Job 20

¹ Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: ² “Therefore my thoughts answer me, because of my haste within me. ³ I hear censure that insults me, and out of my understanding a spirit answers me. ⁴ Do you not know this from of old, since man was placed on earth, ⁵ that the exulting of the wicked is short, and the joy of the godless but for a moment? ⁶ Though his height mount up to the heavens, and his head reach to the clouds, ⁷ he will perish forever like his own dung; those who have seen him will say, ‘Where is he?’ ⁸ He will fly away like a dream and not be found; he will be chased away like a vision of the night. ⁹ The eye that saw him will see him no more, nor will his place any more behold him. ¹⁰ His children will seek the favor of the poor, and his hands will give back his wealth. ¹¹ His bones are full of his youthful vigor, but it will lie down with him in the dust. ¹² “Though evil is sweet in his mouth, though he hides it under his tongue, ¹³ though he is loath to let it go and holds it in his mouth, ¹⁴ yet his food is turned in his stomach; it is the venom of cobras within him. ¹⁵ He swallows down riches and vomits them up again; God casts them out of his belly. ¹⁶ He will suck the poison of cobras; the tongue of a viper will kill him. ¹⁷ He will not look upon the rivers, the streams flowing with honey and curds. ¹⁸ He will give back the fruit of his toil and will not swallow it down; from the profit of his trading he will get no enjoyment. ¹⁹ For he has crushed and abandoned the poor; he has seized a house that he did not build. ²⁰ “Because he knew no contentment in his belly, he will not let anything in which he delights escape him. ²¹ There was nothing left after he had eaten; therefore his prosperity will not endure. ²² In the fullness of his sufficiency he will be in distress; the hand of everyone in misery will come against him. ²³ To fill his belly to the full, God will send his burning anger against him and rain it upon him into his body. ²⁴ He will flee from an iron weapon; a bronze arrow will strike him through. ²⁵ It is drawn forth and comes out of his body; the glittering point comes out of his gallbladder; terrors come upon him. ²⁶ Utter darkness is laid up for his treasures; a fire not fanned will devour him; what is left in his tent will be consumed. ²⁷ The heavens will reveal his iniquity, and the earth will rise up against him. ²⁸ The possessions of his house will be carried away, dragged off in the day of God’s wrath. ²⁹ This is the wicked man’s portion from God, the heritage decreed for him by God.”

Job 21

¹ Then Job answered and said: ² “Keep listening to my words, and let this be your comfort. ³ Bear with me, and I will speak, and after I have spoken, mock on. ⁴ As for me, is my complaint against man? Why should I not be impatient? ⁵ Look at me and be appalled, and lay your hand over your mouth. ⁶ When I remember, I am dismayed, and shuddering seizes my flesh. ⁷ Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power? ⁸ Their offspring are established in their presence, and their descendants before their eyes. ⁹ Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them. ¹⁰ Their bull breeds without fail; their cow calves and does not miscarry. ¹¹ They send out their little boys like a flock, and their children dance. ¹² They sing to the tambourine and the lyre and rejoice to the sound of the pipe. ¹³ They spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol. ¹⁴ They say to God, ‘Depart from us! We do not desire the knowledge of your ways. ¹⁵ What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? And what profit do we get if we pray to him?’ ¹⁶ Behold, is not their prosperity in their hand? The counsel of the wicked is far from me.¹⁷ “How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out? That their calamity comes upon them? That God distributes pains in his anger? ¹⁸ That they are like straw before the wind, and like chaff that the storm carries away? ¹⁹ You say, ‘God stores up their iniquity for their children.’ Let him pay it out to them, that they may know it. ²⁰ Let their own eyes see their destruction, and let them drink of the wrath of the Almighty. ²¹ For what do they care for their houses after them, when the number of their months is cut off? ²² Will any teach God knowledge, seeing that he judges those who are on high? ²³ One dies in his full vigor, being wholly at ease and secure, ²⁴ his pails full of milk and the marrow of his bones moist. ²⁵ Another dies in bitterness of soul, never having tasted of prosperity. ²⁶ They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them. ²⁷ “Behold, I know your thoughts and your schemes to wrong me. ²⁸ For you say, ‘Where is the house of the prince? Where is the tent in which the wicked lived?’ ²⁹ Have you not asked those who travel the roads, and do you not accept their testimony ³⁰ that the evil man is spared in the day of calamity, that he is rescued in the day of wrath? ³¹ Who declares his way to his face, and who repays him for what he has done? ³² When he is carried to the grave, watch is kept over his tomb. ³³ The clods of the valley are sweet to him; all mankind follows after him, and those who go before him are innumerable. ³⁴ How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood.”

In the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflected on the idea of evil men (speaking presumably of the men who perpetrated the horrors of the Russian gulag) escaping punishment in this life. Solzhenitsyn said of this:

In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations. It is for this reason, and not because of the “weakness of indoctrinational work,” that they are growing up “indifferent.” Young people are acquiring the conviction that foul deeds are never punished on earth, that they always bring prosperity.

It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country![1]

There is something within us that agrees with Solzhenitsyn’s desire for justice for the wicked. We very much believe that in a just society those who commit atrocities will be duly and rightly punished. Yet Solzhenitsyn’s despair that this was not happening is something we can also understand. In fact, Solzhenitsyn believed that so many who had done so much evil were avoiding punishment that the young were beginning to think that this was normal and perhaps even good. As a result, Solzhenitsyn feared what the future would look like when the absence of justice in this life was accepted and then celebrated: “It is going to be uncomfortable, horrible, to live in such a country!”

What Solzhenitsyn feared for the future is in fact a part of the past, a part of the whole tragic story of human wickedness. In truth, we might say that every age of man has seen a lack of justice for the wicked. It seems like the wicked “get away with it” all too often and, conversely, that the good often find themselves in the midst of inexplicable hardship.

This argument was marshaled by Job in Job 21 to refute Zophar’s latest offensive launched in Job 20. Zophar will argue that Job is being punished because he is wicked. Job will respond that, in point of fact, Zophar is mistaken in his premise: the wicked often seem to prosper instead of suffer.

Zophar restates his thesis with renewed vigor: (a) the wicked suffer, (b) Job is suffering, therefore (c) Job is wicked.

Stephen Chase has offered a stinging indictment of Zophar, his personality, and his theology, describing Zophar as “the youngest, the most brash, the most dogmatic and assured in his theological perspective,” a man whose “own emotional state seems out of control,” “a traditionalist with what he understands to be an impeccable story of balance between the fate of the wicked and that of the righteous,” a man who “never lets the facts of what he sees get in the way of his precious theory,” and a person who is “like a thoughtless child torturing a bug by directing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass until the bug slowly shrivels, crisps, and burns.”[2]

That is brutal, but it appears to be an apt description. I will remind you that in the account of the woman caught in adultery in John 8, John tells us in verse 9 that, upon having their hypocrisy and self-righteousness revealed by Jesus’ masterful response to their query about stoning the woman, “they went away one by one, beginning with the older ones.” The older ones were the first to drop their punishing stones, or, to put it another way, the younger ones were the last to drop theirs. Perhaps we are seeing something of this phenomenon in Job 20: the impetuous and cocksure arrogance of a youthful ideologue who refuses to have his thinking changed by the facts.

Zophar offers yet another defense of the idea of retributive justice in Job 20. He argues that (a) the wicked suffer, (b) Job is suffering, therefore (c) Job is wicked.

¹ Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: ² “Therefore my thoughts answer me, because of my haste within me. ³ I hear censure that insults me, and out of my understanding a spirit answers me.

Job’s most recent defense of himself stirred something deep and primal within Zophar. It did so because it dared to question the theory that Zophar held so very precious concerning the wicked and the good. In short, if Job was correct, then everything Zophar thought he knew was incorrect. J. Gerald Janzen explains Zophars language in verses 2 and 3 like this:

Zophar’s “frame” is his embodied self. The “spirit of my frame” refers to the way in which his cultural feelings, thoughts, sensibilities, values – the heritage of generations of cultural shaping…are so deeply ingrained as to form an organic extended part of his embodied self…Zophar voices the same objection at the level of human culture as he is formed by it. What he hears literally shakes and jars his whole structure of existence. The protest of his whole being – the spirit of his frame, in its agitation – gives him his answer to Job. For in and through Job he feels himself threatened by a chaos which must be overcome.[3]

Out of the depths of his own soul and therefore out of the depths of his own biases and assumptions and presuppositions, Zophar struck out at Job with ferocity.

⁴ Do you not know this from of old, since man was placed on earth, ⁵ that the exulting of the wicked is short, and the joy of the godless but for a moment? ⁶ Though his height mount up to the heavens, and his head reach to the clouds, ⁷ he will perish forever like his own dung; those who have seen him will say, ‘Where is he?’ ⁸ He will fly away like a dream and not be found; he will be chased away like a vision of the night. ⁹ The eye that saw him will see him no more, nor will his place any more behold him. ¹⁰ His children will seek the favor of the poor, and his hands will give back his wealth. ¹¹ His bones are full of his youthful vigor, but it will lie down with him in the dust. ¹² “Though evil is sweet in his mouth, though he hides it under his tongue, ¹³ though he is loath to let it go and holds it in his mouth, ¹⁴ yet his food is turned in his stomach; it is the venom of cobras within him. ¹⁵ He swallows down riches and vomits them up again; God casts them out of his belly. ¹⁶ He will suck the poison of cobras; the tongue of a viper will kill him. ¹⁷ He will not look upon the rivers, the streams flowing with honey and curds. ¹⁸ He will give back the fruit of his toil and will not swallow it down; from the profit of his trading he will get no enjoyment. ¹⁹ For he has crushed and abandoned the poor; he has seized a house that he did not build. ²⁰ “Because he knew no contentment in his belly, he will not let anything in which he delights escape him. ²¹ There was nothing left after he had eaten; therefore his prosperity will not endure. ²² In the fullness of his sufficiency he will be in distress; the hand of everyone in misery will come against him. ²³ To fill his belly to the full, God will send his burning anger against him and rain it upon him into his body. ²⁴ He will flee from an iron weapon; a bronze arrow will strike him through. ²⁵ It is drawn forth and comes out of his body; the glittering point comes out of his gallbladder; terrors come upon him. ²⁶ Utter darkness is laid up for his treasures; a fire not fanned will devour him; what is left in his tent will be consumed. ²⁷ The heavens will reveal his iniquity, and the earth will rise up against him. ²⁸ The possessions of his house will be carried away, dragged off in the day of God’s wrath. ²⁹ This is the wicked man’s portion from God, the heritage decreed for him by God.”

