A God-ward Orientation: Insights for Spiritual Formation from the Book of Job

Introduction

A type-scene in my childhood household unfolded as follows: My brother and I would be having a disagreement, and a parent would arrive to mediate. Feeling that I was objectively correct, I would sit back in gloating self-satisfaction while the parent chastised my brother for some errant speech or behavior. However, the horrifying moment invariably arrived when the parent would turn on me for rebuke, exposing my spirit of pride or bitterness that was leading me to resist reconciliation. Rightly concerned with the holistic formation of their child, the parent pointed out that my disposition needed reorientation. I had the wrong posture. Perhaps, in these moments, I had more in common with Job’s friends than I would have cared to admit. For, as I understand the Joban Epilogue, God’s surprising rebuke to them, contrasted with divine approval of Job (42:7–8), centers on orientation towards him. This focus on orientation or disposition with respect to God is not confined to the Joban Epilogue; rather, I would contend that the entire form of the book—its literary structure and rhetorical strategies—is shaped towards this conclusion, even if not crystallizing until God’s Epilogue evaluation.

A key issue for Job ¹ concerns its perspective on “fear of God” or “God-fearing,” which provides a framing for this Joban discussion on “God-ward orientation” within a broader theological discussion and a bridge towards spiritual formation. Not many write at length solely on fear of God or God-fearing in Joban scholarship, but conclusions about it often come through in interpretations of how the book fits together and resolves. ² To be precise, one might ask whether Job endorses, expands, qualifies, or disqualifies the notion of the fear of God vis-à-vis its characterization elsewhere the Old Testament (OT). According to this story of an archetypal God-fearer who undergoes inexplicable suffering from the hand of that same God, is God-fearing (still) a viable and worthwhile way to live? If so, what does the fear of God look like in a situation of loss such as Job’s?

By way of example, Lindsay Wilson offers an article-length account of God-fearing within Job. ³ Summarizing his approach will begin to expose some of the complex interrelated issues at play across the book and the theological stakes for how one discerns Job’s stance on God-fearing. Wilson affirms that Job is depicted as a consummate God-fearer in the Prologue and maintains his fear of God throughout, which was proposed as the appropriate solution to his predicament by his friends, the wisdom poem of chapter 28, and Elihu. Chapter 28, in Wilson’s view, aligns with the conventional “wisdom perspective” of the OT in placing primacy on fearing God (cf. 28:28) but makes an “excessive claim” by equating fear of God with wisdom. ⁴ According to Wilson, to make that equation is dissonant with Job’s pursuit of protest and lament in the dialogues. Since the fear of God is absent from the whirlwind speeches and Epilogue, it cannot be the answer to Job’s problems, which lingered despite his fear of God. So Wilson concludes that the fear of God is not discarded but qualified by the book, recognized as unable to address every problem of life. In other words, fear of God is effectively “beside the point” in Job’s case, as wisdom is a broader category. Wilson’s approach commendably attempts to take the whole book into account yet entails critical interpretive assumptions or conclusions: (1) that the fear of God and Job’s bold way of addressing God in the dialogues are at odds; (2) that fear of God has to be explicitly mentioned at the end of the book to be ultimately endorsed; and (3) that the narrator’s perspective (as seen in the Prologue and chapter 28) and God’s perspective do not fully align.

Alternatively, I would maintain that Job unequivocally endorses fear of God through its portrait of Job the God-fearer and is meant to be instructive in supplying a legitimate model of God-fearing for others. In my reading of the book, which I will soon elaborate, what comes to the fore is one’s disposition or orientation towards God. That is, according to Job, to be a God-fearer is to live with a doggedly God-ward orientation, come good (Heb. טוב‎), come bad (Heb. רע‎, cf. Job 2:10). ⁵ Moreover, I would argue that not only does the book espouse a God-ward orientation as the crux of God-fearing but also that the book is crafted in such a way as to cultivate that very orientation in its (ideal) reader. If this account of God-fearing in Job is credible, it suggests not regarding the book as a specialized theodicean treatise on suffering but embracing it as a critical canonical resource with which to grapple regularly and repeatedly, for the sake of forming a more thoroughgoing and persevering God-fearing in the people of God. ⁶ In what follows, I will attempt to capture the contours of the structure and theological thrusts of Job from chapters 1–42, aiming to be illustrative, not exhaustive. Upon making our way through the whole book, we will explore the implications for Christian spiritual formation, especially with regard to developing a God-ward orientation.

