why should he create a crocodile with those great teeth ready to snap at you? Or why should God create this great monstrous bulk of behemoth that seems from our point of view to have no validity other than cruelty? Why is it that God should apparently allow things that seem to be so chaotic and evil in the nature of life, and yet he feeds them like a little dog, and they're like little pets to him?

And as for you, Job, questioning me, where were you where. When I began to create all of these things? You know, and so as I was commenting at supper yesterday, there's a good Scottish phrase that talks about keeping your gas at a peak. You see that when the gas rings, the gas is turned on full, it flares up. But if you reduce it to a pilot light, you see, it's really reduced. Well, Job, all his wailing and crying is all reduced to that peak before the humiliatory effect, before the sheer mystery of life. And just recently, there's something that I've been meditating upon that really, you may think is theologically very daring, but I really believe has validity. Let me just share. I touched it with it with one or two in the class this week was on this theme that if we look at Genesis chapter one, which is the story of creation, we find that the first verse is not a substantive verse, it's simply a clause to the main verse. And we might translate it like when God began to create the heavens and the earth. And I'm not going by my own insight on this.

This is established now in modern Hebrew scholarship, and my colleague Dr. Bruce Walker has written a monograph on this very verse. But it should read, when God began to create the heavens and the earth, then the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the word tohu bohu, without form and void indicates the two aspects of the chaotic that when we talk about the chaotic, we're talking about that which is formless, which erupts in its boundlessness. It isn't constrained, it just is all over the place. And it's not bounded. And we can think of that physically, but we can think of it morally as we think of a lawless society. We talk about a lawless society as a chaotic society. And the other element of the chaotic is that which is empty, which is void. There's nothing there. And people today are talking a lot about nihilism and nothingness.

Well, I think that perhaps what we are reminded of, that in God's governance of the universe, of God's governance of creation, that Job was given a new respect for perhaps, really we need to go back to Genesis 1 and have a new respect for what God's problem is. You know, Job, you think you've got a problem with your skin eruption, with the chaos of the whirlwind, with the destruction of your family, you think you've got a problem. What about my problem? When I started to create the heavens and the earth, it was all without form and void, and there was darkness upon the face of the deep. And it's almost as if God is saying, yes, I'm the only God there is. I'm the moral governor of all things. But in the mystery of evil, even at the very task of creation, it was threatened, and so could it be. And I find this very suggestive that the six days of creation are the two answers that God has to tohu bohu.

That is to say that in the first three days of creation, God is saying that that which could be threatened by the chaotic in its boundlessness is separated. So one way of talking about creation is the bounding that God has thus far no further. And so we find that he separates the light from the darkness, he separates the sea from the sky, the land from the sky, and he separates the land from the sea. Those are the deeds of the first few days of creation. And then in the second three days of creation, he's populating what would otherwise be empty. So on day four, he is replicating the stars of the heavens. On day five, he is populating the sea and the air with that species. Day six, he's populating the land with birds, animals and plants and manufacture. So we come back to Job.

The mystery of evil is far greater than any of us have any conception of. And we're so caught up in the foreground of our little lives. Job is so obsessed by his own problems that he's totally oblivious and blind to all that God, in his moral governance of reality, is coping with all the time. Now, that, of course, creates what I've just given to you into the equation. Just simply intensifies the problem, doesn't it, that we could now conceive of creation as redemptive and of redemption as creative. It's something new for us. Could we have an inkling of that in 2nd Corinthians 4, that when God commanded the light to shine out of darkness, he shone in our hearts to give the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ? Could that be an echo of Genesis 1:3 1:2?

In other words, in the threat of the chaotic of our existence, God is already providing light. And that light is itself a new creation. It was a light on the Damascus road for the solar T. It's the insight that we may gain about our own struggles and pains and sufferings. And that insight is like a Damascus light which, when his light and his presence enters into our soul, transforms us and makes it a whole new being, a whole new creation. And so the neat categories by which we divide creation from redemption are, I think, human categories. The ways in which we want to master this. There's far more interrelatedness between God as creator and God and redeemer than we realize. And I think it also means that we are therefore held, of course, in the tension of it all. Because what are we insisting on? Are we saying that evil is a primordial reality? No, we're not.

Not at all. Are we saying that there's a dualism in reality? That there are good gods and bad gods? No, we're not saying that either. But what we're saying is that the Bible does not give us any inkling of understanding as to the mystery of evil. It doesn't give us any inkling as to where it originated from. What it's telling us is that in the presence of the serpent, in the presence of all that's destructive for the fall of man, in the presence of all of that darkness that was upon the face of the deep, there is the sovereignty of God's grace, there is the power of his sovereign rule. And that what Genesis 1 is celebrating is that God is sovereign and that when he speaks, he speaks creation into being. And in likewise, in the chaos, the suffering, in our own being, we find the possibility there too.