Worship in the dust

The book opens with a picture of a settled life. Job is the greatest man of the east: seven sons, three daughters, thousands of livestock, a household so full it needs a feast schedule to keep up with itself. He is called blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil. And then, in the space of a single chapter, all of it is taken. Four messengers arrive one after another, each interrupting the last, each ending with the same broken phrase: “and I alone have escaped to tell you.” Raiders take the oxen and donkeys. Fire takes the sheep. More raiders take the camels. And a wind off the desert flattens the house where all ten of his children are eating, and they are gone.

Watch what Job does with the unbearable. He stands up. He tears his robe and shaves his head – the old, honest gestures of a body that cannot hold grief inside the skin. And then he falls to the ground. We expect the next word to be a scream, or a curse, or silence. The next word is worshiped.

What he says from the dust is not a denial of the loss. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will return.” He is not pretending the children were never his. He is remembering that they were never, finally, his to keep – that he entered the world holding nothing and will leave it the same way, and that everything in between was given. “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.” The narrator, who has shown us heaven’s wager and earth’s ruin, sets down a single verdict over the scene: in all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.

A friend of mine lost her husband and, four months later, the job that had been the one fixed point in the wreckage. For a while she stopped cooking. Then one evening she set the table for one, lit the candle they used to light together, and said grace out loud to an empty room. She told me she did not feel anything holy while she did it. Her voice shook. She was furious and exhausted and not at all sure God was listening.

But she set the table anyway, and she said the words anyway, because she had decided that her grief would not get to decide who God was. The candle was lit in spite of how she felt, not because of it.

That is closer to Job in the dust than the serene face we sometimes paint on him. His robe is torn. His head is shaved. His body is on the ground. Worship here is not a mood that descended on him; it is a thing he did with a broken voice, because the Name was true before the disaster and is true after it. He blessed God not because the blessing made sense, but because, even now, God was still God.

A man of the land of Uz, called by God Himself blameless and upright, fearing God and shunning evil. In a single day he lost his wealth and all ten of his children; soon after, his health. He is the great test case of Scripture’s hardest question: can a person love God for nothing – not for the gifts, but for God? Through nearly forty chapters he protests, argues, despairs, and refuses both to curse God and to lie about his own innocence. In the end God answers him not with reasons but with His own presence, and Job says, ‘My ears had heard of You, but now my eyes have seen You’ (Job 42:5).