THE WAY OF THE CROSS

“Surely God does not reject a blameless man  or strengthen the hands of evildoers.” (8:20)

Bildad is perfectly correct. Far from rejecting the blameless God says, “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you” (Heb. 13:5). And as for “strengthening the hands of evildoers,” the Lord does the very opposite: “He frustrates the ways of the wicked” (Ps. 146:9). So in general terms Bildad is right. However, when this general truth is applied to the particular case of Job—and even more conspicuously, when it is applied to the case of Jesus Christ—Bildad turns out to be profoundly, egregiously wrong. For on Calvary it was God’s explicit plan to “reject a blameless man” and to “strengthen the hands” of those who crucified Him. And so it was with Job. In Job we see what happens when the Lord places more weight on a man’s shoulders than he can gracefully bear, and when He then abandons that righteous man to carry the weight by himself. Is this not what a cross is? It is abandonment (or at least the felt experience of abandonment) by God.

This strange experience is one from which no believer is exempt. All of us must share in the maddening paradox of knowing in our hearts that we are the loved and redeemed children of God, and freer than the wind, and yet still being compelled to experience firsthand the cruelty and injustice of a world in which the righteous are unwelcome intruders, and in which all too often the strength of evildoers goes wildly unchecked.

Naturally as Christians we suffer many woes simply on account of our own sin. As Eliphaz argued so glibly in 4:8, “Those who sow trouble reap it”—a saying which even the New Testament quotes as a warning to believers (see Gal. 6:7). But to endure the normal consequences of our own folly is not what it means to take up our cross and share in the sufferings of Christ. No, to suffer with Christ means to suffer undeservedly, as Jesus and His apostles did, and as Job also did. When Paul spoke of “filling up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24), he did not mean that he expected to add anything to the finished work of Christ’s atonement. Rather, he was stating the heartfelt aspiration of all mature disciples to be like Jesus in every way, including having “the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives” (2 Cor. 1:5).

The lot of God’s children on this earth is something like being buried alive. First we are raised with Christ and made into entirely new creatures, pure and blameless, washed and redeemed and lifted up to Heaven. All of this happens by faith—which is to say, not in some imaginary way, but in a way more gloriously real than this present world can bear to behold. Yet no sooner has this spiritual transaction taken place, no sooner have we been veritably seated with Christ in the heavenly realms, than immediately we are sent down to earth again, just as Jesus was, and entrusted with a mission: “As the Father sent me, so I am sending you” (John 20:21). The moment we are born again we are sent right back into the world of sin and death. In fact we are set back down into exactly the same circumstances in which we found ourselves before we were saved, and there we are told to take up the work of the Son of God in that situation, however painful it might be. And this is a lot we are to accept with increasing graciousness.

Religion would be well deserving of the title Marx gave it—“the opiate of the masses”—were it not for the fact that in practical terms no such opiate exists. For no matter what system of beliefs people inject into their veins it is still impossible for them to escape pain. As T. S. Eliot wrote, “We only live, only suspire / Consumed by either fire or fire.” Bildad, like many believers today, seems to be more interested in religiously avoiding pain at all costs, than in enduring it for Christ’s sake. Obviously there is some place in his thinking for the stoical acceptance of suffering as a kind of “penance”; but there is clearly no place for the redemptive bearing of unjust, undeserved suffering. “Does God pervert justice?” (8:3) he asks Job sarcastically at the outset of his speech. He seems to think of faith as a way of getting out from under one’s cross, rather than of taking it up.

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