I have learned over the years as a pastor that oftentimes when a church member comes to tell me that “some people” are unhappy about this or that, those people are usually the one who is telling me this and his or her spouse or closest friends. That is, people try to soften their condemnation with the language of obfuscation. That is happening here. Zophar launches a terrifying broadside against the wicked who he refers to throughout as “he.” But the “he” in Zophar’s speech should more accurately be rendered “you,” for Job is clearly the wicked man who Zophar is condemning.

And condemn he does! According to Zophar, the wicked:

• will see their celebrations cut short,
• will see their joy cut short,
• will perish like refuse and be forgotten,
• will evaporate into the air,
• will become invisible to the world,
• will see his children become destitute,
• will be inwardly poisoned by his own evil,
• will be bereft of joy,
• will see his prosperity come to an end,
• will be distressed,
• will be destroyed by those he oppressed,
• will receive the anger of God,
• will be destroyed by the weapons of God,
• will be terrified,
• will lose his wealth,
• will be condemned by heaven and earth.

“This,” cries Zophar, “is the wicked man’s portion from God, the heritage decreed for him by God.” In other words, “This is what happens to the wicked…and so this is what is happening to you!”

It is a vicious categorical syllogism:

Major Premise:           The wicked suffer.

Minor Premise:           Job suffers.

Conclusion:                Job is wicked.

There is a tight logic to Zophar’s argument. It is so tight, in fact, that it shut out compassion, understanding, humility, and the possibility that he might be wrong.

Beware haughty dogmaticians who traffic in their own certainties! Beware those who are so sure that they have figured out the mysteries of suffering that they do not flinch at the agony their theories cause those upon whom they foist them! Zophar was indeed a young, certain theologian, but he was not much of a friend. And, as Job will argue, he was not really much of a theologian either.

Job refutes Zophar’s major premise by arguing that, in reality, the wicked often prosper until the end of their days.

In Job 21, Job takes the interesting track of disproving Zophar’s major premise. Remember Zophar’s syllogism:

Major Premise:           The wicked suffer.

Minor Premise:           Job suffers.

Conclusion:                Job is wicked.

If the major premise is true, then so is the minor premise and conclusion. If it is true that the wicked suffer in this life, and it is certainly true that Job is suffering, then it is also true that Job is wicked. That is the logic of Zophar’s argument. Job, however, turns on the major premise with the same ferocity with which Zophar asserted it, arguing that it is simply not true, or certainly not always true! In fact, the opposite often appears to be the case.

¹ Then Job answered and said: ² “Keep listening to my words, and let this be your comfort. ³ Bear with me, and I will speak, and after I have spoken, mock on. ⁴ As for me, is my complaint against man? Why should I not be impatient?

Verse 4 is significant because it reminds us that, though Job is arguing with Zophar and his friends, his complaint is really against God and not man. Job also reveals the depths to which their argument had plummeted by forecasting yet more mockery from his friends: “Bear with me, and I will speak, and after I have spoken, mock on.” It would be interesting to approach the book of Job primarily from the perspective of how to and how not to disagree, of how to and how not to argue even. But that is another task for another day.

⁵ Look at me and be appalled, and lay your hand over your mouth. ⁶ When I remember, I am dismayed, and shuddering seizes my flesh. ⁷ Why do the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?

Verse 7, in a nutshell, is Job’s attack against Zophar’s major premise. Far from being punished in this life, Job suggests that more times than not “the wicked live, reach old age, and grow mighty in power.” “The longer I live,” wrote Kierkegaard, “the clearer it becomes to me that the real crimes are not punished in this world.”[4] This is Job’s position as well. Job next offers an alternative list to Zophar’s. Whereas Zophar sought to catalogue the suffering of the wicked, Job catalogued their prosperity.

⁸ Their offspring are established in their presence, and their descendants before their eyes. ⁹ Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them. ¹⁰ Their bull breeds without fail; their cow calves and does not miscarry. ¹¹ They send out their little boys like a flock, and their children dance. ¹² They sing to the tambourine and the lyre and rejoice to the sound of the pipe. ¹³ They spend their days in prosperity, and in peace they go down to Sheol.

Verses 8-13 are pregnant with heart-rending anguish. In these verses, Job begins his listing of the blessings of the wicked by pointing to their happy children, their prosperous homes, and their strong livestock. These are precisely the areas in which Satan struck Job. What makes this so very galling, however, is that Job is here describing the peace of the wicked. He next turns to their spiritual lostness and callousness.

¹⁴ They say to God, ‘Depart from us! We do not desire the knowledge of your ways. ¹⁵ What is the Almighty, that we should serve him? And what profit do we get if we pray to him?’ ¹⁶ Behold, is not their prosperity in their hand? The counsel of the wicked is far from me.¹⁷ “How often is it that the lamp of the wicked is put out? That their calamity comes upon them? That God distributes pains in his anger? ¹⁸ That they are like straw before the wind, and like chaff that the storm carries away? ¹⁹ You say, ‘God stores up their iniquity for their children.’ Let him pay it out to them, that they may know it. ²⁰ Let their own eyes see their destruction, and let them drink of the wrath of the Almighty. ²¹ For what do they care for their houses after them, when the number of their months is cut off?

Job seems to ratchet up the intensity in verses 17-21 by actually mocking the suggestion that the wicked are punished, that the wicked are suffering. He seems almost to be asking Zophar to provide him an example of when this does happen. Janzen argues that verses 22-26 should be read as “a quotation of the views of the friends” and that verse 22, “Will any teach God knowledge…” is what his friends were saying about him.[5]

²² Will any teach God knowledge, seeing that he judges those who are on high? ²³ One dies in his full vigor, being wholly at ease and secure, ²⁴ his pails full of milk and the marrow of his bones moist. ²⁵ Another dies in bitterness of soul, never having tasted of prosperity. ²⁶ They lie down alike in the dust, and the worms cover them. ²⁷ “Behold, I know your thoughts and your schemes to wrong me. ²⁸ For you say, ‘Where is the house of the prince? Where is the tent in which the wicked lived?’ ²⁹ Have you not asked those who travel the roads, and do you not accept their testimony ³⁰ that the evil man is spared in the day of calamity, that he is rescued in the day of wrath? ³¹ Who declares his way to his face, and who repays him for what he has done? ³² When he is carried to the grave, watch is kept over his tomb. ³³ The clods of the valley are sweet to him; all mankind follows after him, and those who go before him are innumerable. ³⁴ How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood.”

Job surveys his friends’ challenge to him, but, in verse 29 and following, he says that everybody actually knows that the wicked do not suffer, that they prosper. He next reasserts that, contra Zophar’s syllogism, the lives and deaths of the wicked are “sweet” and, as a result, Zophar’s words and, by extension, the words of all of his friends, are “empty nothings.”

What are we to take from this intense exchange? For starters, we should agree that, at least to an extent, Job was right. Where Job went too far was in his seeming suggestion that there was no justice anywhere to be had. That is simply wrong. But in arguing that the wicked often do not see justice on this side of heaven, Job was correct. In fact, this truth is recognized elsewhere in scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments. For instance, we find it in Psalm 73.

¹ Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. ² But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. ³ For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked. ⁴ For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. ⁵ They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. ⁶ Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. ⁷ Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. ⁸ They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. ⁹ They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. ¹⁰ Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them. ¹¹ And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” ¹² Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. ¹³ All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. ¹⁴ For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. ¹⁵ If I had said, “I will speak thus,” I would have betrayed the generation of your children. ¹⁶ But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, ¹⁷ until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. ¹⁸ Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. ¹⁹ How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! ²⁰ Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms.

The psalmist recognizes that there will be eventual justice, but, again, on this side of heaven, the wicked often prosper. In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, Jesus said the same:

⁴³ “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ ⁴⁴ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, ⁴⁵ so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

The sun rises on the evil and good.

The rain falls on the evil and good.

However, we must also learn from Job’s errors. There is justice, though it often comes only after death. Many people reject this idea. They always have. For instance, the third century church father Tertullian wrote, “We get ourselves laughed at for proclaiming that God will one day judge the world.”[6] But that is actually the truth.

The classic statement on this is found in Hebrews 9.

²⁷ And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment

Here is a simple statement, but one from which Job could have benefited. We too must hold this truth dear to our hearts. Simply put, it means that while the wicked may avoid judgment in this life, they will not avoid it forever. There will be a reckoning.

Of course, this raises an unnerving truth: as sinners, we all have judgment coming to us. It is one thing to recognize that the wicked will face the wrath of God. It is quite another to face the much more difficult fact that we are among the wicked. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

But it is exactly at this point where we need to hear the rest of the Hebrews 9 passage quoted above.

²⁷ And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, ²⁸ so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

“So Christ…”

What beautiful words! All deserve the wrath of God but the grace and mercy of God are likewise now offered to all! For Christ has come and has “been offered once to bear the sins of many.”

Whenever we think of the righteous suffering, we must be aware that, in truth, only One is truly righteous and He chose suffering…for us! There is a story more perplexing than Job suffering, and it is Christ choosing to suffer. More than that, He chose to suffer for us. This means that our salvation is the greatest “injustice” against a righteous Sufferer to ever happen on the earth, but it was an “injustice” freely embraced by the Son of God so that we might be saved. We are saved because the innocent Christ suffered in our stead. We are saved because the Holy One of God stepped into the injustice of the world and shattered its corruptions with His own sacrificial love.

Praise God for the innocent, righteous Christ who embraced the injustice of the cross so that He might justly save all who come to Him!

[1] Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Vol. I. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1973), p.178.

[2] Steven Chase, Job. Belief. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), p.143.

[3] J. Gerald Janzen, Job. Interpretation. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1985), p.85.

[4] Soren Kierkegaard. Attack Upon Christendom. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p.148.

[5] J. Gerald. Janzen, p.156.

[6] Jones, Brian (2011-08-01). Hell Is Real (But I Hate to Admit It) (p. 20). David C. Cook. Kindle Edition.

Patricia Appelbaum has written a well-researched and engagingly-told story about how St. Francis came to be revered among Christians and non-Christians alike in America.  When I was talking to my brother Condy about this book he observed, “People really feel the need to have heroes, don’t they?”  It is true, with all of the good and the bad that such might entail.  Appelbaum’s book tells how Francis came to fill that role to greater and lesser extents in America.

