THE SQUEAKY WHEEL

“I desire to speak to the Almighty and to argue my case with God.” (13:3)

Job really believes that if he summons God, God will appear and answer him. This is astounding. He seems obstinately determined to talk with God face to face and to hear answers from God’s own lips, and he will not settle for anything less. Indeed the very essence of Job’s faith is this insistence upon having a personal encounter— more than that, a personal relationship—with the Lord God Almighty. It is as if he knew and took absolutely literally the promise of Jesus Christ, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you” (Luke 11:9).

Significantly, this verse from Luke follows immediately upon the parable of a man who needed bread in the middle of the night and so went pounding on the door of his sleeping friend. “I tell you,” Jesus concludes the story, “though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness he will get up and give him as much as he needs.” Is it wrong to be stubbornly determined in pursuing a speaking-terms relationship with God? No; on the contrary it is wrong not to be determined enough. To give up too easily is catastrophic. “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door,” Jesus warned, “because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. Once the owner of the house gets up and closes the door, you will stand outside knocking and pleading, ‘Sir, open the door for us.’ But he will answer, ‘I don’t know you or where you come from’” (Luke 13:24-25). The time to stand at the door of Heaven and knock and plead for entry is not later, but now.

A similar moral lies behind the parable of the persistent widow in Luke 18. Job’s case is strikingly parallel to this woman’s, for he too seeks justice from an apparently unjust Judge, and he does so in the stubborn hope that somehow, in the final analysis, true justice must prevail. Astonishingly, this very stubbornness God accepts as faith. To cite yet another example, Job could be compared to the prophet Habakkuk whose book begins, “How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?” (Hab. 1:2). The fact that God appears to be turning a deaf ear to this prayer does not deter the prophet from continuing to call. No, Habakkuk is resolved to “stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me, and what answer I am to give to this complaint” (2:1). How long the prophet had to wait for his answer we are not told, but apparently the wait was well worth his while, for the very next verse in the book declares, “Then the Lord replied,” and two verses later appear the famous words, “The righteous will live by his faith”—a statement so much admired by the New Testament apostles that they quote it no less than three times (see Rom. 1:17; Gal. 3:11; Heb. 10:38).

Many people, of course, have questions for God. But hardly anyone is willing to hold out and wait (let alone to wheedle and pester the Lord) for an answer. Most people will not wait on God even for one minute. Why not? Surely it is because we do not really expect any answer. Job’s friends are scandalized (as many religious people would be today) by the very thought of bringing God directly and personally into their affairs. “Just imagine!” they must have thought; “What kind of a kook does this Job think he is, calling on God as though He were a person like you or I, and actually expecting an answer? No, this is a serious theological discussion we’re having; let’s not drag any charismatic nonsense into it!” But the message of Job, of Habakkuk, and of Jesus’ parables on prayer is all the same: the word of the Lord comes without fail to those whose faith takes a peculiar form—the form of despair honestly and passionately expressed, combined with stubborn persistence in holding out for consolation. If just a few people in a dead church would get down on their knees and rattle the gates of Heaven, refusing to be comforted until the Lord had brought revival, then would not God respond to such prayer and “rend the heavens and come down” (Isa. 64:1)? In the economy of the Holy Spirit, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.


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