Meeting Job (Job 1–2)

As Job opens, the reader is introduced to its exemplary eponymous protagonist. Job is the paragon of virtue—blameless and upright, fearing God and turning away from evil (1:1)—with a flourishing household to match (1:2–3), exhibiting an apparent blessedness (cf. 1:10) that seems to befit his character. ⁷ However, that idyllic arrangement is soon problematized and then obliterated when the Adversary (השׂטן‎) among the heavenly ranks “incites” God to devastate Job “for no reason” (cf. 2:3), first bringing sweeping loss to Job’s household (1:13–19) and then to his body (2:4–8), in order to expose his motives. Does Job fear God—taken here as a shorthand for his whole character and relation to God ⁸ —“for no reason” (1:9)? In order words, does Job fear God disinterestedly, for God’s own sake? Or does Job conveniently behave well to receive divine benefits in the form of abundant progeny and possessions (1:10), participating in a dubious nepotism that God has (allegedly) structured into the cosmos?

To the reader’s discomfort, the God who takes obvious pleasure in “my servant Job” (1:8; 2:3) and who bears an equally obvious responsibility for what happens in his world (cf. 1:21; 2:10) permits the testing of Job to commence both times (1:12; 2:6). Job’s disposition towards God comes under scrutiny at the outset, as his interior will be revealed by how he reacts when the pleasant exterior is stripped away. The book’s concern pertains to what is going on inside of Job, but the measure will be what comes out from Job and onto his lips: ⁹ The Adversary predicts that Job will “curse [God] to [his] face” ¹⁰ (1:11; 2:5) when deprived of the abundance that the Adversary assumes is the condition for Job’s allegiance.

Before even making it out of the Prologue, the claim that the insights which will emerge in the story of Job would be transferrable for others encounters a problem: Maybe Job is too exceptional for his case to be relevant for other God-fearers. ¹¹ The four-fold description of his character depicts him as more glowingly righteous than any other figure in the OT, ¹² after all, and God himself says that “there is no one like him on the earth” (1:8; 2:3). I would argue, however, that the extraordinariness and extremity of Job’s case is precisely what makes it applicable to other God-fearers, via a greater-to-lesser (a fortiori) argument. That is, if we can wrestle through the theological and existential dilemma presented when the most righteous person imaginable undergoes the most comprehensive loss (what the book will call רע‎, “bad,” cf. 2:11; 42:12) imaginable and can still affirm the viability and worthwhileness of God-fearing on the other side, then surely we could do likewise in our ordinary God-fearing lives, whatever our caliber of both piety and suffering. Yet while Job’s situation may be relevant for God-fearing readers, the outworking of his situation is far from comfortable for those invested readers. The critical questions have been gratingly posed by the swift descent of unsuspecting, innocent Job in the Prologue: Who is this God in relation to his suffering servant Job? Will Job continue to be a God-fearer, or will he capitulate to God-cursing? If the former rather than the latter, what does God-fearing look like from the ash heap (cf. 2:8)?

