Judgmentalism

Wrestling with God—And Why Christians Need to Honor It

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No book in the Bible has perplexed me more than Job. Ever since I got my first Bible, I’ve searched for meaning in the trials of the protagonist of that book. Over the years, I’ve come to plenty of inconclusive conclusions about its meaning.

Now that I’m in my 50s, I think I finally understand why that is.

This is the Book of Job in a nutshell:

Satan appears before God and wants to test the faithfulness of a righteous man named Job. The Enemy thinks Job’s faith is founded solely on his health and wealth.

God allows Job to be tested.

Job loses almost everything. His children die. His riches fade. His health is destroyed. His wife nags him.

Job continues in his faith in God despite his ordeal.

Three of Job’s friends visit. They sit in silence with him for a week because they see how much he is suffering.

Job’s friends finally speak and question Job’s faithfulness. They believe he is receiving tit for tat. Obviously, he did something wrong or else none of this calamity would have befallen him.

Job protests his innocence, both before his friends and before God. He wants God to explain Himself.

God remains silent.

Eventually, God speaks and reminds Job of His mighty works and power over all creation. Job is overcome.

God chastises Job’s friends for their lousy analysis and advice.

God restores everything Job lost and more.

I hope I did that summary justice, but the book is worth reading. Many scholars claim it is the oldest book in the Bible and a beautiful example of Oriental wisdom literature.

The odd thing–to me at least–is that it was never clear what the wisdom was in the Book of Job. You have this strange contention between God and Satan, Job defends himself against his friends’ accusations of wrongdoing, Job pleads his case before God, and after a while God overwhelms Job with human insignificance in the face of the Almighty’s works.

I mean, what the heck? Where’s the moral of the story?

For a moment, let’s move to another man-God faceoff:

Jacob Wrestles AngelThe same night he [Jacob] arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.”
—Genesis 32:22-31

And one more:

Then the LORD said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.” So the men turned from there and went toward Sodom, but Abraham still stood before the LORD. Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” And the LORD said, “If I find at Sodom fifty righteous in the city, I will spare the whole place for their sake.” Abraham answered and said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking. Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five?” And he said, “I will not destroy it if I find forty-five there.” Again he spoke to him and said, “Suppose forty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of forty I will not do it.” Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak. Suppose thirty are found there.” He answered, “I will not do it, if I find thirty there.” He said, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord. Suppose twenty are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of twenty I will not destroy it.” Then he said, “Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak again but this once. Suppose ten are found there.” He answered, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” And the LORD went his way, when he had finished speaking to Abraham, and Abraham returned to his place.
—Genesis 18:20-33 ESV

Going back to Job, the one sure truth that emerges from the book is that it ends inconclusively. Job never receives an answer as to why he suffered what he did.

Likewise, God wasn’t happy with Job’s friends’ deficient “comforting.” They were fine so long as they sat in silence with their beleaguered comrade, but the moment they began reasoning with him, they blew it.

If you’ve been around the Church long enough, you’ve probably heard this:

God said it. I believe it. That settles it.

I’m beginning to understand why such a view is naïve. Or at least incomplete.

The story of Job makes it clear that Job did not sin during his ordeal, despite his questioning God. In the end, God blessed Job with even more than Job started out with.

When God said He was going to destroy the entirety of Sodom and Gomorrah for their wickedness, Abraham would not take that for a final answer.

Jacob, wanting more out of life, would not relent when faced with a fearsome “wrestler,” and it took a little “cheating” on the part of his foe to end the confrontation.

All three of those great men of faith appeared to have problems with God that maintaining the religious status quo simply could not resolve. God said it, and these men were not exactly happy with it. They wanted a different outcome. So they fought for it.

I think the story of Job (and of Abraham and Jacob) carries with it some profound wisdom regarding wrestling with God:

1. Sometimes, God blesses those who do NOT take His actions and pronouncements at face value.
There was no “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” in these cases. These faithful men would not allow what God was saying or doing to be the end of the matter. They wanted something more. And God blessed them for their discontent. Now, read that previous sentence again.

2. Sometimes, silence IS golden.
Job’s friends were fine in God’s eyes—until they opened their mouths. We don’t have to have an answer for everything. We don’t even need to have a Bible verse for everything. Part of wrestling with God is not having answers to every last event/situation/question in life. Sometimes, the best response to another’s wrestling is no response at all.

3. Sometimes, the prevailing wisdom isn’t.
When Job’s friends finally did speak, they beat him up with the wisdom of their time: Good people receive good and bad people receive bad. Sadly, that’s the same view of life you hear out of some Christians. God was not happy with that response, though. I think God is not happy with a lot of the responses we Christians beat others with, whether our beating is an effort to prove ourselves biblically correct (and therefore—as we reason it—the rightness of Christian belief) or because we feel we MUST say SOMETHING Christian or else we have not done our Christian duty. Either way, perhaps we need to refrain from speaking until we have all the facts and God says it’s OK. Otherwise, we may very well be throwing our bulk into someone else’s wrestling match, one that isn’t ours to fight.

