Wednesday 15 April 2020

Psalm: Psalm 114

Background

Job, a righteous man, loses his wealth, health and children but refuses to turn against God, though he argues with every fibre of his being with God for some answers.

His main complaint in the whole book is the seeming ‘absence’ of God. In the climax of this passage, he longs for a relationship with God in which God would call and Job would answer him (verse 15). Meanwhile, he has lots of questions and no answers!

Verses 1-2 – Job continues his ongoing protest with God by describing how brief is human existence and full of troubles. His "few of days and full of troubles" reverses the usual Biblical good life as "full of years".

Verses 3-4 – Job protests in an I-You relationship, about God’s harsh judgment of him, when ‘you’ (God) can bring a clean thing out of an unclean one, which no human can.

Verses 5-6 – Since ‘you’ (God) already know the number of our days, why can’t you leave us in peace and look somewhere else, stop wasting time ‘looking at’ and ‘judging’ someone like me?

Verses 7-9 – When a tree is cut down it can sprout again (verses 10-12) but when humans die that is it!

Verse 13 – Sheol is the place in Hebrew thinking where the dead go to. It is at the centre of the earth, though Job 26:5 suggests it as beneath the sea. Job pleas for ‘you’ (God) to hide me safely in Sheol, until your anger has passed. Give me a set time when ‘you’ will remember me.

Verse 14 – Job has an intuitive desire, premonition, maybe borne out of his love of God, that he might live again. He would patiently wait, serving God, until his release from death would come.

Verse 15 – In this amazing moment of resurrection the desire of Job’s heart fulfilled. Not an absent God, but a God who is present. Restored relationship. ‘You’ (God) would call and I would answer. ‘You’ would long for me, the work of your hands.

Verse 16 – ‘You’ would not give me, Job, a small span of time on earth, or track my faults, but would contain and deal with them.

To Ponder:

• If you had been in Job’s place, what would you have said to God, maybe imagining yourself a Job in our present pandemic crisis? What questions would you throw at God?
• Do you, like Job, have an intuitive, in-your-bones hope for resurrection and life not ending but changing after death? How would you describe this? What images do you find helpful? And what might this look like in our present context for our life together?
• The greatest suffering for Job is the sense of God’s absence to him. He talks and God does not seem to answer. Have there been times when God has seemed to be absent to you and how have you got through this?
• Despite everything that happens, Job seems confident that his sins are not a problem for God. How do you cope with a sense of your sins?