Job, his life and example
The scriptural reference for our talks is Job 19:25 – “For I know that my redeemer liveth.” I flipped to the book of Job and re-read the story of a man who demonstrated faith in Christ, and I was surprised at how inaccurately I had remembered the story. I would like to take a few minutes to review the story of Job. I’m sure we all remember both the beginning and the end, but the part that I had misremembered was the middle. I was surprised at how applicable I found the story to be and what guidance I believe we can gain for our lives from reviewing his example.
Job was a righteous man who had about a half dozen or so kids and sufficient income to support them comfortably. He was respected by his peers, regarded as wise, righteous, and appropriately religious. He prayed for the wellbeing of his children, kept the commandments, and was duly blessed of the Lord for it with both material and spiritual abundance. How many of us fall into this group of people? I am confident that many of us do our best to keep the commandments, raise our children righteously, work hard to support our families, and feel blessed of the Lord for our efforts.
For whatever reason, the Lord decides to test Job. He loses his material possessions and his beloved children. What a blow. On Friday I attended a funeral for a 21 year old girl whose mother works with me. The pain and grief were palpable. I do not know how my coworker will be able to bear it. I know there are many in this congregation who have had to bear similar losses. At this important point in his eternal development, when he could well have looked at the heavens and said, “What the heck?!”, Job instead looks at the heavens and says, “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away;” and he might have stopped there, but somehow he manages to continue, “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”[1] What faith he must have had to praise the Lord in the midst of his calamity.
Then he is afflicted with physical ailments and his own wife implies that he has been forsaken by the Lord, and that his assertions of righteousness are clearly overlooking some great sin that the Lord has chosen to punish him for. Job answers her accusations calmly, asking, “What? Shall we receive good at the hand of God and shall we not receive evil?”[2], echoing what Christ said in the sermon on the mount, that our Father in Heaven “maketh the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just and the unjust.”[3] God never promised that evil people would have horrible lives or that good people would have easy, happy lives. He promised us that we would have lives. An opportunity to come to earth, gain a physical body, be tested, and an opportunity to repent so that we could return to live with him. In the preface to Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott says that he got a lot of grief for not letting the most virtuous heroine, Rebecca, marry the noblest hero, Ivanhoe. He says that he did not join her to Ivanhoe because it was a dangerous idea to teach young people that the reward for virtue was a life of bliss. Virtuous living has other rewards than earthly ease, and both Job and Christ affirm this here. I do not wish to imply that virtuous people do not receive blessings from God for their actions. Indeed they do, and often, those blessings take the form of material abundance, but it is not a gospel principle that righteousness frees you from trials, indeed, the opposite may be true. Consider the examples of Joseph Smith in Liberty Jail, Alma the Younger and Amulek in the city of Ammonihah, and ultimately, Jesus Christ, our savior, had to bear his burdens that caused him to cry out to God, and ask if there was not another way.
Back to the story of Job. He takes this all pretty hard, to the point that he wonders why he didn’t die in the womb, what is the purpose of his life and his suffering, but through it all, he refuses to allow his sorrow and grief to become resentment or anger toward God. There are a couple of chapters where he whines a little bit, and who wouldn’t. He has 4 friends, whose names are odd enough to not be worth mentioning, who believe that if a man is suffering serious trials and tribulations, he is being punished by God for something he has done. For about 30 chapters, they do not waver from the belief that Job must have sinned to incite God’s wrath. There seems to be no room in their understanding of God for tribulation for any reason other than retribution.
Throughout their speeches, Job maintains his innocence and his righteousness. He shares his powerful testimony of Christ with his friends. He has some great lines about trusting in God despite trials. He says, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him; but I will maintain mine own ways before him.”[4] We’ll come back to that “I will maintain mine own ways before him” comment in a bit. He also says, “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh will I see God.”[5] He also spends nearly an entire chapter explaining to his friends that sometimes “The wicked live, become old, yea are mighty in power … Their houses are safe from fear … their children dance …” and even, “They spend their days in wealth.”[6] Job goes so far as to say, You know what? If I’ve done wrong, show me where. He directs this challenge, as it were, to the Lord.
We see Job, holding up a list of things that would make him wicked: not helping the poor, being dishonest, stealing, using authority unjustly, etc. and saying, “let’s ask the Lord where I’ve fallen short,” as though he had a yardstick and he measured himself by this list and used it to know that he was righteous.
At this point, Job’s wisest friend, Elihu, jumps in and really lets Job have it for his attitude. He spends 6 chapters telling Job, you can’t hold up a yardstick to determine if you are righteous! He explains that Job has missed the boat on understanding morality. Job has misrepresented God’s version of righteousness, completely neglecting God’s compassionate nature. God is mighty, yet just, quick to warn and equally quick to forgive, he is the source of redemption and salvation, and above all, he is not a man and can not be measured by man’s standards, and for that matter, man can not measure himself by man’s standards. Job’s first three friends thought that Job’s repentance would entail making a list of specific infractions and then asking for forgiveness for those specific actions. Elihu says that his repentance needs to include throwing away the idea that he can possibly use a yardstick to measure righteousness. In many ways, Elihu’s comments remind me of President Ezra Taft Benson’s talk on Pride. Pride is thinking you know better than God, and that you can hold yourself up to God and say, “See?”, believing that once you explain it to him, he’ll have to see it from your point of view. Real repentance entails renouncing your own idea of moral authority, which is God’s alone. He rebukes Job for thinking that he can make his own case before God for his righteousness. In Alma 22, Aaron explains this for us, “And since man had fallen he could not merit anything of himself; but the sufferings and death of Christ atone for their sins…”[7] Nephi tells us that “No flesh can dwell in the presence of God, save it be through the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah.”[8]
Elihu’s statements were confirmed by the voice of God himself (and I can’t believe that I forgot that God actually spoke to them in this story). God speaks to Job in a narrative that I find surprisingly similar to God’s response to Joseph in liberty jail. Remember that there, he listed off a set of trials and then reminded Joseph that “The son of man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?”[9] Here, the Lord recounts to Job a portion of the measure of his creation, and asks Job whether he has done anything similar that would give him the commensurate experience and exaltation to be a judge of morality.
Job was correct in his belief that the trials were not the punishment of God for temporal infractions, and he was firm in his testimony of Christ, the resurrection, and the reality of God’s existence. But he was wrong to believe that he was innocent of any fault, or that his righteousness could be measured by a list of physical actions, or that he was in a position to decide that he did not need repentance. Remember his comment when he was bearing his testimony, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Good. But he continues, “But I will maintain mine own ways before him,” effectively saying, “I’ve decided that I’m righteous, regardless of what God thinks” or “I trust God in everything but whether or not I need to repent.” After hearing God’s voice, Job is truly humbled, fully repents, and is blessed to see the Lord. Without the trial, Job might have continued to believe that he did not need repentance and might have continued to measure himself by the yardstick of physical actinos. The trial was the catalyst that brought him closer to God. We all remember the rest about how his lucky wife got to bear him another 10 kids, he became rich, and died a righteous old humble man after another 140 years.
I want to bear my testimony that God loves us. He does indeed cause the sun to shine on the good and the wicked both. Good people often have lives full of trials and wicked people often live lives of ease, but just as often, good people have seemingly easy lives and wicked people have very short and difficult lives. The ease of our lives is not an indicator of righteousness. The fact that we have lives is an indication that God loves us. And, unfortunately, so is the fact that we have trials. Every one of us has something to repent for; we can merit nothing of ourselves. Our goal to find joy and happiness is reached only as we “press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men”, “relying wholly on upon the merits of him who is mighty to save.”
