Not you. God.

Job 38:1-11

Not you, Job. God. Not you, Job. God.

This whole Job story has been leading up to a foundational question. “Where were you, Job, when the foundations of the earth were being laid?”

No, really, where were you? Because it sounds like you have all this figured out. It sounds like you think that God is unapproachable and vast and unknowable and that, on the one hand, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away without reason, but, on the other hand, God should look favorably on the righteous. Who are you, Job, that you know these things?

See, the book of Job makes an interesting turn if you thought that this was going to be a book about a moral, upright character showing us how to be good, pious, devoted God-followers. We’ve been told since the beginning that Job is a faithful person; how he is unlike all other people in the world in that he truly puts God first. He goes out of his way to assure he does nothing contrary to God’s will. So, it’s easy to assume that this book was going to tell us about how Job responded to the Satan-caused suffering by being a model of faith—one which we could try to emulate.

That’s where we thought this was going, because, like Job’s friends or, to some extent, Job himself, we are looking for answers to our own questions. Not God’s. Ours.

We got glimpses of it last week. Job has a problem with the way he views himself, because he sees how truly righteous he is. From last week’s reading:

‘O that my words were written down!
   O that they were inscribed in a book!
 O that with an iron pen and with lead
   they were engraved on a rock for ever!
 For I know that my Redeemer lives,
   and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
   then in my flesh I shall see God,
whom I shall see on my side,
   and my eyes shall behold, and not another.
   My heart faints within me! (Job 19:23-27)

            Listen to all those first-person pronouns! “O that my words…” “For I know that my Redeemer lives…” “then… I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!”

            This moral, upright, seemingly perfect man has one problem: It’s all about him. Not God. Him. And, if we stop and think about it, we might find this justifiable, because he’s lost everything: his stuff, his land, his family. Who else should he be concerned about? And, yet, it is a little odd that we haven’t heard heads or tails about his lost family, ones who, being dead, are in need of a promise even more desperately than Job. He says nothing of the servants killed by conquering enemies or his ancestors. Job talks about Job. The fact that the world’s most righteous man is concerned primarily with himself should convict us all.

God’s response to Job, beginning in chapter 38, puts us further in our place. You see, God doesn’t simply correct Job for his self-centered bickering; God has no time for the argument at all. God suggests that life is not about Job; it is about God. No matter how supposedly righteous Job is, life is not about him. God is setting the stage for something that becomes plain when Jesus eventually arrives on the scene. God is suggesting that the standard we are held to is so high that even a “righteous person” cannot achieve it. This is something Jesus claims again and again and again in the Gospels. This is especially important in this particular story, however, because Job was the best of the best. If anybody could have been truly righteous it was Job, which leaves us in a peculiar place where the only answer is: Maybe it’s not enough to be the best. Maybe it’s not enough to give to charity; maybe we have to give to every charity; and maybe that’s not possible because we don’t have enough to give. And maybe that’s the point. And maybe faith that is at its heart about my own well-being isn’t such great faith after all; maybe even our view of salvation can be self-centered. Maybe Job’s supposed righteousness was in no small part due to the gifts he had been given. Maybe, strangely, Satan was right about this experiment after all and Job was never righteous on his own, but instead he was made righteous through faith given to him by God.

Actually, this is exactly what Paul says in Ephesians when he writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8 ESV).

All of this starts to make sense if we understand that the universal human sin is to look inward, to make life truly about us, and to make even salvation primarily individual and self-centered. Then, even when we do a “good” thing like, I dunno, going to church; maybe we’re doing it to feel good about ourselves. In that way, it’s still just about us. In fact, this is what Martin Luther said in The Bondage of the Will—that every seemingly good thing we do is not really good; rather it is what Christ is doing in me. Everything we do is corrupted. There is nothing righteous about us apart from what God is doing, so there is no becoming more like Job; there is no becoming better people. All we can ever do is put our sinful self to death and let Christ work through us, which is no credit to us but only to God.

All of this is to say that when God takes the mic and tells Job how it is God is saying, “I am God and you are not.” I am God and you are not. I get to work salvation; you do not. I create; you do not. I do good things; you do not. I am above all, in all, I have view; you are corrupting, sinning; you have point of view.

And if you think this is a particularly negative view of humanity you’re right, BUT (this is a big BUT) in order to understand the majesty of God you have to understand how little we resemble God. Sure, you can see God in one another, but this is just the smallest taste, a little twinkling of the God who creates, redeems, and sanctifies the cosmos. No person stands before God with anything resembling righteousness and we know this because of people like Job—the best of us—because what happens to the best of us? Well, what happens to Job? God comes on to the scene and puts him in his place. It might feel like kicking a man when he’s down. He’s lost everything; how dare God take him, of all people, to task?

Well, for one, God doesn’t have those standards. Everything Job had was a gift he didn’t deserve. Now, having lost all that, he has only himself, which is still a gift he doesn’t deserve, and he’s flaunting it even in his supposed righteousness. You see, everybody in the first half of the book of Job is wrong. Job’s friends are wrong in singling out Job’s actions as the cause of his losses not because sin isn’t at work in Job but because they suggest that Job could have been a good enough person to avoid this. That’s not true; nobody could be righteous enough to avoid the consequences of sin.

Job’s friends then go on to suggest that religion is about becoming a better person. This cheapens God’s grace and, more importantly, mockery of God’s ultimate purpose (God’s telos) for all of creation. If God just wanted you to be a better person—if that’s what life was all about—then you have absolutely no need for Jesus. But Job, too, makes this mistake in believing that all of his pain and suffering is because of God. Of course we know it is because of Satan, but on a more fundamental level Satan is just making real what is already within us. Satan doesn’t do anything we don’t already want to do ourselves. We are turned in on ourselves, and Job proves this again and again and again, even in his most “righteous” moments.

The upside of all this negative talk about human nature is that the promise of salvation that we have through Jesus Christ comes to us apart from everything we do. That’s real grace; not cheapened by human free will. And so we have a tremendous burden lifted from our shoulders. When God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind he points to something that will be fleshed out over the next couple of weeks as we conclude the book of Job, but the short version of it is this: We, human beings, are nothing compared to the majesty of God, which you can fret about and bemoan and fight against, but ultimately your best life comes in forgetting about justifying yourself. You won’t. You can’t. But, mercifully, you have a God that will, a God who actually laid the foundation of the earth. Not you. God. That’s Job in three words: Not you. God.

Amen.