Hi Sisters,
If you haven’t read the first post, I encourage you to read that first (click HERE) as it explains my approach to reading Job during my quiet times.
[Warning: heavy topics ahead. As you read, if you feel yourself becoming triggered or overwhelmed, please do not keep reading. If this brings up wounds in your life, please seek help from a trusted friend, mental health counselor, etc. Do not lose heart, healing from trauma is possible!]
Eliphaz: Do you think you’re wiser than us?
Eliphaz asserts:
7 “Are you the first man who was born? . . .
8 Have you listened in the council of God?
And do you limit wisdom to yourself?
9 What do you know that we do not know?
What do you understand that is not clear to us?
10 Both the gray-haired and the aged are among us,
older than your father.
11 Are the comforts of God too small for you,
or the word that deals gently with you?
(15:7a, 8-11)
Eliphaz did not appreciate Job’s sandwich speech (previous post). Job began and ended that speech with, “I am not inferior to you.” In response, Eliphaz spouts off a number of rhetorical questions to Job. The story Eliphaz is telling himself about Job is: Job thinks he’s smarter than all of us here (even those older than him). He might be thinking, “Young man, I wasn’t born yesterday.”
Eliphaz goes on to repeat what “wise men have told.” The story that has been passed down through the generations is: the wicked will reap destruction. Eliphaz is offended by Job claiming there’s something wrong with the conventional wisdom they’ve come to know.
Easy for You To Say
Job responds:
2 “I have heard many such things;
miserable comforters are you all. . .
4 I also could speak as you do,
if you were in my place;
I could join words together against you
and shake my head at you.
5 I could strengthen you with my mouth,
and the solace of my lips would assuage your pain.
(16:2, 4-5)
Job counters with some sass and sarcasm. He calls his friends miserable comforters (recall in 13 he called them worthless physicians). It’s easy to say what Eliphaz and the others are alleging when they aren’t the ones in crisis. Job could do the same thing and he would be just as comforting as them (NOT!).
Job is exposing a fault in “this is how we’ve always done/thought about things.” He exposes (in my opinion), their lack of emotional wisdom. Of course wise, older counsel is important, but we also need to be open to younger people exposing areas of weakness. Hear this quote from N.T. Wright’s book, The Challenge of Jesus, “I believe, to the contrary, that each generation has to wrestle afresh with the question of Jesus. . . in order to be equipped to engage with the world that he came to save.”
We don’t get a pass just because we are older. And we don’t get a pass to be passive receivers of the previous generation’s wisdom. Each generation has to do the hard work of wrestling with matters of faith afresh, including emotional wisdom and the stories we tell ourselves about God and others.
Grieving Past, Present, and Future
Job laments:
6 “If I speak, my pain is not assuaged,
and if I forbear, how much of it leaves me?
7 Surely now God has worn me out; . . .
12 I was at ease, and he broke me apart;
He slashes open my kidneys and does not spare;
he pours out my gall on the ground. . .
16 My face is red with weeping,
and on my eyelids is deep darkness,
1“My spirit is broken; my days are extinct;
the graveyard is ready for me. . .
11 My days are past; my plans are broken off,
the desires of my heart.
(from chapters 16 & 17)
Job can’t figure out what will make the pain go away. He talks – it doesn’t help. He remains silent – it doesn’t help. He is utterly WORN OUT! The emotional toll is exhausting. Fatigue is setting in. In trauma, daily tasks that aren’t necessary for short term survival are pure exhaustion.
Can you see Job’s appearance? His eyes are blood shot because of the endless crying and dark circles shadow his eyes. This reflects what he feels inside – death. Job’s brain perceives that he is dying (God didn’t physically cut open his kidneys). Grieving the death of multiple children has induced a reaction in the brain, communicating to the body that it’s dying. Emotional trauma induces the same brain reaction as if Job had just been mauled by a lion.
[Side note: Literally the word is “kidneys” but kidneys were often sited figuratively as the seat of temperament, emotions, prudence, vigor, and wisdom. Today we use the heart for this figure of speech. Therefore, we might say something like “God has broken my heart” or “God has cut open my heart.”]
But Job is still physically alive and so the grieving continues. Notice he is grieving not only what has just happened, but he is also grieving the hopes and dreams he had for his future – hopes he had to see his children get married, have families, have family dinners and gatherings. All of that – gone. I think this is the hidden grief that is forgotten when people lose loved ones, fall on hard times (financially, in marriage, etc.) or are diagnosed with a disease – all the future hopes are changed and those dreams must be grieved too.
This is where the picture of the resurrection is so important. Trauma causes a type of death – death in the past, present, and future. Healing is through the grief, pain, suffering, processing, etc. (burial). Resurrection is found on the other side of working through the trauma. We walk by faith, expectantly, looking to the new thing (new hopes, new dreams, new plans, etc.) God will resurrect, because we serve a God that resurrects the dead.
By the River Together 