Who was Job's Redeemer? (Job 19:25-26)

1. There is a beautiful Aria in Handel's Messiah based on these verses in Job:

"I know that my redeemer lives,
     and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
     yet in my flesh I will see God."

It is a tremendously powerful picture!  Job is suffering. In one Christian reading of these verses, he faces potential death, but he knows that Jesus is alive, shall we even say that he will rise from the dead! I know that my Redeemer, Jesus, whom the Romans put to death, has risen and that he will come again. One day he will stand on the earth. Long after Job's skin has disintegrated and he is died, he will rise again from the dead. In his flesh, he will see God.

This is a powerful theological reading of Job. Although I can't think of any place where the New Testament actually interprets this verse from Job in this way, it is a fine theological reading of the verse.

2. The question in my mind is what the verse meant when it was first written? The default reading probably goes something like this:

• "I read the verse against my world and my definitions. As a Christian, Jesus is my Redeemer. "In the end he will stand on the earth," sounds like my belief in the second coming. Skin destroyed and then returning? Sounds like resurrection to me.

The problem is when I try to read the verse against its literary context (the rest of Job) and historical-cultural context (how words were being used in the Ancient Near East at the time, roughly).

a. For example, within Job, look at these verses in the literary context of Job:

• Job 14:12 come into play: "mortals lie down and do not rise again." 
• Job 7:9-10: "those who go down to Sheol do not come up; they return no more to their houses"
• And Job 3:16-19: "why was I not buried like a stillborn child... There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest... The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters."

In other words, Job does not yet seem to have any sense yet of resurrection or of a meaningful afterlife. For this reason alone, it is unlikely that Job 19:25-26 are about resurrection. The rest of Job does not seem to think in those categories yet.

b. When we expand to the historical-cultural context, the situation doesn't seem to change. The other wisdom books, whose final form I personally would date to the same period, have similar things to say:

• Psalm 88:3-6: "My soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. I am counted among those who go down to the Pit; I am like those who have no help, like those forsaken among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those who remember no more… in the regions dark and deep."
• Ecclesiastes 9:5: "The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost."

3. So what was Job saying originally? It seems to me that the most likely meaning is captured in the following paraphrase:

"I know that God, the one who is going to get me out of my current situation, is alive. I know that he is going to show up here in the land. My skin is rotting now with these boils. But he is going to vindicate and restore me. He is going to restore my skin to normal. In my restored flesh, I will see God."

Obviously I could be wrong. My point is merely to exercise the method one uses when the goal is what the text really meant originally. Then we are free, I believe, to hear true Holy Spirit meanings as well. For this reason, I will continue to prize the theological interpretation of Handel's Messiah! It is a Christological reading that is fully correct theologically.

Does God tempt? 5

Now returning to my idea of a booklet on Why God Allows Evil and Suffering?

Here are the previous posts:
Where is God?
Questionable Explanations
What is evil?
Pain is not Evil

And now the latest in the series:
Does God tempt?
On the one hand, the answer to this question seems obvious enough.  James 1:13 says, "No one, when tempted, should say, 'I am being tempted by God'; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one" (NRSV).  But we find other comments in Scripture that complicate matters.

For example, in Romans 9:17-18, God is said to harden Pharaoh and whomever he chooses in a way that leads them to do things which God then condemns.  The person who has done evil, when judged by God, asks God why he is finding fault with them when he has made them to do the evil (9:20).  Some Christians take this passage to mean that God more or less directly causes evil.

In Genesis 22, we find Abraham commanding Isaac to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice.  Christian philosophers debate whether murder is a good thing when God commands it.  And of course God does not let Abraham go through with it.  But given the full revelation of Scripture, God seems to be tempting Abraham to do something that is solidly wrong.

2 Samuel 24:1 actually speaks of God tempting David to do something wrong, something God will later judge David for doing.  He incites David to disobey him and take a census.  This action by God reminds us of the evil spirits that God is said to send on Saul in 2 Samuel 16:14-15.  In more than one place, Saul tries to kill David when this evil spirit from God comes on him (2 Sam. 18:10; 19:9).

To make matters even more complicated, 1 and 2 Chronicles are basically a revised edition of Samuel and Kings from a post-exile perspective.  One of the key ingredients of Jewish theology that has come into play in the meantime is an understanding of someone that works for God in the "testing" department.  This individual, "the adversary" or "the satan," goes around seeing if people will remain loyal to God.

So in 1 Chronicles 21:1's version of 2 Samuel 24, it is no longer God who tempts David to number the children of Israel.  It is now the satan who does so.  Similarly, in Job, it is not God who directly causes the calamity on Job or who tempts Job but rather, it is the satan.  Arguably none of the earlier Old Testament texts have any conception of the satan (Genesis through Kings, the pre-exilic and exilic prophets).  For this reason, they ascribe to God's direct action things like sending evil spirits on Saul.  The later texts would have said it was the satan.

Even here, the satan of the Old Testament is not yet Satan the fallen angel in the New Testament.  This development in understanding seems to take place in the rise of apocalyptic Judaism around 200BC in documents like 1 Enoch.  The New Testament actually says very little about Satan's origins or who he is.  The general understanding we as Christians have of him as a fallen angel and the one who tempted Adam in the Garden does not actually come from the Bible but from Jewish literature at the time. [1]  This fact does not in any way mean that our Christian understanding is wrong, only that it is late and largely comes from outside the Bible.

Two initial conclusions flow from this discussion.  The first is that we must read individual Scriptures about God and temptation in the light of the whole flow of revelation.  We cannot simply take one verse and assume it gives us the whole story.  We will have to do some heavy theological lifting to conceptualize a biblical theology here.

The second is that while we can draw the elements of our biblical theology of God and temptation from these individual texts, we will need some controlling sense of God in general order to connect them to each other.  We have to choose a "center point" in Scripture to which we can map the other passages and perspectives.  Which center point we choose will depend on our overall sense of God's character.  Unfortunately, these sorts of decisions have to be made from outside the Bible looking in because the individual texts themselves present differing perspectives [2]...

the rest of this section tomorrow...

[1] For example, Genesis 3 does not identify the serpent with Satan because Israel had no conception of the satan at the time Genesis was written.  It is not until the first century before Christ that a writing called The Life of Adam and Eve first identifies the serpent as Satan.  Isaiah 14 in context was not originally about Satan but about the king of Babylon.  And Satan falling from the sky in Luke 10:18 in context has to do with the exorcism ministry of the disciples, not something that happened around the birth of the world.

[2] Part of the reason we argue past each other as Christians is because we do not realize this dynamic.  We throw verses that support our positions at each other without realizing that the tie breakers have to be made outside the text in a theological context.

Lectionary Thoughts: Job 19:23-27

“O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!" (NRSV)

These words, here translated in their original sense, give us Job's conviction that the LORD will in fact vindicate him before it is all over. His flesh may indeed disintegrate from the boils, but God will show up eventually. God will arrive before he is dead and tell these "comforters" around him that in fact Job is not being punished for his sins.

This of course does happen. The lesson, which we have to filter through our added understanding of the afterlife, is that God will vindicate the righteous. He does not always do so in this life, to be sure, but He will do so at the resurrection.

This text, however, is also one of those that was particularly susceptible to a Christian reading that read the words against the context of Christianity. Take the translation of the NKJV:

"For I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth; and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God."

Christians have traditionally heard in these words a reference to Christ as Reedemer, as well as to the resurrection. And it is completely correct.

Our Lord Jesus Christ will descend with the voice of the archangel. We who are alive and remain will not precede, but the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be snatched up to meet him in the air. And so shall we ever be with the Lord.