On Accepting Your Ignorance

On Accepting Your Ignorance
Job 38 16-38

In my seminary in England we once produced a dramatic version of the story of Job; I was the screenwriter, and one of my colleagues was the director. She wanted to have God appearing on stage during the dialogues between Job and his friends, silently reaching out his embrace to Job to reassure Job of his presence and concern for him as he went through his ordeal. But I wouldn’t let her do so, because there is no hint of it in the book. I guess it would get in the way of the book’s point in more than one sense. Many people who go through Job’s kind of experience do not have a sense of God’s presence or concern. Further, the adversary would have been able to complain that God had compromised the test. The point was to see whether Job would stay faithful if God’s blessings disappeared. The test depended on the absolute toughness of what happened to Job. God was absent, and Job needed to experience God’s absence. God had to be tough...