Bruised Reed

a bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not quench,
-Matthew 12:20/Isaiah 42:3

"After conversion we need bruising so that reeds may know themselves to be reeds, and not oaks...hence we learn that we must not pass too harsh judgment upon ourselves or others when God exercises us with bruising upon bruising. There must be a conformity to our head, Christ, who 'was bruised for us' that we may know how much we are bound unto him. Ungodly spirits, ignorant of God's ways in bringing his children to heaven, censure broken-hearted Christians as miserable persons, whereas God is doing a gracious good work with them. It is no easy matter to bring a man from nature to grace, and from grace to glory, so unyielfing and intractable are our hearts.

-Richard Sibbs. The Bruised Reed.

Proverbs of Ashes

I recently re-read Richard John Neuhaus' little book "As I Lay Dying," a book written in reflection over a period of time where, struggling with cancer, Neuhaus thought he was going to die. We all think a lot about life, and the "good life." Few think, however, about death or a "good death." Such a thing seems contradictory. Death is bad. This world seems very indifferent to death:

Psalm 103:15-16 - As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.

Neuhaus states:

"Our little story is one of unrequited love for a world that moves on."

The Poet Stephen Crane put it so well:

A man said to the universe:
 "Sir I exist!"
 "However," replied the universe,
 "The fact has not created in me
 A sense of obligation."

I find a strange comfort that Scripture does not ignore these feelings. Job's horrible comforters who merely offered religious sounding cliches left him saying:

"Your maxims are proverbs of ashes;
your defenses are defenses of clay." (Job 13:12)

Faith doesn't shut us up in asking why. It doesn't even shut us up from confronting God:

"Though he slay me, I will hope in him;
yet I will argue my case to His face." (Job 13:15)

Neuhaus has made me re-explore these sentiments. I appreciate his take because he too worked as a chaplain, among those journeying through the shadow of death. Sometimes people shout, sometimes they parrot proverbs of ashes, and sometimes they hope in God, even as they argue their case to his face. I don't think it is the role of the counselor to shut the Jobs of the world up with proverbs of ashes, but to be there to listen to it. If we are, as believers, a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9) then our conduct should be like the great high priest, "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses." (Heb 4:15) Rather, we "rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep," (Rom 12:15) just as Christ wept (John 11:35). He was present and He sympathized. Our observations about the crookedness and perversity of the world are valid, they are the reason we need Someone to hope in, and sit next to, while we are slayed.

Christ in Job

A friend of mine, after completing a degree in Theology, found an element missing from his education in reading the Bible. Certainly the degree he received had a course in Bible Study Methods, and several classes where Biblical historical and language skills were cultivated. Yet, as he explained, it was outside of those classes where he learned the most important aspect of Bible Study that he was missing: the point. The point or end or goal of all Scripture was the story of Redemption as accomplished in Christ. Post-graduation, he started personal study to see this in particular books in the Old Testament, such as Jonah and Habakkuk.

I have had a similar feeling of something missing, especially heightened over the past semester, if a previous post was not enough of a clue. I spent 3 and a half hours listening to lectures on the book of Job and at the end, Christ had not been mentioned once.

When I came to a more Reformation understanding of salvation years ago, besides Ephesians, one of my favorite books became Job. Such a statement seems strange, I have heard few say that Job is a favorite Biblical book. I had read the book before and not loved it, yet after understanding salvation, I now loved it. Why?

Job is a story of suffering and conversation. After Job's possessions are taken away, his children are dead and his health goes bad, Job has three friends that come to comfort him. Job opens his mouth and airs his complaint. He did not deserve this. He was righteous and worshiped God, so why does he get this in repayment? But not only that. Job has lived long enough to see that life is not fair. Justice seems thwarted when evil men succeed in life and honest men are robbed and die young.

Job's friends have horrible answers. They basically deny that anything bad does happen to righteous men. They are like the friend that, when something bad happens to you, asks you how you sinned to cause it. Or like the disciples in John 9:2 that ask whose sin caused the blind man to lose his sight. Their words are met with perhaps the best rebuke from Job in the book: "No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you." (Job 12:2) Sarcasm must be Job's spiritual gift. The answer deserves a punch in the eye, it has no grip on reality. Righteous people do suffer, evil men do prosper.

Elihu, starting in chapter 32, begins his response. Elihu gives several possible answers to why suffering might occur. But Elihu himself does not have an answer for why Job personally suffers. In chapters 38-41, God Himself questions Job, asking Job if he has done what God has done or knows what God knows. Then Job shuts his mouth, and has some degree of restoration.