Attempted Human Answers (Job 3–37)

Near the end of chapter 2, with the narrator’s second word of approval regarding Job’s verbal response to his suffering (2:10), it seems like Job may have cleared the test. But then Job’s three friends enter the scene (2:11–13), and Job opens his mouth in 3:1 with what turns out to be a torrent of anguished and brazen speech over the next twenty-nine chapters. Now the reader finds herself or himself wading through this flood of utterances that seem to edge uncomfortably close to, if not cross, the boundary of what is acceptable to say about and to God. “I can empathize with Job’s grief and anger at his unfair circumstances,” a reader may think, “but is he really allowed to say that?” However, the narrator who provided reliable evaluations of Job’s verbal responses in the Prologue (1:22; 2:10) has receded, no longer supplying straightforward evaluations of Job or anyone else as various human voices proceed to weigh in on Job’s dilemma—and continue speaking for a very long time (chapters 3–37). The questions about Job’s God-fearing from the Prologue become stretched by the yawning poetic middle of the book into those of indefinite longevity: Will Job persevere in fearing God? For how long? What would be the mark of persevering fear of God in circumstances like Job’s? Or does his audacious speech signify that Job has given up on God-fearing?

The impression from the Prologue that Job’s interiority, his disposition towards God, is at stake is only confirmed by the observation that Job’s chief anguish expressed in the poetic exchanges is not his raided camels, or even the death of his children. ¹³ Instead, what Job most regularly and bitterly bewails is his sensation that God has turned against him and now stands in an oppositional relationship to him. ¹⁴ So Job employs vivid imagery of God attacking him like a warrior or predator. ¹⁵ Job presumes that he needs to confront God in court to argue his case against his divine antagonist. ¹⁶ Job even says twice that God has “satan-ed” (שׂטם‎) him (16:9; 30:21), employing an orthographic bi-form of the root used for the Adversary (השׂטן‎) in the Prologue. For someone like Job who used to enjoy close fellowship with God and reciprocal communication, ¹⁷ God’s unexplained apparent hostility and prolonged silence are intolerable.

The responses of Job’s friends to his speech might at first seem promising, as they are highly educated, witty, eloquent old “wise men” from an eastern tradition renowned for wisdom. ¹⁸ The significance of this characterization, in my view, is that if any humans should be able to answer Job, it should be these three. And they certainly do attempt to answer Job with explanations for his (deserved) plight and prescriptions for a (repentant) escape, in an effort to curtail the possible un-orthodoxies spewing from his lips. They even, particularly through the speech of Eliphaz, attempt to instruct this archetypal God-fearer about what he can expect from a God-fearing life. At first, Eliphaz seems to assume that Job possesses an intact fear of God which should steady him amid his unsettling circumstances (4:6). Nonetheless, Eliphaz goes on in that same speech to describe a righteous person’s insulation from disaster and trajectory of flourishing (cf. 4:7–8; 5:19–26) in a manner that blithely and blindly bypasses the real experience of Job the suffering God-fearer. After listening to more of what Job has to say, Eliphaz’s tone sharpens. Subsequent speeches feature Eliphaz questioning (15:4), then blatantly denying and mocking (22:4), Job’s God fearing. ¹⁹ Surely, Eliphaz reasons, importunate behavior such as Job’s complaint against God betrays compromised character and cannot be commensurate with God-fearing.

Already in his very first response to Eliphaz, following Eliphaz’s most mild speech, Job bursts out in frustration that Eliphaz has missed the force of Job’s vexation at just how unfair and bitter God’s inexplicable treatment of him seems. Rather than trite explanation, what Job wants from his friends, after all, is a similar allegiance—an alignment with, not against, him—that he seeks from God. ²⁰ In fact, Job says that to withhold “loyalty” (חסד‎) from a friend is tantamount to forsaking “fear of the Almighty” (יראת שׁדי‎, 6:14). ²¹ Job argues that his friends, not he, are the ones jeopardizing fear of God through their failure to remain committed to a friend, maintaining that there is an inextricable connection between allegiance to one’s friend and allegiance to God.