Among other things, it is a story of the malleability of Francis, or, rather, of how his legions of fans and admirers and even, one might say without exaggeration, disciples have rendered him malleable by virtue of their desire to have Francis on their side.  This means that one can find any and every kind of Francis today:  the Catholic Francis, the Protestant Francis, the environmentalist Francis, the animal rights Francis, the Jewish Francis, the Muslim Francis, the Buddhist Francis, the political Francis, etc. etc.  Which is to say that it’s just as possible to eisegete historical figures as it is to eisegete texts.

Appelbaum argues that there is, of course, an actual Francis under all of this and that we can have enough reasonable certainty of the facts to know that Francis was profoundly inspirational and sincere in his efforts to follow Jesus literally and with a kind of disarming recklessness.  She further shows that Francis and his world did not always have the kind of fever-pitch interest that it now has but that he has indeed always had a following.  The strength of Appelbaum’s story is in showing how the current interest in and devotion to Francis came to be what it currently is.  Francis has morphed from Catholic saint to bird bath saint to ecology saint to the saint for all Christians to the saint for non-Christians to the saint of interreligious dialogue.

There is something about Francis that just draws people in.  I know.  I am one of these people.  I would simply say that I have the deepest respect for Francis and find his life awe inspiring and challenging in the prophetic challenge it presents to me in my own walk.  But, knowing the human penchant for hagiography, for romanticizing, for eisegeting, and for casting our heroes in our own image, I truly have tried hard not to view Francis as something other than he was…and this means having to admit that, as a Baptist, Francis would have had some major problems with me and my own convictions.  Even so, the simple and radical obedience of Francis continues to stand out to me as an amazing example of what Christ can do in a man’s life.

There are many things about Applebaum’s book that I found fascinating and helpful.  I appreciated her discussion of how Assisi itself became the tourist magnet it now is.  I found her section on Zeffirelli’s “Brother Son, Sister Moon,” to be very interesting, particularly as that movie has had a real impact on my life as well.  I appreciated her recognition of the role that John Michael Talbot has played in popularizing Assisi.

Her oft-repeated observation that most of Francis’ followers realize that they cannot literally imitate him in the world today was telling and convicting…and true.  But this is something I think a great deal about.  To honor the spirit and memory of Francis must mean that we do not domesticate him.  In my opinion, to claim to admire Francis with anything like integrity is to embrace the threat of Francis and what his life actually means and could mean for us today.  Which is to say that I do not think we should simply grab onto this or that aspect of Francis.  We should allow what God did in and through Francis’ life continuously to threaten and challenge us.  What endears me to Francis is that he is approachable.  He was a man who determined to live the life of Christ.  That means that I, too, might make such a decision.  We come to Francis warts and all…his and ours…and see in him a brother pointing us to our King.

Appelbaum’s story is intriguing and, at points, frustrating, for there are, again, in my opinion, right and wrong ways to approach Francis.  Appelbaum expertly demonstrates and proves the sheer force of Francis’ magnetism.  Even the distortions of Francis (and she shows us many of them) are, in a sense, compliments to him.  But these distortions that are so well documented here (“distortions,” I hasten to add, is my word, not hers) do provide us with a caution.  We must not let our enchantment with Francis obscure who he actually was and we must not reduce him to a kind of pet either for ourselves or for this or that issue for which we think we can claim him.

I highly recommend this book!  It’s very, very interesting and helpful!

When I was fifteen, my father told me to read Francis Schaeffer.  At that time I began to read through his works and can honestly say that it changed me in deep and significant ways.  At the same time I was reading C.S. Lewis and, through reading both, I came to see that one might be intellectually fulfilled, culturally engaged, and a follower of Jesus.  This was a refreshing and liberating thought for me.  While my appreciation for Francis Schaeffer has taken a bit of a hit over the last decade (perhaps I will write about that in a later post), I am still profoundly grateful for the impact his works have had on me and still think that his is a voice that should be considered.  To that end, it is always encouraging to come across videos of Dr. Schaeffer that I had not seen or heard before.

Robert Wernick’s The Vikings is an extremely informative though in no way exhaustive history of a people who are frequently depicted and often romanticized but perhaps seldom really understood.  Wernick engagingly tells the story of the Vikings’ infamous bent towards pugilism both outsiders and with their own people, their truly inspiring seafaring prowess, their religious beliefs, their great love of wealth (specifically the wealth of others), their ingenuity in technology, the evolution of their laws and social customs, their exploration and expansion, and, ultimately, their demise as a people.

I was unaware of just how much of a scourge the Vikings had become to European society at large, just how many rulers and societies essentially folded like a house of cards before their ruthless and unrelenting onslaught, and just how frequently and often the Vikings returned to plunder and replunder the same areas.  Wernick does not romanticize the Vikings.  They are presented warts and all.  Some of the tales of their brutality are stomach-churning to say the least.  And, in Wernick’s telling, their quick-on-the-draw default to violence was one of their great shortcomings.  Nonetheless, the courage of the Vikings and their strength and resilience as a people is indeed something worthy of awe.

Wernick recounts how only twice were the Vikings thwarted in their efforts at conquest:  by Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, and by the Irish.  Alfred the Great held off the Vikings by a cunning employment of diplomacy and military might.  The Irish, on the other hand, were a perplexing conundrum for the Vikings and, though they made certain substantial inroads into Ireland, they finally and ultimately left the Irish without subduing them as a people.

I was intrigued also to read of the Vikings’ relationship with Christianity.  Wreck recounts how the Vikings did not often convert with anything like true and sole devotion and fervor, though some did.  More times than not, a Viking’s conversion to Christianity was undertaken because it was politically expedient or would advance their own needs…which, come to think of it, happens all too often today as well.  More often this this, Christianity was embraced syncretistically by the Vikings and the God of Christianity was simply placed among the pantheons of their own gods.

Wernick effectively tells of the Viking expansion Westward to Greenland, Iceland, and, ultimately, to the North American continent.  This last part of the book was probably my favorite.  Viking exploration and settlement is an enthralling tale of courage, of ingenuity, of brilliance (and, occasionally, stupidity), and of the indomitability of the human spirit.

There are some fascinating tales told in this book and some truly memorable characters presented.  The book is not overly long, but Wernick does a good job of giving a more than sufficient introductory overview of the Vikings.  This is what a survey should be:  detailed enough so that the reader knows the author has the force of authority and research behind his words but not so detailed that one wanting an overview will get lost or unduly distracted.  The book maintains a good pace and just enough of the exciting or the surreal is included to keep the reader’s interest.  In all, a solid work.

Mark 1

⁴⁰ And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.” ⁴¹ Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” ⁴² And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. ⁴³ And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, ⁴⁴ and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.” ⁴⁵ But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.

In the latter half of the 19^th century, a missionary we now know as Damien of Molokai went to Hawaii to minister. His ministry became focused on the many lepers there and to them he gave his life. He ministered to the lepers, bathed them, helped to increase their standard of living, built better homes for them, dug their graves, and conducted their funerals. In a letter to his brother, Damien wrote, “I make myself a leper with the lepers to gain all to Jesus Christ.”

In December of 1884, Damien prepared a bath for himself. The water was too hot and when he put his foot in it, it instantly blistered. However, Damien felt no pain. It was then that Damien knew that he himself had become a leper. On April 15, 1889, Damien of Molokai died a leper at the age of 49.[1]

It is said that before he realized he was a leper himself, Damien would use the pronoun “you” in his sermons addressing the lepers. After the incident in the bath, however, he used the pronoun “we” when addressing the lepers. He had not only identified with them, he had become one of them.

It is a powerful story and one that has inspired Christians for many years. That a man would go among the lepers, identify with them, become one of them, then die with them is profoundly Christlike. It is Christlike in a grand sense, for Christ too came to us, identified with us, became one of us (yet without sin), and then died for us. Yet Molokai’s story is Christlike in its particulars as well, for Christ too touched the lepers and became for them their great and only hope. Yet, there are differences in the stories of Molokai and Christ, and these differences are not insignificant.

The Leper: A bold approach and a desperate plea for help.

Let us begin by seeing a leper come to the Lord Jesus.

⁴⁰ And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.”

One can hear the desperation in the man’s plea and one can see the desperation in his very coming. This can be attributed not only to the terrible disease itself, but also to the terrible stigma that the disease brought. In the ancient world, the lepers lot was hard indeed!

First, what are we to make of the term “leper.” New Testament scholar Ben Witherington has explained that “the term [lepros]…in antiquity covered a whole gamut of skin diseases, and it is difficult to say what this man had. The disease we know as leprosy appears not to have existed in Jesus’ time and region…Later rabbinic literature suggested that such skin diseases were as difficult to get rid of as raising the dead was to accomplish.”[2] It is possible that the exact disease we know as Hansen’s disease may not have existed in the first century, but, in essence, it is a distinction without significance, for the basic nature of this skin disease and, most significantly, of the stigma it brought is the same.

Consider, for instance, the Old Testament laws concerning those with leprosy. They are found in Leviticus 13.

⁴⁰ “If a man’s hair falls out from his head, he is bald; he is clean. ⁴¹ And if a man’s hair falls out from his forehead, he has baldness of the forehead; he is clean. ⁴² But if there is on the bald head or the bald forehead a reddish-white diseased area, it is a leprous disease breaking out on his bald head or his bald forehead. ⁴³ Then the priest shall examine him, and if the diseased swelling is reddish-white on his bald head or on his bald forehead, like the appearance of leprous disease in the skin of the body, ⁴⁴ he is a leprous man, he is unclean. The priest must pronounce him unclean; his disease is on his head. ⁴⁵ “The leprous person who has the disease shall wear torn clothes and let the hair of his head hang loose, and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’ ⁴⁶ He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease. He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.

What a devastating sentence!

• “he is unclean”
• “the priest must pronounce him unclean”
• he “shall wear torn clothes”
• he shall “let the hair of his head hang loose”
• “he shall cover his upper lip”
• he shall “cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’
• “He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease.”
• “He is unclean.”
• “He shall live alone.”
• “His dwelling shall be outside the camp.”

In other words, leprosy meant banishment, shame, social ostracization, and a lonely death. The treatment of lepers was not much improved in certain periods of church history. For instance, William Barclay has described the treatment of lepers in the Middle Ages as an application of the Mosaic law.

The priest, wearing his stole and carrying a crucifix, led the leper into the church, and read the burial service over him. The leper was a man who was already dead, though still alive. He had to wear a black garment that all might recognize and live in a leper- or lazarus-house. He must not come near a church service but might peer through the leper “squint” cut in the walls while the service went on.[3]

I do hasten to add that there have been exemplary examples of compassionate treatment for lepers in the Christian Church and throughout Christian history. I think it safe to say that it was Christians who led the way in more compassionate care of those inflicted with this dreaded disease. Even so, the leper of the first century and, tragically, lepers throughout time, have felt an incalculable sense of loneliness, of shame, of dirtiness.