In the end, wrestling with God is messy. Christians today don’t want messy, though. We want a systematic faith built on systematic theology that produces systematic answers to life.

Bzzt. Thanks for playing.

Instead, God wants people who tussle with Him. Messy people with fierce questions that make others uncomfortable and that defy simplistic answers. He blesses such folks, despite what we may think of them.

Now before someone wants to use that reality to question everything all the time, notice that word sometimes in the three-item list above.

Jesus is Lord. No point in questioning. Your wrestling and mine will not change that truth. Other immutable truths exist.

But life has gray areas. Recognizing them and wrestling with them is warranted. Perhaps if we recognized that God blesses those who wrestle, then we wouldn’t be so quick to speak the prevailing wisdom and would instead find a second or third way that would bless not only us but the rest of the world too.

So, wrestle with God. And may all of us receive the name Israel.

The Communion of Apprentice Jugglers

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Over the course of 34 years on the Internet (that’s no typo, either), I’ve acquired a set of Internet friends, people with whom I’ve interacted regularly but I’ve also never met in person. It’s a phenomenon of our age.

A common thread among those folks is their contrarian natures. They don’t think like the crowd. They plunge deeper than others into deep topics. They ask harder questions. They don’t settle for simple. By being  this way, they rankle the complacent. As a result, the majority of them have struggled to fit in, whether in their local church or in what we consider “normal” life. Their work lives are almost always more challenging than the norm, and almost all have fought for years to find a place that suits their differentness.

The Apprentice Juggler, from _Tales of the Kingdom_ by David and Karen Mains, illustration by Jack StockmanMany years ago, I was asked to read a children’s book, Tales of the Kingdom by David and Karen Mains, as part of a job I had taken working with children. The book consists of a series of vignettes in the life of a young teen who flees a dystopian city of fire to find refuge among a rebel group living in the forest outside the city’s gates. Along the way, he meets a series of unusual people who are preparing for a great feast.

Based on The Story, Tales of the Kingdom is filled with biblical allusions and continues the tradition of Christian books such as Pilgrim’s Progress. My task was not only to read the book, but to find myself in it. Not surprisingly, I identified with the apprentice juggler.

Part of a troupe that entertained the king in the forest kingdom, the apprentice juggler hid a secret: his inner juggling count was off. He would throw at the wrong time. Tense catches didn’t happen according to expectations. When he performed the way that felt natural to him, his act teetered on disaster because it wasn’t smooth and didn’t conform to the standards of the troupe.

As a result, the apprentice juggler fell into despair and exhaustion at trying to hide his “broken” inner count and to please others.

In a performance before the king one day, fighting to act like his fellow performers, the apprentice juggler succumbed to his off-ness. Instead of jeering, though, both the king and the troupe master recognized him for having an unusual and rare gift as a clown juggler. He indeed lost his place within the troupe, but he took on another, more specialized role, one only he could fill.

At the time, I figured I was one of the few on staff who identified with the apprentice juggler. At almost 30 years later, I now understand that most people will see themselves in him. We all have our ways in which we fight to appear normal. We all have an inner count that’s offbeat, even if only by a fraction.

For some people, though, that unusual inner count comes by them naturally and defines them.  The square peg in the round hole, no matter where they are or what they do, their lives–in thought, emotion, and soul–are not like the crowd. And despite the truth that all of us have a count that doesn’t perfectly conform, for these folks the difference is all the more glaring, especially when they are on the stage of life, beanbags in hand, ready to throw.

But it is one thing to be the contrarian in the human. Being one in spirit is quite another.

In the story, the king recognized the distinctiveness of the apprentice juggler’s inner count. He could because he does not conform either.

Jesus Christ came to us with an inner count we could not recognize in any way. It manifested in a manner we could not comprehend. For this, and for how He made us feel about our own inner count, we nailed Him to a cross. Even the apprentice jugglers of that age, who had waved palms at his arrival, stood among the crowd later that same week and demanded death.

The way of Christ means taking on His inner count. Not simply by being a contrarian in natural practice or thought, but in the way we engage Christ’s life and manifest it in our spirits. To be one with this King–and to be for His Kingdom–our inner spiritual count must be at odds with the world. By necessity. To try to be normal by the standards of the world is to concede. To force the traditional inner count of the rest of the jugglers is to deny the King.

Some of us are apprentice jugglers by the very nature of who God made us. In truth, though, His remaking us by His Spirit should always lead to an inner count that causes tension in the complacent, joy in those expecting the unexpected, and peace for all who struggle to find what is true and who long to see it reign. For this reason grace exists, that we can walk in that Kingdom count without fear, to be the men and women Christ is making us, without a care as to what the world thinks or what it might costs us to be like Him in His inner count.