As Job and his friends only become more vehemently at odds with each passing exchange, the reader watches the dialogue eventually deteriorate: the incomplete third dialogue cycle signals structurally that Job’s friends are running out of words as Bildad manages one last meager rebuttal of five verses (25:2–6) and Zophar’s voice never reemerges for a third speech. In my view, the dialogue cycles (chapters 3–27) are tiresomely long on purpose, leading the invested reader on a tumultuous rollercoaster of apprehension (at Job’s impetuous speech), frustration (at the friends’ mounting accusations against innocent Job), and confusion (at why the unfruitful dialogue is continuing and how to evaluate the profusion of opinions and insults)—before leaving the reader disillusioned as these once-promising human answers falter and fail to satisfy Job. When offering poetic commentary on the preceding dialogue in chapter 28, the narrator implicitly reaffirms Job’s fundamentally correct orientation towards God and away from evil, as the narrator equates “fearing God” and “turning away from evil” with wisdom itself (28:28; cf. 1:1, 8; 2:3). Wisdom, that supreme treasure which proves so frustratingly evasive when humans strain to search for it (cf. 28:12–22), apparently can be “found” in the life of someone who fears God. ²² While there is no explicit narratorial confirmation at this point that Job’s life continues to be an authorized portrait of God-fearing, the repetition at this point in the book of the conspicuous collocation describing Job in the Prologue—”fearing God” and “turning away from evil” (1:1, 8; 2:3)—is suggestive. Perhaps Job has not reneged on his fear of God in the midst of his tumultuous speech, as Eliphaz has supposed. Perhaps there is something to God-fearing that Eliphaz is missing and that Job is embodying, as uneasy as his raw speech has made Eliphaz (and likely the reader).

After all, the beleaguered God-fearer has set himself on pursuing an audience with God himself, often imploring God to answer him, to break the deafening divine silence. ²³ Eventually Job summons God to respond to his oath of innocence in chapter 31: “Let the Almighty answer me!” (31:35–37). This God-fearer will not give ground on the essentialness of encountering God himself. Instead of being alleviated immediately, the mounting expectation and tensive anticipation for divine answer is pressurized still further by the verbose six-chapter interruption of Elihu, the heretofore unknown interlocutor who now chimes in with his “answer” for Job. ²⁴ Claiming a superior perspective, ²⁵ Elihu assures Job that one could not anticipate God to answer directly, ²⁶ so Elihu will provide the conclusive assessment himself, steering clear of Job’s self-justification and the friends’ failure to find an answer (cf. 31:1–5). Elihu, for his part, considers God to be one whom people should expect to fear (see נורא‎, 37:22 יראוהו‎, 37:24), but not to find (37:22–24), as Elihu relentlessly communicates divine transcendence while scoffing at Job’s hope of encountering God for himself (cf. 32:13; 35:12–16; 37:19–20). By the time Elihu finishes, any human contribution that possibly could have remained after the friends faded away has surely been aired and exhausted—so, too, the reader.

Divine Answer (Job 38:1–42:17)

Then at long last, God’s voice comes rushing from the whirlwind at the start of chapter 38. That divine voice comes pointing out snow (38:22–23, 29–30) and wild donkeys (39:5–8), among other things, in what seems to be a perplexing kind of answer to a man perched on ashes and scraping his miserable skin with a potsherd. Though reluctant to truncate the discussion of the exquisite imagery and soaring rhetoric of the whirlwind speeches, in sum I see these speeches as binding together divine immanence—this God does listen (cf. 9:16) and meaningfully answer—and divine transcendence—this God is also unlike humans and thus not reducible to their categories or demands. Accordingly, wisdom for Job lies in acquiescing to the Creator-creature distinction. Job is invited to stay in his “wisdom lane” of fearing God and turning away from evil (cf. 28:28), relinquishing to God what lies beyond Job’s creaturely purview, trusting God to rule what he cannot control and to know what he cannot understand. ²⁷ As I take it, Job’s second response to God in 42:1–6 depicts satisfaction, ²⁸ not because his material circumstances have improved, but because “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye has seen you” (42:5). It is fitting for a God-fearer who has been pressing towards direct encounter with God himself, and who has now been answered by that God, to be satisfied.