This is what makes the leper’s actions in our text so very poignant.

⁴⁰ And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.”

The scandal is in the words, “And a leper came to him.” He came right up to Jesus and kneeled at his feet. In doing this, he was violating not only custom but also Levitical law: “He is unclean. He shall live alone. His dwelling shall be outside the camp.”

“Outside the camp” does not mean “kneeling at one’s feet.”

This leper, by any human reckoning of the time, came too close. He came too close.

By any human reckoning…but not by the reckoning of the Kingdom of God and not by the reckoning of the King.

He came because he was broken. He was broken and lonely and ashamed and defiled and dirty and sick. He came because the risk of being stoned to death was worth the slimmest possibility of receiving some small compassion at the hand of this one named Jesus. The reputation of Jesus had made it out there even among the lepers. This man had heard it, and so he came. He came in defiance of the rules and the shame and the strictures and the laws. He came in defiance of the bans. He came because it would be better to die violently after a brief moment of actual human contact than to die alone in one’s leper shack.

He came because there seemed to be something about Jesus that said, even to outcast lepers, Come! Come!

Are you ashamed this morning? Lonely? Outcast? Dirty? Unclean? Embarrassed? Alone? If you will but risk coming to Christ, you will find there a friend and more than a friend. You will find there a healer and a Savior.

Jesus: A complex and provocative reaction leading to substitutionary compassion.

Consider the reaction of Jesus.

⁴¹ Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” ⁴² And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. ⁴³ And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, ⁴⁴ and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”

The Church Father Origen memorably and beautifully said that Jesus “touches him in his untouchability.”[4]

Behold the wonderful love of Jesus for the outcasts! Behold the compassionate tenderness of our loving Lord. Jesus is moved by this man’s plea. And then, Jesus does the unthinkable. He touches him. In touching him, Jesus renders himself unclean on the basis of the law as recorded in Leviticus 5.

² or if anyone touches an unclean thing, whether a carcass of an unclean wild animal or a carcass of unclean livestock or a carcass of unclean swarming things, and it is hidden from him and he has become unclean, and he realizes his guilt; ³ or if he touches human uncleanness, of whatever sort the uncleanness may be with which one becomes unclean, and it is hidden from him, when he comes to know it, and realizes his guilt; ⁴ or if anyone utters with his lips a rash oath to do evil or to do good, any sort of rash oath that people swear, and it is hidden from him, when he comes to know it, and he realizes his guilt in any of these; ⁵ when he realizes his guilt in any of these and confesses the sin he has committed, ⁶ he shall bring to the Lord as his compensation for the sin that he has committed, a female from the flock, a lamb or a goat, for a sin offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him for his sin.

Unlike Damien, Jesus does not become a leper himself. He heals the leper without becoming a leper. The disease has no power over Jesus. Even so, in the eyes of the religious establishment and of the people shaped by it, Jesus took the uncleanness of the leper onto and into himself. He was now defiled and, if you listen to the wording of Leviticus 5, he had now sinned in the eyes of the priests. Jesus was now guilty before the establishment.

But Jesus knew this. Jesus knew that He had not sinned before God Himself, for there is a sin greater than ceremonially uncleanness and that is failing to show mercy and compassion to a hurting person. There is, in other words, a higher law that resides in the loving heart of God Himself. The law God had given in the legal codes was good, but it had become something it was not intended to be. Jesus came to reveal this fact and point us to the true intention behind all the divine decrees and commands. John Chrysostom said that Jesus, in touching the leper, signified “that he is not under the hand of the law, but the law is in his hands.”[5]

So Jesus healed the poor leper. He healed him completely and marvelously.

Even so, there is a challenge in our text, a textual problem that is a somewhat infamous conundrum in terms of how to interpret our passage. Hear again the text:

⁴¹ Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” ⁴² And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. ⁴³ And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, ⁴⁴ and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”

The challenge comes in the first phrase of verse 41: “Moved with pity…” While many early manuscripts do contain the word “pity,” other manuscripts have the word “indignation.” “Pity” and “indignation” are not the same thing.

“Despite the massive external attestation for ‘filled with compassion,’” writes James Brooks, “internal considerations are so strong that ‘having become angry’ probably is the original.” Maybe so. The wording of verse 43 might support this idea. Brooks notes that the words “sternly charged him,” in verse 43, can also be translated “to be angry,” “to scold,” and “to warn,” and that the words “and sent him away at once” “usually means to cast out and is often used with reference to expelling demons (vv.34,39).” (William Lane says of verse 43 that “the language is very strong and seems more appropriate in an address to a demon than to a man whom Jesus has just healed” and suggests that the verse could be translated, “he inveighed against him and drove him away.”[6]) Brooks’ conclusion is most interesting:

Unless Mark used the verbs in this verse with milder-than-usual meanings, it appears that Jesus was angry with the man and that he cast him out (of a house or synagogue?). It is highly probably therefore that v.41 also indicates that Jesus was angry with the leper. If anyone except Jesus had been involved, few would ever have suggested any other interpretation.[7]

Perhaps this is so. What are we to make of it? First, let me say that even if the word should be “indignation” instead of “compassion,” compassion is all throughout this text and is found in Jesus’ healing action. He does indeed heal the man and the man rejoices over it!

Furthermore, if the beginning of verse 41 does read, “Moved with indignation,” and if the verbs of verse 43 do communicate the same, we still must ask why this is. For starters, it is extremely unlikely that the leper himself was the direct object of Jesus’ indignation, if indignation He felt. On the contrary, I would propose that the text immediately preceding this, Mark 1:29-39, offers the solution.

You will recall how Jesus’ healing of Peter’s mother-in-law in that text is not merely a story of healing, it is also a story of temptation. For as we saw when considering that passage, Jesus’ preaching ministry was in danger of being eclipsed by Jesus’ healing ministry. Indeed, Jesus’ retreat back to the desolate place, the wilderness, alone in the dark, suggests the ongoing temptation of Christ as Mark presents it. Finally, Jesus abandons his mother-in-law’s home, despite the disciples’ plea for him to return to the waiting crowds, because, as He reminds them, He came not only to do miracles but also to preach the Kingdom. He came, in other words, to demonstrate power and to proclamation.

So immediately preceding our text we find Jesus’ fleeing a scene of healing because it threatened to trap Him in one area thereby keeping Him from moving towards the cross. When Jesus healed, the word spread, the crowds came, and Jesus was faced not only with the threat but even the temptation of simply staying in one place, forsaking His ultimate mission, and becoming a faith healer. This He clearly would not do. He came to heal, yes, but also to preach and, above all, to move to the cross.

We might say, then, that the healing ministry of Jesus, while important, brought with it certain dangers. Even so, Jesus is a healer. Jesus loves people. Jesus does feel compassion. So when the leper comes to Him and presents himself pitifully before Christ for healing, Jesus, moved by love and mercy, heals him. Yet, even as He did so, Jesus understandably felt indignation, not towards the man, but towards the devil who was forever trying to sidetrack him. Perhaps Jesus even felt some indignation toward the man if the man was likewise caught up in the healing frenzy that was forever following Jesus. If so, even that indignation was focused ultimately on the human capacity for missing the main point.

I agree with Michael card who wrote, “Jesus is not angry with the man. He is frustrated by a situation in which he feels trapped.”[8] He feels trapped because He wants to heal and bless, but He knows that His healing opens the door for misunderstanding, for a mob mentality, and for the temptation for Him to miss His true calling.

That this is likely what is happening can be seen in the instructions Jesus gives the leper in verses 43-44.

⁴³ And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, ⁴⁴ and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”

“Say nothing to anyone.” Jesus is not wanting a repeat of what happened earlier. He cannot always set aside His mission simply to stay in one place, thereby abandoning His journey to the cross, in order to heal everybody.

The Leper: A challenging disobedience arising from uncontrollable joy.

Though charged to be silent, the leper is anything but.

⁴⁵ But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.

I would like to use the leper as a kind of good example, but, in doing so, I do not want to overlook that there were very serious consequences for his disobedience. I am not commending the lepers disobedience, for, as the second half of verse 45 tells us, the leper’s missionary activity resulted in an undesirable shift in Jesus’ ministry at that time: “Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.” There were, in other words, real reasons why Jesus told the leper to be silent. William Lane noted that the leper’s disobedience “serves to terminate the preaching tour of the Galilean villages.”[9]

Again, I do not wish to commend the leper’s disobedience, but I would like to walk a fine line here and point out that his disobedience was indeed a missionary disobedience resulting from uncontrollable joy. It is hard not to tell others when you have met the King of Kings! Should he have obeyed Jesus? Yes. But can we yet learn and be inspired by the poor man’s well-intentioned act of disobedience? I think so.

What does it say, friends, that the leper, upon being charged not to speak, cannot stop speaking but the Church, upon being charged to speak, cannot find the courage to do so? What does it say, that the leper ignores Christ’s command to silence because he feels he must speak but we ignore Christ’s command to speak because we feel we must be silent?

Is there not a challenge for us in the leper’s disobedience? Is it not to our shame? If we, like him, have been healed by the touch of Christ, and healed of a far greater disease than leprosy, should we not find it difficult to be silent?

Would that we in our obedience were half the missionaries that this man was in his disobedience! Would that we spoke as he spoke and showed the courage that he showed!

He did so because he had been touched by Jesus and, having been touched, his life was forever changed!

Have you been touched by the healing hand of Christ? Yes? Then tell it! Proclaim it! Announce it! The King who has authority to vanquish sin, death, and hell, has come, is here, and is coming again! Let us blow the trumpets for the King and His Kingdom come and coming! Let us, too, refuse to be silent!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Damien

[2] Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Mark. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001), p.103.

[3] William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark. The Daily Study Bible. (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1971), p.37.

[4] Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall, eds. Mark. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Gen. Ed., Thomas C. Oden. New Testament, Vol. II (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), p.25.

[5] Thomas C. Oden and Christopher A. Hall, eds., p.26.

[6] William L. Lane, The Gospel According to Mark. The New International Commentary of the New Testament. Gen. Ed., F.F. Bruce (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), p.87.

[7] James A. Brooks, Mark. The New American Commentary. Gen. Ed., David S. Dockery. Vol.23 (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1991), p.55-56.