What was the book of Job's answer? When Job asks why good men suffer and bad men prosper, why death reigns and pain affects all men, what is the answer to Job's question?

There are two main possibilities:

1. Elihu - This view says Job has sinned in his reaction to his pain. And so Elihu is the mediator that Job was longing for (Job 9:32-33). Elihu thus gives many possibilities for why suffering occurs:

Suffering can be for the purpose of education, preventing something else, corrective, for God's glory, to change one's priorities, a stimulus to prayer, or it can be judgment.

So while Job was righteous before the pain, Job is seen to have sinned in his response to pain. Elihu is seen as the rebuker of Job's sin in pain and introduces God who then continues the rebuke of Job's unrighteousness in pain. Job's fault is that he didn't take it like a man.

I do not take this view for a few reasons. One, it shows Satan was right. In the beginning of the book the whole point of the trials of Job was for God to demonstrate to Satan that indeed Job trusted God, and not merely because God had given Job much. If Job was sinning in offering his complaints (though obviously in some of the hyperbolic ways he says it), then Satan was right.

Two, it would make Job 42:7 a very odd verse indeed:

Job 42:7 - After the LORD had spoken these words to Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite: "My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has."

How has Job spoken rightly? Let's look at the second possibility:


2. The book of Job gives no final answer.

This answer seems to be wrong on its face. I will, however, try to explain why I think it is the right answer. Certainly, Elihu does give many good possibilities for what God may be doing in the midst of suffering. Elihu's answers are certainly possibilities. Yet, they are not sufficient.

To merely look for fault in Job, and say that Job sinned and the point of the book is to shut up when you experience pain, ignores the seriousness of Job's case and why this book would bother with 30 chapters exploring Job's complaint. Job states his problems directly and with a true resonating force:

The evil prosper:

Job 21:29-34: "Have you not asked those who travel the roads, and do you not accept their testimony that the evil man is spared in the day of calamity, that he is rescued in the day of wrath? Who declares his way to His face, and who repays him for what he has done? When he is carried to the grave, watch is kept over his tomb. The clods of the valley are sweet to him; all mankind follows after him, and those who go before him are innumerable. How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood."


The problem of death

Job 14:10-12: "But a man dies and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he? As waters fail from a lake and a river wastes away and dries up, so a man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake or be roused out of his sleep."

The problem of cleansing

Job 14:4 "Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? There is not one."


The problem of a distant God.

Job 23:3 "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him, that I might come even to His seat!"


The problems of the people of God

Job 16:2 "I have heard many such things; miserable comforters are you all."

Job 12:4 - "I am one mocked by his friends."

The problem of Revelation

Job 28:12 "But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?


The problem of mediation

Job 9:32-33 "For He is not a man, as I am, that I might answer Him, that we should come to trial together. There is no arbiter between us, who might lay his hand on us both."


The problem of wisdom not answering the problem of pain

Job 13:12 "Your maxims are proverbs of ashes; your defenses are defenses of clay. "

But how has Job spoken rightly? (Job 42:7) Was it merely the repentance? No, God is evaluating the conversation between Job and his friends. Thus, what Job's friends said on whole is not what was true, but what Job said on whole was. Job's friends had looked at Job as having to have done something particularly wrong himself that now Job was getting his due punishment for. It is much like the disciples in John 9:2 asking who sinned to make the man be blind. Instead, Job says the way the world works right now has something deeply wrong with it.

Certainly, we can all share this observation. G.K. Chesterton compared the human condition to a man ship wrecked on an island, yet with him has washed up artifacts from his civilized world. We are in a primitive and harsh world, yet we have things that tell us this is not how it was supposed to be. We have moments of beauty and love that make pain, suffering and injustice a problem. They are evidences that something is deeply wrong.

Job speaks rightly because Job diagnoses the problem of the fallen world. All the things Job cites ARE problems, not things to be ignored or said don't really affect the righteous. They do affect the righteous. They are problems in this world begging for an answer.

In the midst of Job's suffering, even though he cites all these real problems, Job also declares,

Job 19:25-27 - "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. My heart faints within me!"

Job doesn't know exactly how, but Job knows in his frustrations that the problems he cites will be addressed, and not just spiritually, but "in the flesh."

