Blameless

The book of Job is about a man who lived long ago, perhaps around the time of Abraham, the father of the Jewish people. It is one of the most ancient pieces of literature in the world. It is usually the beginning and the end of the book that get the most attention. The beginning shows a scene in heaven between God and Satan where Job seems to be the object of a wager.

“Have you considered my servant Job – he is blameless and upright,” says God.
“He only worships you because you’ve blessed him so much! Take away his blessing and he’ll curse you!” says Satan.
“You think so? Well let’s find out. Go ahead and take it away,” says God.

And so the story of Job’s tragic tale begins. While we, as readers, know what kicks off Job’s tragedy, Job never knows. Even after it is all over Job is never shown the beginning to his story. That is a big lesson for us to learn. We may never know why things happen, but we can be certain that there is one. Certainly this is one of the lessons of the book as a whole.

The bulk of the book, however, is a dialogue between Job and his friends as they wrestle to figure out why Job is suffering and how he should respond. Job’s friends make the point that suffering is caused by our own doing. Job must have done something bad to deserve all of this. Suffering means God is displeased and is moving you to repent. They encourage Job to figure out what he has done and confess it before God so that he might be forgiven. And as you read their words you are hard-pressed to find anything wrong with them. These friends of Job are the elders of the land – those who have lived long enough to acquire great wisdom with regard to living. Where did they go wrong?

There is no way to answer that question without paying attention to the opening verses of the book. The author sets the stage of everything that follows and if we read too quickly, we’ll miss it. The key to understanding Job, the person, his suffering, and the problem with most counsel comes from this opening description of him. We can sum up the key to all of these questions with one word from verse 1, blameless. Everything hinges on it. Without properly understanding this one single word we will never grasp the book of Job; and, quite possibly, we will not be able to survive our own times of suffering with our sanity and faith in tact. To see this, we’re going to work our way backward through the text so that we can end where the writer of Job begins. We’ll look at the practice of a blameless man, the prosperity of a blameless man, and the provenance of his blamelessness. Job, according to these opening verses, is the person all of us want to be. He is the father we wish we had. He is the statesman we wish governed us.

 

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