[8] Michael Card, Mark. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), p.41.

[9] William Lane, p.89.

Job 18

¹ Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said: ² “How long will you hunt for words? Consider, and then we will speak. ³ Why are we counted as cattle? Why are we stupid in your sight? ⁴ You who tear yourself in your anger, shall the earth be forsaken for you, or the rock be removed out of its place? ⁵ “Indeed, the light of the wicked is put out, and the flame of his fire does not shine. ⁶ The light is dark in his tent, and his lamp above him is put out. ⁷ His strong steps are shortened, and his own schemes throw him down. ⁸ For he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walks on its mesh. ⁹ A trap seizes him by the heel; a snare lays hold of him. ¹⁰ A rope is hidden for him in the ground, a trap for him in the path. ¹¹ Terrors frighten him on every side, and chase him at his heels. ¹² His strength is famished, and calamity is ready for his stumbling. ¹³ It consumes the parts of his skin; the firstborn of death consumes his limbs. ¹⁴ He is torn from the tent in which he trusted and is brought to the king of terrors. ¹⁵ In his tent dwells that which is none of his; sulfur is scattered over his habitation. ¹⁶ His roots dry up beneath, and his branches wither above. ¹⁷ His memory perishes from the earth, and he has no name in the street. ¹⁸ He is thrust from light into darkness, and driven out of the world. ¹⁹ He has no posterity or progeny among his people, and no survivor where he used to live. ²⁰ They of the west are appalled at his day, and horror seizes them of the east. ²¹ Surely such are the dwellings of the unrighteous, such is the place of him who knows not God.”

Job 19

¹ Then Job answered and said: ² “How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words? ³ These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me? ⁴ And even if it be true that I have erred, my error remains with myself. ⁵ If indeed you magnify yourselves against me and make my disgrace an argument against me, ⁶ know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me. ⁷ Behold, I cry out, ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered; I call for help, but there is no justice. ⁸ He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. ⁹ He has stripped from me my glory and taken the crown from my head. ¹⁰ He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, and my hope has he pulled up like a tree. ¹¹ He has kindled his wrath against me and counts me as his adversary. ¹² His troops come on together; they have cast up their siege ramp against me and encamp around my tent. ¹³ “He has put my brothers far from me, and those who knew me are wholly estranged from me. ¹⁴ My relatives have failed me, my close friends have forgotten me. ¹⁵ The guests in my house and my maidservants count me as a stranger; I have become a foreigner in their eyes. ¹⁶ I call to my servant, but he gives me no answer; I must plead with him with my mouth for mercy. ¹⁷ My breath is strange to my wife, and I am a stench to the children of my own mother. ¹⁸ Even young children despise me; when I rise they talk against me. ¹⁹ All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me. ²⁰ My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. ²¹ Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! ²² Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh? ²³ “Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! ²⁴ Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! ²⁵ For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. ²⁶ And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, ²⁷ whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! ²⁸ If you say, ‘How we will pursue him!’ and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him,’ ²⁹ be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, that you may know there is a judgment.”

On July 8, 1741, Jonathan Edwards stood before his congregation and preached on Deuteronomy 32:35, “Their foot shall slide in due time.” It is perhaps the most famous sermon ever preached on American soil. It is entitled, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” It is a startling and jarring sermon and one that God used to spark a massive awakening in the land. It is also filled with terrifying imagery of the wrath of God. Consider the imagery of this particular section of the sermon.

The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course, when once it is let loose. It is true, that judgment against your evil works has not been executed hitherto; the floods of God’s vengeance have been withheld; but your guilt in the mean time is constantly increasing, and you are every day treasuring up more wrath; the waters are constantly rising, and waxing more and more mighty; and there is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, that holds the waters back, that are unwilling to be stopped, and press hard to go forward. If God should only withdraw his hand from the flood-gate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God, would rush forth with inconceivable fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent power; and if your strength were ten thousand times greater than it is, yea, ten thousand times greater than the strength of the stoutest, sturdiest devil in hell, it would be nothing to withstand or endure it.

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. Thus all you that never passed under a great change of heart, by the mighty power of the Spirit of God upon your souls; all you that were never born again, and made new creatures, and raised from being dead in sin, to a state of new, and before altogether unexperienced light and life, are in the hands of an angry God. However you may have reformed your life in many things, and may have had religious affections, and may keep up a form of religion in your families and closets, and in the house of God, it is nothing but his mere pleasure that keeps you from being this moment swallowed up in everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And there is no other reason to be given, why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up. There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell.

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: it is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you, as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any Mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.[1]

One does not often hear such preaching today. This is probably not a good thing. To be sure, the sweetness of the gospel must never be eclipsed by the wrath of God, but the righteous wrath of God is indeed one of the things that makes the gospel so very sweet.

What Edwards was attempting to do, in part, was remind his congregation of the odiousness of sin, the righteousness of God’s wrath, the certainty of God’s coming judgment against wickedness, and, ultimately, the graciousness of God who alone keeps the full vent of His fury from falling upon us at this very moment. Edwards was therefore seeking to move his people to repentance by invoking the wrath of God against wickedness.

Old Testament scholar J. Gerald Janzen has argued that Bildad the Shuhite is doing in Job 18 what Jonathan Edwards did in his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Bildad was seeking, Janzen tells us, “to move the intransigent sinner to a more tenable place in the world and before God.”[2] That is no doubt true, but it must be said that the critical difference between Edwards’ approach and Bildad’s approach was that Edwards was correct in pointing to the sins of the people as the reason for God’s wrath whereas Bildad was incorrect in his assumption that the calamity that had befallen Job was the result of Job’s sin.

Nonetheless, Bildad appeals to the wrath of God against wickedness and Job responds with a plea for greater understanding from his misguided friends.

Bildad launches the ultimate ad hominem attack: “Job, you are wicked.”

An ad hominem is a logical fallacy in which, in the midst of an argument or debate, one person abandons the substance of the argument itself and launches an attack on the other person’s character. It is a fallacy because a person’s character does not render a person’s argument right or wrong. It may render a person a hypocrite, to be sure, but it is irrelevant to the argument itself.

While Bildad’s approach in Job 18 may not be a pure ad hominem due to the fact that what Bildad thinks of Job’s character is bound up with his central theory concerning Job’s tragedy, the invective he unleashes in this next speech feels like an assault.

¹ Then Bildad the Shuhite answered and said: ² “How long will you hunt for words? Consider, and then we will speak. ³ Why are we counted as cattle? Why are we stupid in your sight? ⁴ You who tear yourself in your anger, shall the earth be forsaken for you, or the rock be removed out of its place? ⁵ “Indeed, the light of the wicked is put out, and the flame of his fire does not shine. ⁶ The light is dark in his tent, and his lamp above him is put out. ⁷ His strong steps are shortened, and his own schemes throw him down. ⁸ For he is cast into a net by his own feet, and he walks on its mesh. ⁹ A trap seizes him by the heel; a snare lays hold of him. ¹⁰ A rope is hidden for him in the ground, a trap for him in the path. ¹¹ Terrors frighten him on every side, and chase him at his heels. ¹² His strength is famished, and calamity is ready for his stumbling. ¹³ It consumes the parts of his skin; the firstborn of death consumes his limbs. ¹⁴ He is torn from the tent in which he trusted and is brought to the king of terrors. ¹⁵ In his tent dwells that which is none of his; sulfur is scattered over his habitation. ¹⁶ His roots dry up beneath, and his branches wither above. ¹⁷ His memory perishes from the earth, and he has no name in the street. ¹⁸ He is thrust from light into darkness, and driven out of the world. ¹⁹ He has no posterity or progeny among his people, and no survivor where he used to live. ²⁰ They of the west are appalled at his day, and horror seizes them of the east. ²¹ Surely such are the dwellings of the unrighteous, such is the place of him who knows not God.”

Simply put, Bildad tells Job that he is wicked and deserves what he is getting. The imagery is Edwardsesque in its descriptive force and emotional intensity. Job, being a wicked man (in Bildad’s mind), is like an extinguished fire, a tripped up schemer, a man caught in a net, a man haunted and running fro terrors, a weak man, a man eaten alive by calamity, a man thrown before the terror of terrors, a tree that is dead above ground and below, a man whose name is blotted from the books of the living, a man whom nobody will remember, a man with no children or heirs, and a man of whom people are afraid.

This ad hominem is essentially a doubling-down on Bildad’s part. It is as if he has stuck his fingers in his ears so as not to hear Job’s protest and then started screaming, “You are evil! You are evil!”

I once did marriage counseling with a young couple who were having a very difficult time communicating. Conflict resolution was a real weakness to say the least. The wife recounted to me that on one occasion they were in the car having a disagreement when all of a sudden her husband began to shout over here, “GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN! GET THEE BEHIND ME SATAN!” Not surprisingly, such is not conducive to a healthy relationship.

This is, in essence, what Bildad is doing in Job 18. He is, as it were, increasing the volume and intensity of what he has been saying all along, wrong that it was. He is saying that the matter is simple and settled:

• The wicked suffer.
• Job is wicked.
• Therefore Job suffers.

It is hard to reason with a man who has determined not to listen.

Job responds by pleading with his friends to understand that God is ultimately responsible for his calamity.

Perhaps realizing that the intensity of the exchange he is having with his friends has reached an impasse, and perhaps realizing that his arguments heretofore are not being seriously considered by his friends, Job takes a bit of a different approach in Job 19. He asks his friends to show him understanding and mercy since, after all, it is God who has struck him and who can stop God from doing what he wants.

¹ Then Job answered and said: ² “How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words? ³ These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me? ⁴ And even if it be true that I have erred, my error remains with myself. ⁵ If indeed you magnify yourselves against me and make my disgrace an argument against me, ⁶ know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me. ⁷ Behold, I cry out, ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered; I call for help, but there is no justice. ⁸ He has walled up my way, so that I cannot pass, and he has set darkness upon my paths. ⁹ He has stripped from me my glory and taken the crown from my head. ¹⁰ He breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, and my hope has he pulled up like a tree. ¹¹ He has kindled his wrath against me and counts me as his adversary. ¹² His troops come on together; they have cast up their siege ramp against me and encamp around my tent. ¹³ “He has put my brothers far from me, and those who knew me are wholly estranged from me. ¹⁴ My relatives have failed me, my close friends have forgotten me. ¹⁵ The guests in my house and my maidservants count me as a stranger; I have become a foreigner in their eyes. ¹⁶ I call to my servant, but he gives me no answer; I must plead with him with my mouth for mercy. ¹⁷ My breath is strange to my wife, and I am a stench to the children of my own mother. ¹⁸ Even young children despise me; when I rise they talk against me. ¹⁹ All my intimate friends abhor me, and those whom I loved have turned against me. ²⁰ My bones stick to my skin and to my flesh, and I have escaped by the skin of my teeth. ²¹ Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! ²² Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?

