Some Thoughts on Some of Job

Been a bit of a doozy this past week has been, at least for me anyhow. I won’t get into it as some of it is confidential work stuff, but it has been kinda non-stop stress for me, but the thing that has really helped me get though it is our friend and brother Job.

As I’m sure you know Job was what was in come follow me last week (not this one but I’ll pontificate on the Psalms another time) and is one of my favorite books in the bible. I could go into the themes of the book and perhaps I will another time but today I want to write on the power Job shows sitting in the ashes of his life and accused and accosted but not unfaithful.

My favorite way to read Job is to sit in the ashes with him and mourn with him who mourns. That’s what I was doing for the 2 weeks when all this havoc at work started. I am not unaware of the seeming correlation between how things are going for me in my life and how they go for Job in his. Seems that every time I am reading Job I am doing so in a pile of ashes in my own life. Though I do wonder if it is the ashes, I’m in that lead me to read Job or the reading of Job that makes me aware of them? Either way I find ashes when reading Job and this time was no different.

It’s of his strength I want to focus on though. As you read through, you will see his life come crashing down around him as his herds are destroyed and stolen, his lands plundered, his buildings razed, and his children killed. Then his health both mental and physical are laid to ruin as insomnia, nightmares, ringworm, waking terrors, and festering sores set in. Then his last vestibules of comfort ripped from him as his friends begin their onslaught of accusation and betrayal. And yet in the middle of it, in the depths of his woe we find chapter 19 verses 23 through 27  

Oh that my words were written!

Oh that they were inscribed in a book!

Oh that with an iron pen and lead

they were engraved in the rock forever!

For I know that my Redeemer lives,

and at the last he will stand upon the earth.

And after my skin has been thus destroyed,

yet in my flesh I shall see God,

whom I shall see for myself,

and my eyes shall behold, and not another.

There is power in this, it’s the same power sought after in the phrase “unbowed, unbent, unbroken” used as words under which banners are gather in Game of Thrones. It is the same power captured in Captain Ahab’s speech at the end of Moby Dick “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” It is reflected in stirring poetry in the words of Invictus:

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

It’s the power of the Idea that when things get really bad, when the whole of the world turns against us, when Satan strikes out with his hale and his mighty storms, and when the very jaws of hell gape open the mouth wide after us that we can stand and not shrink.

The word is Courage. Courage to grapple with the whale, courage to be found unafraid in the face of doom, courage to remain unbowed unbent and unbroken, courage to remain true to the faith, courage to say in the face of all that is bad in the world that I know my redeemer lives!

That is the courage Job teaches us.

When I find myself in the ashes with Job it is his courage I pray for.

When Satan comes as he inevitably does, look for that courage.

Im praying for thee, please pray for me