We know more fully now how that problem is addressed, and Who Job's Redeemer is. To the problem of death, Christ brings resurrection. To the problem of injustice, Christ will bring final judgment with the sword. To the problem of the poor comforts of the people of God, Christ is born under the Law, into the people of God, bringing perfect comfort and bringing the Comforter, the Spirit. To the problem of mediation between God and man, Christ, the God-man, brings Himself. To the problem of the defects of wisdom in answering the problem of pain, Christ Himself is the wisdom of God revealed and vindicated. To the problem of a distant God, Christ Himself is Immanuel, God with us. And to the problem of cleansing, Christ Himself comes to "wash us in water with the word."

Ultimately, the book of Job is unsatisfactory unless Christ is applied. To merely say that suffering is corrective or educational does not suffice. The world is not as it should be, and the existence of love and beauty and truth in the world point beyond themselves to restoration, not to become satisfactory in the present. Job is discontent with the world as it is, his friends try to justify it rather than look to its redemption. Job is truer in that Job's words beg for the Redeemer, while his friends words are false because they fail to recognize the need of a Redeemer.

Job's friends stand condemned. Elihu may offer helpful rebuke to the over-reaction of Job, yet we cannot look to him as the ultimate mediator between God and man. And God's dialogue does not just tell Job to shut up, but tells Job that He is the God of Creation, and so to trust Him that he can be the God of re-creation. In this way, the book of Job gives no final answer to the problem of pain. The book of Job and Job himself speaks truly because he asks the right questions. Job's questions wait for a further revelation. Job speaks rightly to identify the problems of a fallen world, and speaks even more rightly to identify the only thing he can hold onto, "I know that my Redeemer lives."

Reformed Spirituality: The Angst of a Fallen World

We live in a religious culture of immediate gratification. We rarely feel hunger without grabbing a Snickers bar or driving through a McDonalds. We avoid books for television. 30-minute programs, cut up into 7-minute segments with 1-minute distractions to keep us from getting bored. Our gospel can be like that too. We want to reflect on grace and the victory of Christ without feeling the effects of a world with sin, suffering and death...without feeling the world we currently live in. We don't recognize Good Friday, we run to Easter. Yet the world maintains its journey in a perpetual Friday, a world in a journey to decay, of the aging of our bodies that are “born towards death” as Neuhaus said. Often, our shouts of praise and victory in the church are heard as feats of self-delusion by a world that itself has sought sex and mind altering substances to escape. Yet, when the world awakes to deal with the night before, it looks to the church and sees another self-delusion. Our gospel can sometimes morph into a denial of effects of sin, an avoidance of suffering, and an ignoring of death.

The true gospel, however, does not deny sin (or that we are sinners), avoid suffering and ignore death. The true gospel begins with the acknowledgement that such things are real, are terrible and are the bane of the existence of man in his time on earth. The true gospel must be longed for through sin, suffering and death. The true gospel will never be sweet to the one who denies he is a sinner. The true gospel will not be relief to the woman who avoids relationships to avoid suffering. The true gospel will not be deliverance to the one who avoids funerals and pretends they will never die. The true gospel feels the fallen state of the world and first acknowledges its existence and disappointment and frustration before it runs to Easter, or it never would run to Easter. The true Gospel knows that the only way to Easter is through Good Friday. The true Gospel can sympathize and sit with Job as he cries out to God:

"Man who is born of a woman is few of days and full of trouble. He comes out like a flower and withers; he flees like a shadow and continues not. And do you open your eyes on such a one and bring me into judgment with you? Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? There is not one. Since his days are determined, and the number of his months is with you, and you have appointed his limits that he cannot pass, look away from him and leave him alone, that he may enjoy, like a hired hand, his day.

"For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the soil, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant. But a man dies and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he? As waters fail from a lake and a river wastes away and dries up, so a man lies down and rises not again; till the heavens are no more he will not awake or be roused out of his sleep.

"Oh that you would hide me in the grave, that you would conceal me until your wrath be past, that you would appoint me a set time, and remember me! If a man dies, shall he live again? All the days of my service I would wait, till my renewal should come. You would call, and I would answer you; you would long for the work of your hands. For then you would number my steps; you would not keep watch over my sin; my transgression would be sealed up in a bag, and you would cover over my iniquity.

"But the mountain falls and crumbles away, and the rock is removed from its place; the waters wear away the stones; the torrents wash away the soil of the earth; so you destroy the hope of man. You prevail forever against him, and he passes; you change his countenance, and send him away.

"His sons come to honor, and he does not know it; they are brought low, and he perceives it not. He feels only the pain of his own body, and he mourns only for himself."

-Job 14