Bitter Complaints: Born To Trouble Series

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In a way, a lot has transpired between last week’s reading and this one. In another way, nothing much has changed. Job is still on the ash heap. Job is still iN A place of bitter complaints. The companions who sat in silence with Job for seven days (2:13) now try and blame Job for his suffering.

They believe, after all, that suffering is always the result of sin, and so they try to find some hidden sin in this innocent man to protect themselves from the threat of the chaos that has engulfed him. You know folk will make you sick telling you what's wrong with you.

But We like the friends of Job, do the same thing, of course, though more subtly. When we hear of a tragedy, our gut reaction is often to reason to ourselves why it won’t happen to us: They built their house in a flood plain. she wasn’t watching her child closely enough. They live in the wrong neighborhood.

Through it all, Job holds on he keeps the faith. He knows that he has done nothing to deserve this suffering. He knows his poverty and oppression are not his doing.

Suffering is not always the result of sin, claims Job, a radical assertion in his day, and an important one to affirm even today. And as I said last week Poverty is not always the result of sin. We are going to have to stop blaming the individuals for the systematic sins they are experiencing the narrative is going to have to be changed. Oppression is not the result of the oppressed but of the oppressor.

The speeches of Job and his “friends” are repetitive, sometimes tedious, to read. But it is important to note some moves that Job makes in these long chapters of dialogue. Some of what we see here in our text is central to being a disciple of Jesus.

#1 Job Moves from Death Wish to Justice.

In the text Job begins the dialogue in chapter 3, for instance, with a curse on the day of his birth, wishing for death, wishing that he had never been born in the first place.

That death wish surfaces again a few times in his speeches, but he eventually moves from wishing for death to wishing for justice.

Job’s words are bitter, even despairing. He accuses God of terrible things, Even feeling God’s absence, though, Job continues to address God:

Yet, Job speaks to God directly, honestly. He speaks in all his anger, pain, grief, and despair because he knows that God is big enough to handle it. He holds on to God with fierce faith. He calls on God to answer him, to help him.

Job has shifted from pain to a process, he understands it’s not about him and his, it’s about A God who is just and who provides justice to those in need. What Job does is the move from woe is me to what God has for me! And we all have to get there to the point where we know that God is gonna come through for us. Know that God is on our side and God got good for all God's children.

#2 Job is Not Afraid to Lament.

Job laments, and through that lament, something like hope is born. The American church avoids lament. But lament is an essential component of the Christian faith. Lament recognizes struggles and suffering, that the world is not as it ought to be.

Lament challenges the status quo and cries out for justice against existing injustices. In the Old Testament, talk of God is characterized by two-way thinking. Lament creates space for this two-way conversation and moves the theology of suffering into interaction with the theology of celebration.

From the Bible, we learn much of lament. Recall David, Job, and Isaiah in their respective times of mourning. Their grief is symbolized with ashes and sackcloth and marked with honest, anguished cries.

In other Scripture, we find the wailing women, professional mourners called to grieve in the community. And there is Rachel, “weeping for her children” with “lamentation and bitter weeping” (Jeremiah 31:15). To these voices and tears, we add our own. Lament is not just biblical it’s not just natural, it’s a central component to faith. We all find times in our suffering to cry out for God's justice, to think things over and realize just how far we got to go and where God brought us from, and what was left where we used to be.

#3 Job Keeps Praying

But Job is disappointed. But Job is Bitter, But Job is Broke, But Job is Busted. And Yet He can’t argue his case before God because God is nowhere to be found. Verses 8-9 read like a reversal of Psalm 139, which affirms the psalmist’s belief that escaping the presence of God is impossible (“Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?” 139:7). Job 23:8-9, in contrast, laments that God “is not there… I cannot perceive him… I cannot behold him… I cannot see him” (see also Psalm 22:1-2; Isaiah 45:15).