Job’s speech somewhat matches Bildad’s in terms of its impressive marshaling of the imagery of ruin.   In Job’s speech, however, the imagery is not of a wicked man getting what he deserves, but rather of a man who has simply been assaulted by God for some unknown reason. One might risk oversimplification by suggesting that Job’s friends are screaming, “It is Job’s fault!” whereas Job is screaming, “It is God’s fault!”

Job recognizes that he is not a perfect man and not beyond error, but he still maintains his innocence and argues that the reason for his calamity is found in God’s secret, interior will and not in Job’s wickedness. In so ruthlessly pursing him, Job says, his friends have become vicious towards him in the same way that God has: “Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?” (v.22)

Job argues that God has laid him low. In Job’s mind, God has walled him in, cast him in darkness, stripped him of glory, broken him, robbed him of hope, attacked him with all of His armies, deprived him of family and friends, made him an exile and outsider in his own home, ruined his marriage, made him monstrous to young children, destroyed his friendships, and wrecked his health. In light of God’s attack, Job wonders, might his friends extend to him a bit of understanding and compassion?

Job’s theology is worthy of consideration. It must be said that in terms of ultimate causes he is correct. He is correct that behind everything there is God. But, again, let us remember that Job has not read the first chapters of the book of Job! He does not know that Satan presented himself to God, that God agreed to allow Satan to strike Job, that God forbade Satan to kill Job, and that God loved and had not forsaken Job. In other words, Job’s theology had room only for simple, direct causes and not for divine allowance. But divine allowance changes everything.

Is God not ultimately the cause behind all causes? In a sense. But the presence of divine allowance is critically important here. It means that God Himself does not actively, directly, and simply cause Job’s calamity or ours. It means He allows it. Could God have chosen not to allow it? Of course. But sometimes He does allow it. This is the great question of the book: why does God allow bad things to happen to His people?

Job is therefore partially right, but he is also partially wrong. Is the hand of God involved in this? Yes, but not in the simple way he imagines, not, that is, in any way that makes God the active cause of the evil that has befallen him.

Yet Job still holds out a lingering hope.

What happens next is surprising to say the least. In the midst of Job’s diatribe against what he sees as the harming hand of God, he breaks into something like praise. What is more, he exhibits something that sounds like hope!

²³ “Oh that my words were written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! ²⁴ Oh that with an iron pen and lead they were engraved in the rock forever! ²⁵ For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth. ²⁶ And after my skin has been thus destroyed, yet in my flesh I shall see God, ²⁷ whom I shall see for myself, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! ²⁸ If you say, ‘How we will pursue him!’ and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him,’ ²⁹ be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, that you may know there is a judgment.”

Unbelievable! In the midst of his disappointment, pain, dismay, fear, dread, anger, anxiety, and loss of hope, Job pronounces his certain belief in a coming Redeemer, a Redeemer who is God. He proclaims that he will see God.

Steven Chase has made an interesting observation about Job’s statement in verse 25, “yet in my flesh I shall see God.”

The phrase umibbe-sari is more properly rendered, literally, as “from or out of my flesh” or even “without my flesh.” Whatever the phrase means, it does not mean “in.” Dhorme thinks it means “behind my skin…as behind a curtain,” and the curtain may be death. Once again the question of immortality and the afterlife is raised, but once again it is ambiguous: for instance, the skin may need to be peeled off before Job sees God (i.e., in death); or it may mean a robust and renewed vision “from out of my flesh” in this life.[3]

However he means it, Job means that he will one day stand before God. Significantly, he says that this God will be a saving, redeeming God to him.

What are we to make of this? We have seen glimpses of this before, this unexpected, out of place, spontaneous, surprising doxology in the midst of prolonged complaint.

We are reminded again of Piper’s beautiful line from his Job poem, “I cling with feeble fingers to the ledge of thy great grace.” It would appear that this is what is happening. Just when we think that Job has slipped into an incurable despair and lust for death, he springs up with an undeniable and unvanquished note of hope, anticipation, and even joy!

Such is the power of hope within the hearts of the people of God. In our darkest moments, our moments of spiritual abandonment and loss, our deepest agonies of mind, body, and soul, there is something within the hearts of God’s people that refuses to let go in any ultimate and final sense. There is a hope that cannot be vanquished, a flame that cannot be extinguished, a small, almost imperceptible, sometimes barely there kernel of faith that refuses to go away.

“For truly, I say to you,” says Jesus in Matthew 17:20, “if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.”

Mustard seed faith: small, simple, almost imperceptible…but there. Mustard seed faith is not impressive faith as humans reckon it. It is contemptible in human reckoning. But not so in God’s. God can work with the small faith of His beleaguered people. He does not despise it. We do, but we are fools. The reality is that many people often find their faith to be the size of a mustard seed. Job did. Perhaps you do. And, like a small thing that refuses to die, there are times when it has to fight its way to the surface, peeking its head up above the soil of our own dismay and complaints. But there it is, surprising even us, growing up out of the soil, still there, still present, not vanquished. And that means that our small faith, like Job’s small faith, is actually quite a very big thing indeed! For our mustard seed faith clings to the great and eternal King of heaven and earth who is ever and always in the business of taking the small offerings of His children and extending them outwards and onwards into amazing and beautiful displays of His great grace.

Job grieved and roiled and writhed in his pain. He complained and condemned and rebuked and rebuffed. But here, at the end of Job 19, we see something else: Job still believed. With feeble fingers, perhaps, but, then, feeble fingers are all that we ever bring to God. Even so, the grasp of God is strong and does not let go.

Job barely held on to God…but God never let go of Job.

“I know that my Redeemer lives!”

And there it is! Mustard seed faith! Faith struggling to see and understand! Faith barely peeking up above the topsoil! But faith nonetheless.

Do not let go. Do not quit. Do not walk away. Your Redeemer lives!

[1] https://www.sermonindex.net/modules/articles/index.php?view=article&aid=544

[2] J. Gerald Janzen, Job. Interpretation. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1985), p.130.

[3] Steven Chase, Job. Belief. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2013), p.137-138.

In Stephen Lawhead’s novel Byzantium, the Irish monk Aidan has a conversation with a group of Vikings in which he explains who Jesus is and what He has done.  In this, Lawhead has provided a great example of what contextualization should look like when evangelizing those who inhabit a different thought world than our own.  Note carefully Aidan’s terminology as well as how he carefully responds to the Vikings’ assumptions about manhood and deity.  While fictional, this is quite helpful and moving.  Here is the conversation:

“You respect this god of yours,” said Leif, cocking his head to one side.

“He does that,” Gunnar assured him, taking some pride in this fact. “Aeddan has not ceased making prayers to his god since he came to us. He even makes prayers over our supper.”

“Indeed?” asked Ragnar wonderingly. “Scop never does this. He was of the Shaven Men, I am told. Is this something your god demands of you?”

“It is not a demand of the god,” I replied. “It is -” I paused, desperately trying to think how to describe devotion. “It is a thing we do out of gratitude for his care of us.”

“Your god gives you food and drink?” hooted the one called Jarn. “Now I have heard everything!”

Talk turned to whether it was worth a man’s time to hold to any gods, and which ones were best to worship. Leif insisted that it made no difference whether a man worshipped all of them or none. The debate occupied them for a goodly while, the ale vat supplying the necessary moisture when throats grew hoarse from argument.

Finally, Ragnar turned to me. “Shaven One, what say you? Is it that men should obey the old gods or give them up?”

“The gods you are speaking of,” I replied carelessly, “are like the chaff thrown to the pigs; they are the dried grass knotted and burned for kindling. They are worth less than the breath it takes to speak out their names.”

They all stared at me. But the ol was making me feel expansive and wise, so I blustered on. “The sun has set on their day, and it will not rise again.”

“Hoo! Hoo!” cried Jarn derisively. “Hear him! We have a thul among us now. Hoo!”

“Quiet, Jarn,” growled Ragnar Yellow Hair. “I would hear his answer for this question has vexed me sorely many years.” When silence had been enforced, he turned to me.

“Speak more. I am listening.”

“The god I serve is the Most High God,” I told them. Jan snorted at my presumption, but I ignored him and blundered on, mangling the few words at my disposal, but pushing on regardless. “This God is the Creator of all that is, and ruler of all Heaven and Earth, and of the unseen realms, both above and below. He is not worshipped by way of stone images or wooden idols, but in the heart and spirit of those who humble themselves before him. It is ever his desire to befriend and welcome the people who call upon his name.”

Leif spoke up. “How do you know this? Has anyone ever seen this god of yours? Has anyone ever spoken to him, eaten with him, drunk with him?” He took a long pull on his cup. The others reinforced themselves likewise.

“Ah!” I answered. “Many years ago, this very thing came to pass. God himself came down from his Great Hall. He took flesh and was born as an infant, grew to manhood and astonished everyone with his wisdom and the wonders he performed. Many people believed and followed him.”

“Wonders?” sneered Jarn. “What are these wonders?”

“He brought dead people back to life, restored sight to men born blind, gave the deaf to hear. He touched the sick with his hands and they were healed. Once, at a wedding feast, he even turned water into ol -“

“That is a god worthy of worship!” cried Leif enthusiastically.

“Heya, but the jarls and truth-singers of that land could not abide his presence,” I continued. “Despite the good things he did and taught, the skalds of the kings feared him. So, one dark night, up they leapt and seized him and dragged him before the Roman Magister; they accused him falsely and demanded that he be put to death.”

“Ho!” shouted Gunnar, growing excited by the tale. “But his followers raised the battle cry and descended upon the Romans and slew them. They cut off their heads and hands, and made a feast for the crows.”

“Alas,” I informed him sadly, “his followers were not warriors.”

“Nay? What were they then, jarls?”

“Neither were thy lords. They were fisherfolk,” I told him.

“Fisherfolk!” hooted Jarn, who acted as if he had never heard anything so funny.

“Yes, fisherfolk and shepherds and the like,” I replied, “Thus, when the Romans seized him, all his followers scattered to the hills, lest they should be caught and tortured and put to death also.”

“Ha!” laughed Ragnar scornfully. “I would not have run away. I would have driven them down with my spear and axe. I would have stood before them with my shield and fought them like a man.”