But then God turns to rebuke Eliphaz and the other two friends, informing them that his anger burns against them “for you have not spoken to me reliably, as my servant Job has.” This rendering of the critical causal clause conveys that God’s chastisement of Job’s friends pertains to their direction of speech (“to me” for אלי‎) ²⁹ rather than the content of their speech (“of/about me” for אלי‎). ³⁰ Job’s friends, for as much as they spoke to Job about God, never spoke to God about Job, and they are held accountable, becoming the objects of divine wrath, for this failure of intercession. Yet Job, for all of his brazen speech, even his reproachable “words without knowledge” that obscured God’s counsel (38:2), spoke to God, often addressing him in second person. ³¹ Job’s speech-patterns betrayed his orientation or disposition. That is, Job was consistently orienting himself towards God in his desire to encounter God, to hear God’s answer. ³² Following God’s surprising evaluation of the troubled friendship between Job and his friends, ³³ God compounds the surprise through his design for their reconciliation, implicating Job as an intercessor for his conspicuously non-interceding friends (42:8–9). While Job, the servant who holds God’s favor, is in the obedient act of praying for his friends (42:10), God restores Job’s fortunes to superabundant degree (42:10–17). The final portrait of this God-fearer ³⁴ resonates with that of the Prologue in many respects but is escalated—“more than” (42:12; cf. 8:7)—in scope and caliber of blessing. ³⁵

Joban Conclusions and Spiritual Formation Implications

Having surveyed the general contours of Job in my approach, it now remains to consider implications for Christian spiritual formation, chiefly with respect to one’s orientation or disposition in the life of faith. In the early centuries of Christian interpretation, Job was frequently regarded as an exemplar of virtues (e.g., patience, fortitude, humility) and a type (e.g., defeating Satan) and/or prophet (e.g., bodily resurrection foretold in 19:25–26) of Christ. In these Christian understandings of and extrapolations from Job, typically most reference was made to his character profile and verbal responses in the Prologue and his vindication in the Epilogue, to the neglect of his persona in the poetic middle. ³⁶ However, the nascent reflections on spiritual formation that I offer here are drawn from the sweep of the whole book, especially the length and confusion of the seemingly unwieldy poetic middle (3:1–42:6), and consider the function of waiting on both the micro- and macro-levels. Thus, respectively, first I address waiting in the dimension of an individual God-fearer’s life, and second in the eschatological dimension.

So what ought a God-fearer to do when waiting, when subjected to a prolonged strain of pain? According to Job, speak to God. One of the major contributions of this book to the biblical conceptualization of God-fearing is that Job would be commended by God at the end for speaking to him (cf. 42:7–8). Job depicts a freedom to speak honestly to God, to wrestle strenuously with him, about what one does not understand and finds difficult to bear, consistent with the OT lament tradition. ³⁷ At the same time, there is a boundedness to speech, in that not everything that even a God-fearing human will say from the depths of their agony is a legitimate, sanctioned representation of who God is and what he does—hence Job is rebuked from the whirlwind for misconstruing God’s way of managing his world (cf. 38:2; 40:8). Nonetheless, Job is commended for having spoken to God persistently, and it is a dignifying marker of Job’s status as God’s servant that God would answer to realign him. Additionally, waiting for God’s answer is not merely neutral, passive lag-time. That is, directing one’s voice to God not only reveals one’s disposition but also, when directed to God determinedly over time, is instrumental in further forming one’s disposition. The combination of a situation of difficulty—which furnishes a context of urgency—and time—which furnishes the opportunity to practice and develop a habit—can forge an increasingly instinctual disposition in humans to turn to God. Stated otherwise, someone who directs their voice to God every day for a lifetime will become a very distinct kind of person who lives by a very distinct dependence on God, living in alignment with the creaturely contingency which God has designed for humans within the Creature-creature relation. ³⁸ I would maintain that even though encounter with God ends up significantly reframing Job’s expectations, Job was put in position to be satisfied by that very encounter since he had been training his longing on it all along. Observing the pattern of Job, being a God-fearer looks like having a doggedly God-ward disposition which deepens and strengthens as one persists in turning to God, speaking to him, desperately dependent on his answer for resolution.

