MERE HUMANITY

“Does not man have hard service on earth? Are not his days like those of a hired man? Like a slave longing for the evening shadows . . .” (7:1-2)

Like so many passages of great lyric poetry in this book, these stanzas have an uncanny power to evoke in just a few pen-strokes all the bewildering and homely reality of the human condition. The farmer in his cornfield; the stockbroker in his glass-and-steel tower; the President in his Oval Office; the Christian writer at his word processor: all of us know exactly what it is to be “a slave longing for the evening shadows.” Job’s questions at the beginning of Chapter 7 may appear to bring a complete shift in subject; but really they are a continuation of his primary line of self-defense, as he points out quite simply that it is the lot of humanity to suffer and that he, Job, is in this respect no different from any other person.

As we shall see so often throughout this story, Job’s faith draws its strength not just from his knowledge of the Lord but from the profound awareness he has of his own mere humanity. In the previous chapter, for example, he had piteously lamented, “Do I have the strength of stone? Is my flesh bronze? Do I have any power to help myself, now that success has been driven from me?” (6:12-13). Job is keenly aware that he is not a man of stone or of bronze but of flesh and bone, and he knows also that flesh and bone are but dust. Here is a man steeped in the consciousness of his mortality and human weakness. He knows well his frailty; yet beyond this he knows that the Lord knows it too. In the words of Psalm 103:14, “[The Lord] knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust.” Accordingly, in one of those odd paradoxes that serve like alternating current to animate the beating heart of faith, it is Job’s intimate knowledge of his own utter helplessness that becomes the very ground upon which he stands as he reaches out boldly to shake the throne of God. “Give me a place to stand and I will move the world,” boasted Archimedes. But Job was a still greater engineer, for he knew where to stand to move the heart of God.

Job’s language in the opening verses of Chapter 7 may remind us of those New Testament passages in which the people of God are called “aliens and strangers on earth” (Heb. 11:13; 1 Peter 2:11). If we are aliens here, then it stands to reason that we will encounter many difficulties. As believers we will continue to suffer—that is, to experience evil firsthand—since in worldly terms we are no better off than anyone else. Indeed we are worse off, for does it not follow that those who love their Creator will feel the brunt of the fallen creation even more painfully than those who do not love Him? Becoming a Christian, far from reducing the normal hardships of life or the demands made upon us as human beings, actually increases them. God’s gift of grace does not in this sense make life easier.

True, the Christian life is not without its privileges, even in worldly terms. But essentially our growth in Christ happens not by being lifted above the level of the world but rather by being immersed more and more deeply in it. What we are involved in is a process not of divinization, but of increasing humanization, for the way we become like God is by becoming more human—more of what He created us to be. Any theology that either demeans our humanness, or else tends in any way toward elitism (whether intellectual, social, or spiritual) is a twisted theology. Any spirituality that tries to rob people of their day-to-day creatureliness, or that lures them away from the ordinary struggles and duties of life in the real world, is a false spirituality. On the contrary, the more saintly a person becomes, the more closely he or she will be identified with the common lot of suffering humanity. Job is a great saint not because he is in any way superhuman, but because he is himself. There is no sham or deceit in him, no artificiality or posturing—and even if there is, it is only what is to be expected from dust and ashes.

Milan Kundera, Czech author of the novel with the haunting title The Unbearable Lightness of Being, once confessed, “My lifetime ambition has been to unite the utmost seriousness of question with the utmost lightness of form.” Was this perhaps what God had up His sleeve when He created human beings—and even more, when He became one Himself?

Mason, M. (2002). The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything. Crossway.