Daily Devotion for Lent 2025, Day 10

Today Reading: Job, Chapter Ten

Here Job is complaining about God’s seemingly negative attention toward him.  He seems to vacillate between the bargaining stage of grief and depression.  There’s probably a little anger as well if we read between the lines.

Job is bargaining because he also wants to believe in the contract that if one is righteous, then one won’t suffer the losses of offspring and wealth that have afflicted him.

The difficult piece for us as we look on is that Job seems genuinely confused as to why God would be working against him in this way.  Life has been pretty good up to this point.  Job’s earlier response to his wife of “receiving the bad along with the good” seems to have been forgotten by him.  It could have been that he said this while he was still in denial.

As Job questions God, we see in verses 4-5 a beginning of the idea that an omnipotent being might not be able to empathize or completely understand what it is to be mortal.

When Job asks, “Do you have eyes of flesh?  Do you see as humans see?  Are your days like the days of mortals or your years like human years,” these questions are rhetorical.  The answer is no.  

Try on other shoes sometimes!

Christians began to embrace this ontological question through the theology of incarnation in Jesus.  God self-limits in Jesus so that God can answer yes to the above questions.  

Both the Jewish text and the Christian theology help us understand the power of putting ourselves in another’s shoes.  When we can see a viewpoint other than our own, it allows us to connect with that person on a more fundamental basis.  When we only connect with our judgment, we might tell them to do better or to quit sinning.  This is blaming the victim.  

How can we empathize with others while maintaining our standards and morals and ethics?  

Prayer for the day:

Loving Lord, we seek your help.  As we have received grace and forgiveness, we find that it is easier to move into a new beginning.  Help us to see others through the eyes of the mercy we’ve been shown.  May we not be so quick to look for a cause for their trouble.  Give us the patience to sit in silence and hold them in comfort.  We pray this in Jesus’ name who suffered much.  Amen.

Photo by Heather Cowper via Flickr.com.  Used under the Creative Commons license.

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