AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK OF JOB Part VII

Theological Bites

Last time we left at a note where we had concluded that God is sovereign and his sovereignty is an Absolute Sovereignty and that it is due to the absoluteness of his sovereignty that he exercises permissive sovereignty. God permits his created creatures like us to exercise our will in the way we want and all he does is to supply information that there are two sides; one of good and the other of evil.

We had also given a rationale for God’s permissive sovereignty in which we had two reasons.

1. God permits this because of who he is. He is the God of love and love is democratic. In love, people are free to do whatever they want, when they want and live to enjoy the fruits of their choices or suffer the consequences of the same.
2. God permits evil and suffering to exercise its ill-will to the fullest before ‘conscience’ beings like us so that we can be clear on what really is good and what is evil (Genesis 2:16-17, 3:1-7).

Please refer to the previous articles to learn more about the background to this issue.

An All-Power God

For God to be to be this permissive, it is because he is the God of all-power and all-power means that he has, essentially, nothing to lose. Again God is this permissive because he is the God of Love and love is democratic. God, unlike the devil, entertains an exclusively open relationship with us, in the world of Satan you are free to enter but not free to leave.

In that of God, we are all free to enter and at the same time equally free to leave at our discretion. If God changes and blocks pain and suffering before it even practices itself, then God is not all-powerful and he is afraid of the damage that the will of evil might cost him given that he might never fix it. What distinguishes the power of God from all other powers, is that it is the power that even accommodates all other powers in it.

All the powers we know are the kind of powers that fight opposing powers for these powers are never safe and whole as long these other opposing powers are doing their will. The all-power God that we worship is the God who permits all other powers to exercise their will and still God’s power is not affected. The existence of pain and suffering in the world for all the years that the world has been existence demonstrates how powerful God is.

Let me tell you how using the easiest example: look at the evilness of the cancer cells and the H.I.V virus and what they do to the human body These viruses, with or without treatment of the human body, will not live forever. I want you to imagine the human body to be the world and these viruses to be the evil will and ask yourself; how long has this world lived on with the evil will be exercised? How come with all the ill and aggression of evil, this world lives on and with all its brokenness there is still some joyous moments, success, and testimony in such a world?

The reason is a simple one, an all-power God is with us and all other powers and principalities have not achieved and will never achieve their goal unless you as an individual give them that.

An Only Love God

God is a love being and his love is democratic. He lets us do whatever we want and after we realise that we were wrong, he still receives us back as we have never offended his love. Love is the Justice of God. The question is; How can God be this loving and let all this evil happen? The answer is still LOVE. We can only challenge the love of God in contrast to the existing pain, suffering and loss based on how much we know compared to how much he knows.

We parents, out of the love for our children, have ever subjected our children to a certain kind of pain which was interpreted by them as hatred to them. But later, after some exposure, some of these children realised it was love at play. For God to be this loving but with this pain and loss we go through might be difficult to comprehend to the spiritual infants, but the adults refer to the cross and appreciate this love.

According to Leibniz,

“There are three forms of evil in the world: moral, physical, and metaphysical. God is all-good. God is all-powerful. Terrible things happen. Trying to reconcile these three things is what we call theodicy—an attempt to understand why God allows evil to exist in the world. To quote Abraham: “Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Genesis 18:25).

God is not an absentee landlord or a spectator as we suffer but he is and has ever been part of this pain we go through. To make sure he clarifies that he is in love with us even with the existence of pain and loss, he left his own self (identity), became a man (John 1:14) and suffered our lot (John 15:13). Because God is love, he got involved in our mess and actually lost his identity and life (John 3:16).

On Earth God suffered moral evil, he was tempted and castigated, he suffered physical evil, he was poor and hungry, cried, lost loved ones, beaten and wounded, he also suffered metaphysical evil, he fought demons and encountered demon masters and eventually he was dragged to Hell.

The Justice of God

Because Job believed in retribution theology, he was wondering the cause of his pain since he knew he was righteous. Job 9:22-24 demonstrates his attitude toward God when he said:

“It is all one; therefore I say, ‘He destroys both the blameless and the wicked.’ When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the faces of its judges—if it is not he, who then is it?”

The cross is the loving answer to the question of suffering and pain in the book of Job. If the cross is understood for what it is and serves, then the Paradox of Epicurus becomes easy to answer:

• How can an all-good, all-loving allow evil to exist? = because all-good and all-loving mean democracy and unlimited freedom of expression. Anything less than that compromises the ‘all’-good/love.
• Is God all-powerful? = Yes, he is all-powerful.
• If he is, then either God wants to abolish evil and cannot or God can abolish evil but he doesn’t want to. = God doesn’t want to abolish anything that belongs, is wanted by his beings and probably not understood by them. The following three questions fall in our understanding of the above answers.
• If God wants to abolish evil and cannot, then God is impotent or actually defeated by evil.
• But if God wants to abolish evil and does not want to, then God is evil.
• For if God wants can abolish evil and God really wants to abolish evil, then why is there evil in the world?

Let me conclude by sharing a triangle my professor taught me when he wanted me to understand the book of Job easily. However, this one is my version, it is no longer the way he drew it:

 

Pastor White’s contentious triangles of the book of Job.

God’s Justice is not when the wicked suffer and the righteous prosper, God’s Justice is achieved when both the wicked, and the righteous and sin itself bow down and confess that God is right and everything else is wrong (Philippians 2:10, Romans 14:11)

God bless you I invoke TRUTH, REASON and FAITH (2Tim 2:7)

Pr. T.I.M WHITE

The Gospel Hawker

@iTiS Well of Worship Fellowship (John 4:24)