Daily Devotion for Lent 2025, Day 33

Today's Reading: Job, Chapter Thirty-four

Elihu continues in his defense of God.  He claims that Job is accusing God of being unjust.  Job does make this claim in a roundabout way.  If one believes that only the guilty would receive the kinds of awful things in this life that Job received, and if Job is truly innocent, then this was an injustice.

What the reader knows is that Job is innocent.  God and the Satan (Accuser) are testing Job's goodness to see if it will stand up to calamity.  So far, he hasn't cursed God yet as the Satan predicted.

But what we see in this work is that a proclamation of innocence doesn't necessarily make God unjust.  It may be that the world operates differently than we supposed.  

Elihu makes the argument that God doesn't need to put people on trial because God knows us thoroughly.  This is a movement toward omnipotence which is new theological ground.

We see the earlier thought (that you can hide from God and that God doesn't know everything) with the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis.  God calls to Adam asking, "Where are you?"  

We begin to see a movement away from this in the book of Jonah when he runs the opposite direction from God's call but discovers that God is just as powerful outside of the promised land (and even on the seas) as God is at home.  

Elihu makes the argument that both rich and poor answer to God and each one dies.  There is a balancing among human beings in our mortality and one's riches cannot buy them out of Sheol.  But this line of thought could call into question the notion that the rich are wealthy due to God's favor which aligns with the good receive tangible blessings while the evil receive tangible punishments.  So, in a way, Elihu is making Job's argument for him.

Of course, he ends with a refutation of Job.  They can't get past the idea that he must have done something to deserve this and now he is rebelling because Job must be in denial.  Elihu seems to believe that Job is not very self-aware but it really has to do with Elihu's own misconceptions about how God works in the universe.

Sometimes we just know we're right!

Does self-assurance ever lead to conflict in our lives?  How can we remain confident while at the same time leaving room for the idea that we might be incorrect?  Some people continue to double-down on a statement no matter what.  The difficulty is that if it is proven wrong, their fall is that much greater.

Prayer for the day:

God, help us to remain steadfast in our assurances of your grace and love.  May we not move our stance on the forgiveness that we find and offer in Christ.  Let us see that mutual respect is not something from which we will waver.  And as these come from our faith, deepen our faith today.  We pray these things in Jesus' name.  Amen.

Photo by fr0ggy5 on Unsplash

New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition. Copyright © 2021 National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Daily Devotion for Lent 2025, Day 9

Today's Reading: Job, Chapter Nine

Job begins to recount the mighty attributes of God that places God far beyond mere mortals. Interestingly, (spoiler alert) these are some of the same things that God asserts later in the book for why Job doesn't understand!

God as the creator of all things is far beyond mortals in wisdom and knowledge.  

But even as ignorant as human beings may be, we still know when things have not worked in our favor.  At some level, every person has felt cheated before.  Anyone who has watched competitive sports would say that their team hasn't always received a fair shake.  Every person living has probably heard from their parents growing up that life is not always fair.  

But there comes a point where injustice moves past annoying and hovers around catastrophic.  When our life track is substantially altered, it may be that we would like some answers from God.

J

Sometimes life seems stacked for others

ob recognizes that the power differential is such that he would have a difficult time making a good case before God anyway.  He would be too intimidated to make rational points.  

When we experience some type of life-changing loss whether it be a loved one passing too soon or news of an unforeseen illness or being unexpectedly laid off, we are often left asking the question, "why?"  Sometimes people may believe that this is a consequence for some type of sinful behavior.  But if you didn't do anything that would be worthy of the supposed penalty, you may still wonder about the justice of the universe.  

If anger is one of the stages of grief, dare we be angry with God?

The fact that Job is in the Bible at all indicates that God doesn't duck these kinds of feelings.  In order for us to move past anger, it is far healthier to express it in prayer than to repress the emotion and pretend we are okay.  In my experience, it will eventually come out.

If God wants health for us, which I believe to be true, then God is big enough to take us at face value throughout the whole of our lives.  Even when we're angry.  

Prayer for the day:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.  Amen.

The Serenity Prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, Union Theological Seminary, 20th Century

Photo by A Guy Named Nyal via Flickr.com.  Used under the Creative Commons license.