Job's Argument with God

Today's Reading

Read Job 9:14-24 — Job's reckoning with the impossibility of arguing with God on level terms. "How then can I answer him, choosing my words with him? Though I am in the right, I cannot answer him; I must appeal for mercy to my accuser." And then, in verse 22, the line that frightens commentators: "It is all one; therefore I say, He destroys both the blameless and the wicked."

Read Job 10:1-3 — Job turning to address God directly: "I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me. Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands?"

Read Job 13:3 and 13:15: "But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God." And: "Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face."

Read Psalm 13:1-2 — David's compressed version of the same prayer: "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?"

Read Lamentations 3:1-9 — Jeremiah's catalogue of the same accusation: "He has driven and brought me into darkness without any light... he has walled me about so that I cannot escape... though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer."

Reflection

There is a kind of Christian who would not, under any circumstances, speak to God the way Job does in chapter 9. The very thought offends them. God is good, God is sovereign, who are we to question?

The book of Job — inspired Scripture, included in the canon, the book that ends with God himself praising the speaker — is divine permission to be that other kind of Christian. The kind who argues. The kind who, when the suffering is great enough, says exactly what is true: that this looks, from where I am sitting, like injustice. That if there is a defense for what God has permitted, I cannot see it. That I would like, very much, to take this up with him personally.

Read the speeches again. In chapter 9, Job is not careful. He is not balanced. He is saying, openly, that God seems to destroy the blameless and the wicked alike. By chapter 10 he is asking God whether he enjoys this — "Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands?" By chapter 13 he is demanding a courtroom. "I desire to argue my case with God."

You can be forgiven for never having heard a sermon on these chapters. They sit awkwardly in our religion of cheerful affirmation. But they are in the Bible. They are spoken by the man God identifies in chapter 1 as blameless and upright, and at the end of the book God will say that this man — this furious arguer — has spoken rightly about God, while the friends who defended God's reputation have not.

What is going on?

The answer is that lament is a form of faith. The atheist does not bother to argue with God; there is no one there to argue with. The polite religionist does not argue either, because his god is too small to absorb the argument and would shatter under it. Only the person who actually believes in the God of Israel — the God who, against all probability, hears prayer — can scream at him. The screaming is, paradoxically, an act of trust. Tim Keller puts it directly: "To lament is to cry out to God in pain, but it is to do so as an act of faith. The lamenter believes God is there, that God hears, and that God can be argued with."

The Psalter is full of this. Roughly a third of the psalms are psalms of complaint. They do not just lament a situation; they accuse God of being absent, of having forgotten, of having hidden his face. Psalm 13: "How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?" Psalm 22, the one Jesus prayed from the cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Psalm 88: "Why, O Lord, do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me?" These are inspired prayers. The church has prayed them publicly for three thousand years. The Holy Spirit included them so that, in the day of trouble, you would not have to invent the words.

Lamentations does the same on a national scale. Jeremiah, watching Jerusalem burn, writes a five-chapter funeral poem in which the third chapter goes for nine straight verses cataloging what God has done to him: walled him in, shut out his prayer, made his paths crooked, broken his teeth on gravel. Then, in verses 22-23, comes the famous line: "His mercies are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." Christians sing the line. We rarely sing the nine verses of accusation that come immediately before it. The poet thought we needed both. He was right.

Job 13:15 is the most famous verse in this whole tradition, and it is famous in a misleading way. The King James Bible translates it: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust him." It is engraved on tombstones. It has been the comfort of the dying for four hundred years. What is rarely mentioned is that the underlying Hebrew is genuinely ambiguous. The same consonants, with different vowels, can read: "He will surely slay me; I have no hope." The ESV note acknowledges this. The most honest translation lands somewhere on the knife's edge: "Though he slay me, I will hope in him; yet I will argue my ways to his face." Hope and argument in the same breath. Trust that does not require God to have been gentle. Faith that has not stopped asking why.

This is the kind of faith Job has, and it is the kind of faith Calvin — pastoring the sick and chronically ill of Geneva, himself in constant pain from gout, kidney stones, and migraines — comes to recommend. In his sermons on Job, Calvin keeps insisting that we are not the masters of God's reasons. "If we ask, 'Why does God permit so many afflictions?' the holy Spirit replies in effect, that though our minds cannot grasp the reason, we should resign ourselves to it; that the will of God may be the rule of our wisdom." But notice: this is not Calvin telling Job to shut up. Calvin is, if anything, more in awe of Job's complaints than most of us. He preached one hundred and fifty-nine sermons on the book. He treated the complaints as Scripture, not as a phase Job needed to grow out of. Resignation, for Calvin, is the long final station of a journey that begins with everything Job actually says.

J.I. Packer, three centuries later, lands in the same place: "When the worst comes to the worst, what is left of faith is faith stripped to its barest essence: 'Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.'" Note the order. The slaying is allowed to happen. The trust is what remains afterward — not as a denial of the slaying, but as the strange, narrow, persisting thread that did not snap.

If you are sitting today with a question for God you have not let yourself ask, the book of Job is your permission. Not as a clever rhetorical move. As a real prayer. The God who survived Job's accusations and called him blameless will survive yours. The argument is not a sin. The silence — the polite Christian silence that pretends the question does not hurt — is much closer to one. The Bible takes the sufferer's question seriously enough to give us a thirty-eight-chapter argument and call the arguer righteous. We can do the same.

Going Deeper

Pick one psalm of complaint — Psalm 13, 22, 42, 77, or 88 — and pray it as your own prayer this evening. Do not soften the accusations. Pray them as written. Then, if you can, sit in silence for five minutes. The complaint psalms are how Scripture teaches us to pray when prayer hurts. They have been doing it for three millennia. They will hold you tonight.