As intimated above, waiting in Job may also be construed in much more temporally and theologically expansive dimensions. In my view, Job is like a miniaturized version of the entire biblical story. As Job the God-fearer waits for God’s answer, so God’s people and all of creation await the decisive inbreaking of the divine presence into an earthly dilemma that proves intractable to humans. In this construal, asking “Why so long?” about Job 3–37 may be analogous to asking “Why the OT?” As in, why did God not answer Job from the whirlwind right after chapter 2, and why was Jesus not sent into the world straight after Genesis 3? Why should there have been a long, messy OT intervening? While certainly not wishing to reduce the function of the OT to a single point, I wonder if, taking instruction from Job, one function of the OT is to showcase the exhausting of human attempts to “answer” the רע‎ committed by humans and consequently unleashed into creation by humans in Genesis 3. As the OT unfolds, humans are seen as emphatically unable to sustain faithful covenant partnership with God and therefore incapable of reentering the idyllic garden paradise (cf. Gen 3:22–24), in a manner resembling the exhausting of the best human efforts to “answer” the רע‎ of Job’s plight throughout the lengthy poetic exchanges. ³⁹ And as in Job, any initial optimism about what humans may be able to contribute substantively towards the restoration of splintered relationships between the Creator and his creation and within that creation deteriorates as the OT reader watches the failure of successive generations to sustain fidelity to the gracious and compassionate God of Israel (cf. Exod 34:6–7). Yet the reader also knows that God has not given up on his creation and develops the definite sense, particularly while reading the prophetic promises of restoration from exile, ⁴⁰ that only the inbreaking of God’s decisive answer can address what has gone horribly awry among his people and in his world. Only God possesses the wisdom and power to redeem.

Ultimately, God answers not in a whirlwind but in a womb, by incarnation, when the Word and Wisdom by which God created the world (cf. Job 28: 25–26; John 1:1–4) takes on flesh and steps into the story of suffering humanity as the unparalleled righteous sufferer ⁴¹ and perfect interceding friend. ⁴² The God of Job has answered in this way to offer and to effect an end which is “more than” the beginning, an Eschaton resembling yet surpassing Eden. ⁴³ Thankfully on this latter point, I am in league with another Christian reader of Job, namely James. Near the end of his epistle, James exhorts his hearers to “be patient until the coming of the Lord” (5:7). In search of apt models for the posture of Christians in view of Jesus’ expected return (5:8), James points out farmers’ patience while waiting for their crops to be ready for harvest (5:7) and the prophets’ patience while facing suffering for the word of the Lord (5:10). Then he turns to one more model: “Behold, we call blessed those who have remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness (ὑπομονή) of Job and have seen the end (τέλος) of the Lord, that the Lord is abundantly compassionate and merciful.” Not only invoking Job as an exemplar for the early Christian community undergoing trials, James also makes the theologically significant move of likening the Joban Epilogue to the Eschaton. ⁴⁴ Just as Job waited for the Lord’s answer and was not disappointed—rather experienced divine generosity and blessing beyond what Job could have imagined—so the God-fearer who has been pining for divine answer will not be disappointed. Whatever טוב‎ (“good”), whatever רע‎ (“bad”) may come in this life, the witness of Job and of the rest of the Scriptures is that it is always worth it to be God-fearer oriented towards his coming because God does answer. God has answered climactically in Jesus’ first coming and will answer consummately with his second coming. And then the end will be unimaginably “more than” the beginning.