Or, perhaps, like
I often am, you are distressed about some current world disaster or wickedness
and want to think about the problem of
Suffering.
There
is a saying The Patience of Job But was he?Unfortunately some have used the book to develop the classic understanding
of suffering as being either caused by sin (as the "comforters" wrongly
supposed) or as a test (as it seems to have been). In the service for the
"visitation of the sick" in the Book of Common Prayer, the poor unfortunate,
perhaps on his deathbed, is told in no uncertain terms that either he has
sinned and must repent or he is being tested and should rejoice. If you
have never read the Book of Job you should. It begins with a prologue in
which God makes His wager with satan and ends with an epilogue in which
Job's fortunes are restored and he lives happily ever after. The story
in between is (I understand ) in poetry. Indeed it is rather like
a Mystery Play or even a Pantomime. Both tell a rather fanciful story with
some kind of moral. The moral here is Don't presume to understand
God. God (very reasonably) has all the best lines which set out
(very poetically) how little we can possibly know of His ways.
Stand up now like a man and answer the question I ask you , says God, were you there when I made the world.................(Job 38 v3ff) It goes on and on in this way. Although this is certainly a put down (relative to God) it is also a recognition of Man's importance, otherwise why should God bother.
Only when Job has accepted both his smallness relative to God
and
his responsibility as a man, are his fortunes restored. That, it
seems to me, is the key to our relationship with God and one to be worked
out and wrestled with every moment of every day. It is from the Book of
Job that we get the well known sentence of faith:
Or, perhaps, like
I often am, you are distressed about some current world disaster or wickedness
and want to think about the problem of
Suffering.