This devotional was originally published by the Holston Conference Daily Devotional on Tuesday, October 12, 2021. You can find that post at this link.
“I think my favorite Bible story is Job. You know the one, right? Where Job is this great guy and God ruins his life just for sport? I like that story.”
My friend was a very outspoken religious skeptic (to put it mildly). He had asked a few of us Christians what our favorite Bible stories were. This was his response. To his mind, this story of suffering and forsakenness encapsulated the heart of God for the world. If God is so good, then why all the bad?
I’m sad to say my reaction was probably pretty pathetic. Like Job’s friends in that narrative, I undoubtedly scrambled all my apologetic resources to God’s defense. And, like Job’s friends, I undoubtedly did a very poor job.
Reconciling the suffering of the world with the claim of an all-powerful and all-loving God is an old problem. Often, the old solution (particularly in our world) is intellectual arguments. Discussions of free will, human sin, a broken world…all of these are true. At different times, they may even be helpful. But they do little to touch the heart of someone stuck in the pit.
Consider Job in our text today: he is filled with that intensity of longing, that ache for his world to go back to normal. He waits for the knot in his stomach to be released and the tension throughout his body to dissipate. He laments days gone by when anxiety was not a gripping shadow, grief was not a constant companion, and the goodness and mercy of God followed him every day.
Job longs for the past when life was good. His present is misery and his future is worse: “I cry to you, O God, but you don’t answer. I stand before you, but you don’t even look. You have become cruel toward me. You use your power to persecute me. You throw me into the whirlwind and destroy me in the storm. And I know you are sending me to my death— the destination of all who live.” (Job 30:20–23, NLT)
The worst part for Job, as it often is for us, is that he gets no answer from God. For all Job’s questions and all his pain and all his protests, God is utterly, agonizingly silent. But, eventually, God does answer. And the answer isn’t quite what Job hoped for. While that’s worth considering on other days (feel free to read Job 38-42 at some point), what I find fascinating is not so much what God says as where he says it from: “Then the Lord answered Job from the whirlwind…” (Job 38:1, 40:6, NLT)
Job felt as though he’d been thrown into the whirlwind, swept up in a calamitous storm and turned around and upside down; he was lost, anchorless and rudderless on a storm at sea. And where was God in the midst of this chaos? Well…he was in the whirlwind too.
All of us will face periods of suffering. And all of us will minister to people in the midst of pain and suffering too. There is no one who cannot, at some point, identify with Job’s suffering in the storm. But this is the Gospel: in the midst of the whirlwind, God chooses to identify with Job’s suffering too. At the eye of the storm, there stands a Roman Cross.
For all that the cross signifies and means, at least one dimension of it is God’s choice to enter into the forsakenness of the human experience of suffering. In the crucifixion, we see God entering into the fullness of human suffering to make a way through and offer that unexpected, unanticipated hope of Resurrection.
A Prayer: In this moment and time, I acknowledge your Lordship, Jesus. Gracious God, thank you for loving me and giving me the gift of today. Thank you for entering into the whirlwind. In the chaos and confusion in which we find ourselves today, give me faith enough to cling to you. Guide me along your way, lead me with your truth, and give me your life this day, Amen.
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