“What happened to this God-man?” wondered Gunnar.

“The skalds and Romans killed him.”

“What are you saying!” cried Leif, aghast with incredulity. “Is it that this god of yours was killed by the Romans? If he was truly creator of the world, he could take any form he wished. Why did he not change himself into a fire and burn them up? Could he not seize them and crush them with his mighty strength? Could he not send the death wind among them and slay his enemies in their beds?”

“You are forgetting,” I said, “that he had become a man and could do only what a man might do.”

“He let them kill him?” hooted Leif. “Even my hound would never allow such a thing.”

“Maybe your hound is a better god than the one Aeddan worships,” Jarn suggested maliciously. “Perhaps we should all worship Leif’s hound instead.”

“Is this so?” demanded Ragnar, frowning with concern. “He let the Romans kill him? How could this happen?”

“The Roman warriors chained him and took him out; they stripped him, tied him to a post, and beat him with the iron-tipped lash,” I said. “They beat him so hard the flesh came off his bones and his blood covered the ground. Even so, he did not cry out.”

“That is manful, at least,” put in Gunnar, much impressed. “I am certain Leif’s hound could not do that.”

“Then, when he was already half dead, they laid a timber door post on his shoulders and made him carry it naked through the city, all the way to Skull Hill.”

“The Romans are cowardly dogs,” spat Ragnar. “Everyone knows this.”

“The Romans took him and laid him on the ground…” Putting aside my cup, I lay down and stretched myself in the cross position. “While a warrior knelt on his arms and legs, another took up a hammer and spike, and nailed each arm and leg to the timber beam. Then they hoisted up and stuck the beam in the ground, leaving him to hang there until he died.”

My listeners gaped.

“While he hung high above the ground, the sky grew dark. The wind blew fierce. The thunder roared through the sky-vault.”

“Did he turn into a storm and strike them all dead with thunder-bolts?” wondered Gunnar wistfully.

“Nay,” I said.

“What did he do?” asked Jarn suspiciously.

“He died.” I closed my eyes and let my limbs go limp.

“It is just as well,” sniffed Jarn. “If your god is so weak and useless as that.”

“Odin once sacrificed himself in such a way,” Ragnar pointed out. “He hung on the World Tree for nine days and nights, allowing his flesh to be consumed by ravens and owls.”

“What good is a dead god?” asked Leif. “I have ever understood that.”

“Ah, now you have hit upon the most important point,” I told them. “For after he was well and truly dead, the skalds caused him to be taken down; they put him in a cave and sealed the entrance of the cave with a huge stone – a stone so big not even ten strong men could shift it. This they did because they feared him even in death. And they made the Roman warriors to stand guard over the tomb lest anything should happen.”

“Did anything happen?” Ragnar asked doubtfully.

“He came back to life.” I leaped form the ground, much to the astonishment of my listeners. “Three days after he died, he rose again, and broke out of the cave – but not before he had descended into the underworld and freed all the slaves of Hel.” I used their word, for it very nearly signified the same thing: a place of tortured souls.

This impressed them greatly “Heya,” nodded Ragnar in approval. “And did he wreak vengeance on the skalds and Romans who killed him?”

“Not even then did he demand the blood price. In this he showed his true lordship: for he is a god of righteousness, not revenge – life and not death. And from before the ages of the world he had established loving kindness as the rooftree of his hall. He is alive now, and for ever more. So whoever calls upon his name will be saved out of death and the torment of Hel.”

“If he is alive,” demanded Jarn scornfully, “Where is he now? Have you seen him?”

“Many have seen him,” I replied, “for he does often reveal himself to those who diligently seek him. But his kingdom is in heaven where he is building a great hall wherein al his people can gather for the marriage feast when he returns to earth to take his bride.”

“When is he returning?” asked Ragnar.

“Soon,” I said, “And when he returns the dead will come back to life, and he will judge everyone. Those who have practiced wickedness and treachery against him, he will exile to Hel where they will mourn for ever that they did not heed him well when they had the chance.”

“What of those who held to him?” asked Leif.

“To those who’ve shown him fealty,” I explained, “he will grant everlasting life. And they will join him in the heavenly all where there will be feasting and celebrating for ever.”

My listeners liked this idea. “This hall must be very big to hold so many people,” observed Gunnar.

“Valhalla is large,” offered Ragnar helpfully.

“It is bigger than Valhalla,” I said confidently.

“If it so big, how can he build it by himself?” wondered Leif.

“He is a god, Leif,” answered Gunnar. “Gods, as we know, can do these things.”

“Also,” I added, “he has seven times seven hosts of angels to help him.”

“Who are these angels?” asked Ragnar.

“They are the champions of heaven,” I told him. “And they are led by a chieftain called Michael who carries a sword of fire.”

“I have heard of this one,” put in Gunnar. “My swineherd Helmuth speaks of him often.”

“He cannot be much of a god if fisherfolk and swineherds can call upon him,” scoffed Jarn.

“Anyone may call upon him,” I said. “Kings and jarls, free men and women, children and slaves.”

“I would not hold to any god my slave worshipped,” Jarn insisted.

“Has this god a name?” asked Leif.

“His name is Jesu,” I said. “Also called the Christ, a word which means jarl in the tongue of the Greekmen.”

“You speak well for this god of yours,” Ragnar said; Gunnar and Tolar nodded. “I am persuaded that this is a matter worthy of further consideration.”

Stephen Lawhead, Byzantium. (New York, NY: Harper Prism, 1996), p.162-166.

In general, I would say my feelings towards modern Christian fiction could best be described as embarrassed if not hostile.  That is because…well…have you ever read Christian fiction?  Dostoevsky it ain’t.  However, I have long had a soft spot for the works of Stephen Lawhead.  His writing is so good (usually) and the depth of his historical research is so impressive, insightful, and skillfully employed that I am loathe to group him under the title “Christian fiction” at all.  Lawhead is a Christian who writes very good fiction.  There is indeed often in Lawhead’s writings an evangelistic bent, one might say, and a sufficient enough one to have his works sold on the shelves of LifeWay.  (This is not a criticism, I hope I need not say, nor is it a suggestion that this is disingenuous on Lawhead’s part.  It is not.)  Even so, there is a stark difference in Lawhead’s works and most of these other works in terms of quality.

Lawhead’s Byzantium is a stand alone volume (he normally writes series) and is a profoundly impressive novel.  The story involves a group of Irish monks who set out from their monastery to deliver the Book of Kells to the Emperor of Byzantium.  Along the way, they face numerous trials and challenges that transform their pilgrimage from one of simple deliverance to one of genuine life transformation.  The hero of the story is Aidan, a young monk who is chosen to go with the pilgrim party to deliver the prized possession to Byzantium.  Aidan is ever-haunted by a vision he has had that he will die in Byzantium.

It is difficult to tell much more of the story without revealing numerous and major spoilers.  Let me simply say that this is one of the better “there and back again” tales you will ever read.  It is filled with numerous fascinating elements from the later second half of the first millennium:  monasticism, the Vikings, emerging Islam, Eastern Christianity, Saracen pirates, Armenian soldiers, ocean warfare, orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy, imperial political intrigue, the nature of slavery, social status, pagan spirituality, theodicy, gender relations, the eating habits of ancient people’s, Western Christianity, Rome, ancient money, etc.  Above all, however, we find in this story a moving and challenging account of one man’s attempt to hold on to faith in the midst of very trying circumstances.

There are some particularly powerful points in this book.  Bishop Cadoc’s sermon before the departure of the monks was quite beautiful.  Aidan’s conversation with the Vikings concerning the gospel and, in particular, the impact of that story on his pagan listeners was extremely well done.  And, finally, one of the Vikings’ account of how the gospel had grasped his own mind and heart was really quite moving.

This is a large book and a long journey, but one that is very well worth it!  This is probably the best Lawhead book I’ve ever read.  I would highly recommend it to anybody who would like to read an extremely well done example of historical fiction and, above all else, a really good story!

Mark 1

²⁹ And immediately he left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. ³⁰ Now Simon’s mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her. ³¹ And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them. ³² That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons. ³³ And the whole city was gathered together at the door. ³⁴ And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. ³⁵ And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. ³⁶ And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, ³⁷ and they found him and said to him, “Everyone is looking for you.” ³⁸ And he said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.” ³⁹ And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

The late Henri Nouwen was an interesting and insightful Christian writer who achieved a great deal of success in his life. I recently watched a lecture he gave in which he was talking to the audience about how, when he was at Harvard Divinity School, he began to feel deeply discontented. He made the intriguing comment that he came to realize that his career was stifling his vocation. So he went to live at L’Arche Daybreak outside of Toronto and there he helped to take care of a severely handicapped man named Adam.

It is a fascinating story, and one that I have only sketched in the briefest of terms here. What is interesting, however, is Nouwen’s idea that a person’s career could stifle a person’s vocation. That is, what a person was good at doing, what a person could, say, make a living doing, is not necessarily what a person has been called to do or what a person should be doing.

To be sure, careers and vocations converge for some fortunate souls. Even if they do not, part of living in the world is caring financially for your family and earning money so that you can eat and live. So the fact that one’s career may not be one’s vocation does not mean that one should immediately jettison the former. Sometimes that is not an immediate possibility. Nonetheless, living out your vocation is an important goal, and one that most people, one would think, would like to do.

I would like to propose, if you will allow it, that this career vs. vocation dynamic can help us understand what is happening in Mark 1:29-39. Jesus would not, of course, have spoken of having a career. That is a very odd though indeed! Jesus had a vocation and a commission, we might add. He had a mission. He came for a purpose. Even so, in this fascinating episode concerning Jesus and the healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, we find the suggestion of a temptation presented to Jesus. It was the temptation to abandon His vocation in order to develop something like a career, something that He was, to use our admittedly inaccurate language, “good at,” to stay in one place and achieve fame through a ministry of miracles. To do this, however, He would have to abandon His vocation. This was the temptation with which Christ was presented.

Jesus marvelously demonstrates the power of the Kingdom but the devil uses it to tempt the people with consumerism and to tempt Jesus to abandon His mission.

Our text begins with a miracle, a demonstration of Kingdom power.

