Daily Devotional • September 8
A Reading from Job 25:1-6, 27:1-6
1 Then Bildad the Shuhite answered:
2 “Dominion and fear are with God;
he makes peace in his high heaven.
3 Is there any number to his armies?
Upon whom does his light not arise?
4 How then can a mortal be righteous before God?
How can one born of woman be pure?
5 If even the moon is not bright
and the stars are not pure in his sight,
6 how much less a mortal, who is a maggot,
and a human being, who is a worm!”
1 Job again took up his discourse and said:
2 “As God lives, who has taken away my right,
and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter,
3 as long as my breath is in me
and the spirit of God is in my nostrils,
4 my lips will not speak falsehood,
and my tongue will not utter deceit.
5 Far be it from me to say that you are right;
until I die I will not put away my integrity from me.
6 I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go;
my heart will not reproach me as long as I live.
Meditation
I met a woman at my church whose alcoholic father turned against her in unremitting rage after her mother, his wife, died. His immeasurable anguish became unjust fury directed towards the daughter. Once at dinner he aimed a gun at her and pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. When she came a long way to see him on his deathbed, his last words to his daughter were that he regretted that the gun hadn’t fired.
She is filled with unfathomable pain, and yet she is faithful to her life in church and devoted to God. She reminds me of Job. Job strikes at the oldtime and persistent belief that people who suffer must have sinned. The agelong answer to the puzzle of why good people suffer is that really they are not good and their suffering is a just judgment for their sins.
Job erupts into a howling protest against that dry and simplistic conviction; real life is simply not like that. Job is innocent; his three friends who come to comfort him do so by appealing to him to repent of whatever fault he had committed that had brought down a punishing judgment.
The fourth friend, quoted in today’s lesson, steps in and tries to improve on the three friends’ lamentable unhelpfulness, but he is no more effective than they are. Job’s retort is the heart of his protest. He doesn’t know why he is suffering but he insists that the old party line is wrong and therefore deficient. He claims not to have committed any sin worthy of his suffering, and stands firm in an uncompromising commitment to his godly life. One can see his fist raised and imagine the fire in his eyes. And here is the beginning of the way through the morass of the question of suffering.
“I don’t understand why I suffer, but I will never, ever step down from my commitment to God!”
David Baumann has been a priest for more than 50 years. He served in the Dioceses of Los Angeles and Springfield, and has been fully retired for three years. He is a published writer of nonfiction, science fiction, and short stories.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
Church of the Ascension and Saint Agnes, Washington
The Diocese of Okinawa – The Nippon Sei Ko Kai