Our lessons in Job will end soon enough. Most Western scholars miss the best parts because they refuse to consider Job from Job’s own cultural matrix. It’s not that I pretend to be such a grand expert, but that I do make an effort to see how people in that time spoke and thought. I do rely on linguistic analyses, but I reject most commentary because it is hopelessly Western.
Job’s religion is very much the same as Jethro’s, the father-in-law of Moses. What Moses learned from Jethro, as well as the imperial Egyptian education he received, was subjected to God’s direct editorial guidance during the 40 days on Mount Sinai. Altogether we see a totally different worldview and a wholly different interpretation of morality. What Moses carried was the closest you could come to what God thinks in human terms. What Moses did with the narrative of Job helps us to see things as God Himself sees them, as God demands that we see them.
Job consistently warns us that God does not cater to human reason. He simply ignores it and does what He does, allowing us to see some portion of it. God has offered enough that He justly holds us accountable to His laws. Over and over, the refrain in Job states correctly that God does hold men accountable to His Law Covenants. Not so much Moses for us who aren’t of Israel, but certainly accountable to the ancient Covenant of Noah as understood by Job and Jethro, and perhaps somewhat in accord with the highly corrupted viewpoint of Judaism today. The point is that there is sufficient witness. My fiction books strive in part to point out that you could discern much of God’s divine justice simply by adopting the proper mindset and examining history and nature. Paul says as much in Romans: You have no excuse, human.
The Book of Job warns us that we may not always see God’s wrath in clear connection to human sin, but that has no bearing on the truth that God’s wrath falls on sin. The proper understanding is more organic, less mechanical than Western minds like. You can harvest a lot of God’s mercy simply by embracing a genuine desire to please Him, but doing so entails an effort to learn better as time goes on. You gain mercy as a respite for strength to improve.
Yes, the ANE brand of justice could at times be quite rough compared to ours. Slaughtering entire populations bothers us because we reject the notion God could demand such a thing. Sorry, but we weren’t there and we sure as hell don’t understand God better than they did then. We could hardly claim to be better.
Here’s the thing: In our names, some folks receiving a government paycheck committed crimes so hideous we can’t even imagine it. They didn’t do it to protect a damn thing, but because they enjoyed it. When you factor in all the ways in which this whole program was a total failure and waste of money that produced nothing useful, and that the people doing it knew it was useless, you can only conclude they are simply delighted with a grade of human evil we can’t fathom. It’s not psychopathic by birth, but by willful adoption. These kinds of people would not hesitate to turn the same torture on you and I if we threatened their pay and prerogatives. How bluntly do I have to portray this?
We could have known, but chose not to. We chose a cheerleader’s empty-headed boosterism so we could make ourselves feel better, somehow imagining that God actually prefers us over other humans. This is egregiously, willfully poking God in the eye, folks. We as a nation are guilty and cannot pretend we didn’t know. The linked article is simply a reminder. Jingoism is an obvious sin; no excuse. Jingoism is what built that CIA program of torture. When you start digging into the details, you realize we have finally beat the Soviets again — we have committed a far greater and deeper evil than the KGB and friends could ever dream.
So the first thing to do is shed the worship of the uniforms and badges of authority. I’ve worn both uniform and badge, and I will warn you that reverencing them is an inexcusable evil. I repented of the choice to let someone else order me to do evil. You can repent, too. Will we still face the wrath of God in some measure? No doubt. Can we obtain mercy? Also no doubt. Repent; the sooner the better, and repeatedly. Take upon yourself the due measure of actual responsibility and confess (“stand with God”) that we have sinned. Confess the sins of your people for them (see Isaiah on this). Distance yourself from that sin by engaging an act of will to love God and His justice.
Stop redefining God in Western terms. You cannot know God if you reject His revelation and His revealed intellectual frame of reference. We have ordered up from the divine fast food counter a huge meal of wrath. It’s coming and our nation will be destroyed in one sense or another. You need not go down entirely with it. You can still answer the question, “You want to get fried with that?”
