We are told multiple times today that God is powerful and can be scary. Now, on the one hand, we want to say with St Therese of Liseux, "How can I fear a God who is nothing but mercy and love?" And we've talked about this in other blogs - the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and love is its fulfillment.
But Job and his friends have been accusing God of not being fair. Mostly Job. His friends have said that Job MUST have done something wrong to deserve what has happened to him. But the implication is that Job had to have done something wrong, or God WOULD be unjust to treat him that way.
God takes us a step back from all of those theodicy questions. Now, tomorrow we're going to get a very satisfying answer to their questions. We will, in fact, get the most satisfying answer there is. But today God reminds them that they're acting a little entitled.
And we act that way, too, I hate to say. When we pray, we often don't align ourselves with His will and try to find what He wants us to do. Instead, what we usually do is ask for things. But even when we ask, it's usually with the assumption that He will give it to us. We usually don't pray, "Do you want me to get married?" but instead we say, "When are you going to bring me a spouse?"
We don't pray, "Is it your will that I have children?", but instead we presume and say to God, "When are you going to give me children?" The same thing goes for our health. We assume that God OWES us a healthy body, and wealth to go with it. When something DOES go wrong, we whine alot and seek His will in the suffering very little.
So that's what God reminds Job and his friends today. We're not owed anything. God doesn't have to give us health, wealth, a happy family, and great friends. Sometimes life is hard, and God calls us to pick up our cross and carry it.
To be honest, and this isn't a happy honest, God DOES owe us something. See, we are sinners, and the wages of sin is death. What that means in regular words is that we have earned wages. We have worked and God owes us the proper payment for our work. But our work has been sin and the proper payment is death and hell. That's a sobering realization, right?
Now, the good news is that God cares about us more than we can imagine. And our happiness is important to Him. So He often DOES give us the things we take for granted. But when He makes us wait, or even gives us an answer, "no", we need to say with Job: "The LORD gives, and the LORD takes away. Blessed be the name of the LORD."
God, thanks for reminding us not to be spoiled brats.
3 comments:
Very insightful comment at the end about what our wages earn us from a just god.
But also curious why fear is the beginning of wisdom.
Sorry, Publius, I didn't see your comment until now.
Proverbs 9:10 tells us very clearly. "Fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding."
If you read my other blogs (there are alot, though, so I don't expect you to dig through them all) you'll see that I explore this idea regularly. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and love of God is the fulfillment of wisdom. We begin by fearing Him, just like we have a healthy "fear" or respect of our parents when we're growing up. We don't disobey our parents because we are literally afraid that they'll punish us if we do. And that is healthy. But as we grow older, we develop our own inner moral compass, and we no longer need to fear our parents, so we love them instead.
We do something very similar with God. We begin by being afraid (if we're wise) that He will throw us into hell if we sin. But when we're fully grown spiritually, we begin to see (like Paul said) that while all things are permissable, not all things are beneficial. So we learn to love God as our friend and fear Him less as a terrifying judge.
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