²⁹ And immediately he left the synagogue and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. ³⁰ Now Simon’s mother-in-law lay ill with a fever, and immediately they told him about her. ³¹ And he came and took her by the hand and lifted her up, and the fever left her, and she began to serve them. ³² That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons. ³³ And the whole city was gathered together at the door. ³⁴ And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

The miracle account is straight forward enough. Peter’s mother-in-law is sick with fever. Jesus comes to her, lifts her up, and she is healed. Significantly, immediately after her healing, “she began to serve them.” I say this is significant because it shows what our right response to the benevolent kindness of the Lord Jesus should be: adoration and service. We have all been healed by Christ, and of a sickness greater than mere fever. We too should serve Him and His people.

As a result of this miracle, Jesus’ popularity exploded and the house was soon surrounded by those who were hurting: the sick, the dying, and the demon possessed. And Jesus continued to work great miracles in their midst. Such is the compassion and love of Christ. He desires to help the wounded and suffering.

This is indeed a beautiful thing, but we must understand that something else is happening under the surface. “Listen closely to the text,” writes Michael Card, “and you will hear not a word of Jesus’ preaching or teaching. Not a single word. The crowds have come only to receive his gifts, not to hear him.”[1]

This is true. It is abundantly clear from the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus that He came to preach and to demonstrate Kingdom power through the working of miracles and through other means as well. Thus, Christ’s ministry might be said to have consisted of these to elements: proclamation and power. Both were centered on the Kingdom of God, the righteous rule of God Himself. Christ’s preaching was Kingdom proclamation and Christ’s miracles were Kingdom power unmasked.

Both of these elements were extremely important and both constituted Jesus’ vocation. This is what Jesus was called to do.

Why, then, does Michael Card’s point matter? “Listen closely to the text and you will not hear a word of Jesus’ preaching or teaching. Not a single word.” It matters because the popularity Jesus was faced with in this instance was centered on only one aspect of His calling: power. It did not have room for proclamation.

This meant something for Jesus and it meant something for the people. For the people, it meant the temptation to consumerism, to the commodification of the divine, the reduction of God’s power to the status of a product. Religious consumerism is the using of God’s power for personal advancement. I do not say that these poor people who came longingly to Jesus were pernicious. Heaven forbid! Were I in the neighborhood I would have brought my sick loved ones as well. My point is that even well-intended devotion can quickly morph into religious consumerism if the totality of what God is doing is missed because of an overemphasis on those aspects of what God is doing that most directly benefit me and my well-being.

Coming to Jesus for healing is a natural thing to do, and Christ honored the faith of those who came. But the reduction of Christ to a miracle-worker for one’s own personal benefit is a crass thing that is ever and always lurking around the corner of our own self-centered hearts. One must beware the lure of consumerism!

Historian Mark Noll has made the point that the absence of government endorsement of religion in America inadvertently led to the creation of a religious marketplace in which religious consumerism thrived.

The national government refused to support any particular denomination. The consequences for the churches were immense. They were now compelled to compete for adherents, rather than being assigned responsibility for parishioners as had been the almost universal European pattern. The denominations had to appeal directly to individuals. They had to convince individuals, first, that they should pay attention to God and, second, that they should do so in their churches and not elsewhere. The primary way the churches accomplished this task was through the techniques of revival — direct, fervent address aimed at convincing, convicting, and enlisting the individual. As Finke describes it, this process led to “a religious market that caters to the individual and makes religion an individual decision. Though religion is still a group phenomenon, which relies on the support, control and rewards of the local church, the open market stresses personal conversion and faith. Once again, the religious decision is an individual decision set in the context of a religious market with a wide array of diversity — a diversity that is assured by the diversity of the population and the lack of religious regulation.”[2]

Christian consumerism is therefore now advanced by churches who are all competing for the allegiance of the consuming public. The temptation is now for the Church to offer goods and services to meet the perceived felt needs of the population. This perpetuates consumerism and distorts the entire mission of the Church. Dallas Willard described it like this:

But spirituality in many Christian circles has simply become another dimension of Christian consumerism. We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith. And spirituality is one more thing to consume. I go to many, many conferences and talk about these things, and so often I see these people who are just consuming more Christian services.[3]

Furthermore, Calvin Miller quotes Erwin McManus as saying:

We both expect and demand to be treated like consumers. “If you want my patronage, you had better cater to my needs.” This type of ideology has become a reality for the church. In both traditional and contemporary churches, the member became the customer to whom the church was tailored.

To which Miller adds, “The odd thing about this view of member as consumer is that few see anything odd about it.”[4]

In ways they perhaps did not understand at the time, the people’s overemphasis on the power aspect of Jesus’ ministry was opening the door to consumerism, to the commodification of Jesus. This has ever and always been a temptation for the people of God. In its most grotesque form, churches do not even hide the fact. I am speaking of churches that simply acknowledge they are offering a product. “Give me your credit card number and God will bless you! Sow a seed and God will heal you!” This is consumerism. This is commercialism outright.

In its more “sophisticated” form, consumerist churches eschew such overt blasphemies but still treat the congregation like consumers to be placated instead of a body to be encouraged to Christlikeness. So preachers avoid anything that might offend people or preachers show favoritism to the wealthier members, the members who have the most potential to help them personally. Or churches invest inordinate sums to offer attractive products in the ways of programs and comforts and amenities. None of this is to suggest that there is not a place for programs in the Church or that these programs should not be well done. Rather, it is simply to suggest that consumerism comes in various guises, and most often it is disguised behind things that, in and of themselves and in appropriate measures, are not bad.

For the people, then, the healing ministry of Jesus could easily be reduced to consumerism. But there was a temptation for Jesus as well, and it is to this dynamic that we consider Nouwen’s career vs. vocation distinction. The fact that there was a temptation for Christ in this becomes clear in the next verses.

Jesus returns to the wilderness, rejects the devil’s temptation, reasserts His purpose for coming, and presses on.

Jesus has just performed an amazing miracle. His fame spreads. The people begin to come to him en masse. In response, Jesus heals many of them and casts out many demons. He has demonstrated Kingdom power and it is to this that the people come. The next verses are telling.

³⁵ And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. ³⁶ And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, ³⁷ and they found him and said to him, “Everyone is looking for you.” ³⁸ And he said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.” ³⁹ And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

Verse 35 is critically important. We see that Jesus (1) went out into the dark, (2) went to a desolate place, and (3) prayed. Let us begin our consideration of these verses by first noting Ronald Kernaghan’s observation that Mark’s account of the wilderness temptation “is striking on two counts: it tells neither how Jesus was tempted nor how he fared,” which suggests that “Mark wanted his readers to see the temptation as something that continued throughout Jesus’ ministry.”[5] This is important. In Mark’s gospel, the wilderness is an open-ended reality, something that was ongoing. The devil was always and ever trying to tempt Jesus.

To what was the devil trying to tempt Jesus? Ultimately, he was trying to tempt Jesus to abandon His calling, His vocation, we might say, the mission which He came to fulfill. To be even more specific, the devil was always trying to keep Jesus from going to the cross. The gospels are filled with the numerous ways that he attempted this. Regardless, if the devil could keep Jesus from going to the cross, he could keep Jesus from accomplishing His primary purpose in coming.

That is an observation from Mark as a book, but there are specific aspects of our particular text that need to be considered as well. New Testament scholar William Lane has pointed out some very interesting things about this:

• Mark describes the place where Jesus went in v.35 as literally a “wilderness place” though “the description is inappropriate geographically, for the land about Capernaum was cultivated during this period.”

• Mark uses this terminology of Jesus retreating to a wilderness place two other times (in 1:45 and 6:31-33). In both of those cases Jesus goes to the wilderness place (1) after He has done something miraculous and (2) “from the multitude which seeks his gifts.”

• Mark’s gospel depicts Jesus praying only three times (1:35, 6:46, 14:32-42) and in each instance the prayer is at night and alone.[6]

Once we put all of this together, we begin to understand what is happening at a deeper level in our text. Here are the bare bone facts:

• Jesus performs a miracle.

• The people come in droves asking for more miracles.

• Jesus performs more miracles.

• Jesus arises in the dark.

• Jesus goes to the wilderness.

• Jesus prays to the Father.

• The disciples come and tell Him to return to the expectant crowds.

• Jesus refuses and says they must leave.

• Jesus asserts that He has come not only to demonstrate power but also to proclaim.

• They leave the waiting crowds behind and He continues to preach and perform miracles.

My contention is that there in the darkness, alone, back in the wilderness, Jesus does battle with the devil once again, refuses the temptation of Satan, recommits once again to the Father’s will, and then leaves the place of temptation behind. And, in particular, what Jesus was leaving behind was a “career” (to use our terminology) that would have stifled His vocation. That is, He was tempted to stay in one place, to be a highly acclaimed and successful worker of miracles, to have His needs provided by Peter’s grateful mother-in-law, and to live out His days in comfort and fame.

Could Jesus have done great things staying there and healing the sick and possessed who came to Him? Indeed He could have. But would it have been the greatest thing, securing the salvation of all who would come to Him? Most certainly not. For that, Jesus had to move to the cross.

We are here because He refused to stay there.

The temptation to stay and heal was a temptation to do half of His ministry and to make of it a career. He refused.

“Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.”

Time and again, Jesus refused to abandon His vocation, His calling, His mission.

William Lane said it well when he said that Jesus’ “purpose is not to heal as many people as possible as a manifestation of the kingdom of God drawn near in his person, but to confront men with the demand for decision in the perspective of God’s absolute claim upon their person.”[7]

The devil wanted nothing more than to keep Jesus from Calvary because thereby he could keep Jesus from Easter morning. If Jesus comes out of that tomb, the devil’s greatest weapons are destroyed. To that end, the devil tempted Jesus to rest on His laurels, to stay in one place and become famous and revered. But Jesus saw a greater calling: the calling of the cross.

The world did not need a magician. The world needed a Savior. And the Savior needed the cross.

Praise God for the obedience of the Son! Praise God that Jesus pressed on the cross! For this, truly, is why He came! Which is to say, He came not to offer us a religious good. He came to offer us Himself. He came to offer us life, and that abundant and eternal and joyous!

[1] Michael Card, Mark. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012), p.38.

[2] Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Highlight Loc. 988-996.

[3] Dallas Willard, The Great Omission (New York, NY: HarperOne, 2006), 52.

[4] Calvin Miller, O Shepherd, Where Art Thou? (Nasvhille, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2006), p.50.

[5] Ronald J. Kernaghan, Mark. The IVP New Testament Commentary Series. Ed., Grant R. Osborne. Vol.2 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), p.49.

[6] William L. Lane, The Gospel According to Mark. The New International Commentary of the New Testament. Gen. Ed., F.F. Bruce (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974), p.81.

[7] William L. Lane, p.82.