kayla nicole smith

Excerpts from Job chapters 7-9 (Eugene Peterson's translation)

"That's what happens to all who forget God-- all their hopes come to nothing.
They hang their life from one thin thread,
they hitch their fate to a spider web.
One jiggle and the thread breaks,
one jab and the web collapses."
-Job's friend, Bildad

"Somehow, though he moves right in front of me, I don't see him;
quietly but surely he's active, and I miss it."
-Job, on God

"What a miracle of skin and bone,
muscle and brain!
You gave me life itself, and incredible love.
You watched and guarded every breath I took."
-Job, to God

Job never attacks God. He only asks those difficult questions that come from the core of a person, that try to get at the mystery and terrifying glory and indecipherable nature of God. One of those questions is where God is. How is God in those times of complete, all-encompassing pain? Where is he, why does he let it happen, why does he make it happen?
Job never paints God as evil... he still glorifies him. He still recognizes the love that was threaded into every ounce of his body when he was created, when he was given that miracle of skin and bone, life. But he also sees the difference in how God sheltered him then and is making him grow now.

"My belly is full of bitterness.
I'm up to my ears in a swamp of affliction.
I try to make the best of it, try to brave it out,
but you're too much for me,
relentless, like a lion on the prowl.
You line up fresh witnesses against me.
You compound your anger
and pile on the grief and pain!"
-Job, to God

Job was honest before God-- a man of integrity. What is integrity? It means you're the same person before people and under the cover of darkness. (For it is shameful to even speak of those things which are done by them in secret.) You're honest with yourself, you're honest before God. Like Pastor John said, it means you don't cheat-- and there are lots of ways to cheat. With your eyes. With your money, with your thoughts. Kierkegaard would say Job strove with God, not with men. He wouldn't compare his suffering with what his friends were going through, he wouldn't compare what he could handle and what they could handle-- he went before God a broken man, humbled, feeling like the waves of God's wrath were pounding him into nothing, not only wanting to die, but wishing he had never been born. But he went before God.