Job asked the “Why?” question more honestly, more persistently, and more respectfully than almost anyone in Scripture. He lost his children, his wealth, his health, and his standing, and through chapter after chapter he did not curse God. He pressed Him.
“Why?” he asked, over and over. Not rhetorically. He wanted an answer, and he believed he had the right to one.
His friends offered theories. Job rejected every one of them. He wasn’t looking for an explanation he could construct himself. He wanted it from God’s own mouth.
He never got it.
When God finally speaks, in chapter 38, He doesn’t answer the question. He doesn’t defend Himself, doesn’t walk Job through the wager with Satan, doesn’t say a single word about why. Instead He asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid, whether he’s ever commanded the morning, whether he can bind the chains of the Pleiades.
God hurls question after question at Job. Questions no mere human can answer.
And Job doesn’t even try to answer. I can only imagine that he is in a state of stunned terror. And when the questions end, Job is beginning to get the picture. His voice must quaver with awe as he responds: I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You; therefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
He still doesn’t know why he had to suffer. He never finds out. But he has gained a glimpse into the magnificence and omnipotence of Almighty God.
A Different Man, the Same Question
Centuries later, a group of men bring Jesus a report: Pilate has slaughtered a group of Galileans at worship, their blood mixed with their own sacrifices. (Luke 13:1-5) It’s horrifying. It’s also, whether they realize it or not, the same question Job asked. Why would God allow this?
Jesus doesn’t answer it. He doesn’t rank the victims’ righteousness, doesn’t explain Pilate’s cruelty, doesn’t address the injustice at all. He redirects entirely: unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Then, in case anyone thought Pilate’s brutality was the real subject, He brings up eighteen people crushed under a falling tower, a plain accident, nobody’s fault, and says the same thing again: unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.
Two very different situations. Two people asking, in their own way, why did this happen? And in both cases, God’s answer is not an answer. It’s a redirection.
Mind Your Own Business
It’s hard not to hear something almost blunt underneath both of these exchanges – as if God is saying, obliquely, in Job’s suffering and in the crowd’s outrage alike: that isn’t your business. Not unkindly. Not dismissively. But firmly enough that neither Job nor the men in Luke 13 walk away with an explanation for suffering and injustice.
Which raises the obvious next question, the one I don’t think either passage lets us avoid:
What, then, is my business?
(To be continued.)
Link to Part Two: Mind Your Own Business, Part 2: The Inheritance We Take for Granted
My previous blog, “Repent or Perish: The Real Meaning of the Fig Tree in Luke 13,” is also based on the first verses of Luke 13.
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