Monday 31 January

Job 19:1-21:34

Sometimes you read a verse from the bible and it is like it is speaking directly into your situation.  And so it is today; “my breath is offensive to my wife... even the little boys...ridicule me”.  I’m joking of course - it is my wife, and not my little boys, who ridicules me - but in this section we do really get a sense of how isolated and how depressed Job must have felt.  It must be horrifying and debilitating to be loathed by the person who lies next to you at night and to know that each and every morning all you have to look forward to for breakfast is a big bowl of scorn-flakes (I’m sorry I think I’ve gone to far with that one ;-)).  Even now I find myself just wanting to joke about it because the prospect of living in that place is too awful for me to accept.  So how on earth can we worship a God who would put someone there?

Well, first of all I don’t think we get much of a choice in the matter; God is God and there is no other.  Whether we like it or not, he deserves, even demands our worship.  But it is more than that.  The fact that such events would be included in God’s holy book show his desire to achieve redemption in and through suffering.  Also, it was never God’s idea to put Job through all this mess - there was another one who was agitating for that - and God acted as a protective guard throughout, limiting the extent to which Satan was able to pursue his destructive agenda.  So why did God allow Satan any scope at all to act against Job and why does he not act to remedy the situation any sooner?  I’m not sure that question is ever neatly answered in this intriguing book but we do see here, in the deepest darkest night of Job’s soul some extraordinary flickers of revelation that perhaps could not have sparked in more comfortable surroundings.  Here, in Job, we almost certainly see the first evidence in the bible of a genuine hope in resurrection (19:26) and the first sense of individuals being held personally accountable to God.  These ideas are not properly forged in the Jewish mindset until around the time of Jesus, so you can see how Job, in his suffering, grasped some of the most awesome truths about God almost a thousand years ahead of his more comfortable descendants.  Does that make suffering seem OK? Nope - it still hurts like hell and, indeed, that is the place from which it came.  But, we know that God does, somehow, in ways that people probably don’t even realise at the time, bring unfathomable revelation and unchallengable redemption into the very deepest pits of despair.  

Matthew 1:1-17

I find it interesting that there is a current fashion to refer to Jesus as a Rabbi.  For me, this fashion suggests Jesus was primarily a man of holy living and teaching, to be followed by students who with to emulate his level of understanding of God.  This section blows that fashion out of the water.  There is nothing academic or studious about Jesus’s assault on the precincts of the temple.  This is a highly prophetic and symbolic action that, for me, is the pinnacle of all his acts prior to his death.  He, in a wildly subversive manner acts out the destruction of the temple that he knows is going to occur approximately 30 years later.  Jesus’ actions, rather than being a protest at how the money-changers were exploiting the poor, were the final, unthinkably provocative declaration that the age of the temple was now over.  Jesus’ prophetic actions screamed in the face of the Jerusalem population that they had to make a choice between the expiring covenant of the temple and the vibrant, dawning covenant of the cross.  This was the thing about Jesus - he was a prophet through and through; grabbing attention, bringing new revelation and, above all, demanding an active response from every person he came across. 

Psalm 18:1-6

The Lord is my rock is one of my favourite images from the Psalms.  The rock I have in mind is not a small piece of quartz that I keep in my desk draw or use as a paper-weight.  No, rather it is a huge, Ayers-Rock-sized monster on which my feet can stand firm and secure, well away from the sinking sand of uncertainty and insecurity.