Some apprentice jugglers are born, but all who desire to be in the Kingdom must be born again to experience the natural rhythm of living in Christ. In this, we all must be apprentice jugglers in the Spirit.

Free to Be the Person God Is Making Us

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A woman known to be her town’s “crazy cat lady” walks into the local pet store and makes a request of the owner.

“You want to buy a bird?” the man asked, shocked. “You have a lot of cats.”

“I know,” said the woman, “but the variety would be nice. A songbird, with a melody in its heart and lovely plumage. I really want a bird.”

“Birds fly. They don’t use a litter box. No ‘nine lives’ with a bird,” the pet shop owner shot back. “They demand attention.”

“Yes, yes,” the woman replied, “I know all that. A bird, please. How about that lovely yellow one.”

“The canary.” The owner gave a baleful look toward the bird on its perch nearby. He really liked that bird.

“It sings, right?”

The owner paused a moment, then he nodded.

A cage later and a few supplies, and the woman left with her bird.

Six weeks later, the woman was back in the store. And the owner could tell something was wrong. When he saw her pull out a paper bag and heard a faint peep, his heart sank.

The woman upended the bag on the pet shop counter and something yellow slid out.

The canary lay there, dazed. Two rubber bands wrapped around its wings and its barely there belly. Feathers were frayed and missing, and the pet shop owner noticed remnants of what might be masking tape on its beak. The bird had a distinct eye twitch and wheeze.

“Heavens!” the man cried. “What happened?”

“Well, for one,” the woman began, “it likes to sing at the crack of dawn and I’m not an early riser, so I had to deal with that. Then I let it out of the cage to exercise, and it got caught in the flypaper, so no more flying.”

She pointed to the rubber bands.

“It’s a terrible mouser and turns up its beak at my tuna,” she added. “Snotty little thing…as if the tuna I give my kitties is not good enough for it. A terrible playmate for them too.”

The pet shop owner could only stare, eyes traveling from the bedraggled bird to the woman.

“In summation, sir, I want my money back, because this is clearly not a cat.”

***

Free to BeI think it is the scourge of our times that no one is grateful for what he or she has. This extends to how we are perceived by other people, sadly, as it seems also that no one is satisfied with us as we are either.

A spouse who now isn’t good-looking enough or as fit as society demands.

A worker who works differently or doesn’t fit within the culture.

A child with unusual skills or ideas that aren’t like ours.

A church member with a few character flaws and one of those “out there” spiritual gifts.

The truth is, everyone wants us to be something–or someone–else. Too many people have a personal ideal in their heads they want to apply universally, standards and restrictions that while reasonable for them might be totally unreasonable when applied to someone else. The world wants a cat, and yet you and I may be birds.

In short, many of us are forced into being someone we’re not.

Where this proves heartbreaking is when a Christian is not good enough for his or her church.

Every church has some legalistic conformity lurking within it. Doesn’t matter if you’re a Calvinist, Pentecostal, Episcopalian, Evangelical Free, or whatever. Somewhere in your church is this idea that whomever it is that God has made you, that person you are is not good enough, not right enough, not conformed enough, or not gifted enough. You simply are not the person you should be.

And the only way to get out of that inadequacy is to ___________.

Now you can fill that blank with countless legalistic demands, but the fact remains: None of that is of God.

I can say that with some confidence because this is how God sees you (as written by the Apostle Paul):

For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.
–Philippians 1:6

If you are a born-again Christian, who began the work of making you to be the best you? God.

Who is currently doing that work in you? God.

Who is responsible for the timing of that work in your life? God.

So who on earth can say that the you you are right now is inadequate, not right, broken, unmanageable, incapable, lacking, ungifted, gifted wrongly, or any of a million other accusatory statements?

No one.

Actually, I’m wrong about that. There is one entity whose sole role is to go around telling you and me all those terrible things. Care to guess who? Hint: Think an entity Jesus vanquished utterly.

Tragically, people aren’t supposed to usurp the job of Satan, yet we do it all the time.

Now we would have to be optimistic fools to think that the world isn’t going to play accuser. The world’s in the grip of Satan.

But what excuses Christians to denigrate another Christian? When we act that way, aren’t we saying to God that He isn’t working so-and-so’s sanctification the right way? Aren’t we putting God on our timetable for His work in another’s life? Aren’t we simultaneously playing the role of both God and Satan? How totally messed up is that?

Folks, there’s wisdom in saying that God is working His way His way in the lives of every Christian on this planet. Sometimes we can help bolster that work when God asks us to, and sometimes He may ask us to be the voice of Truth in another’s life, but more often than not we give too much power to our efforts to remake people in our own image and not allow God the right to better them as He sees fit and in His timetable. We look at Philippians 1:6 and just blow it off, because deep down inside, we don’t believe it. We think we know better.

And that’s the oldest mistake in the Book.