Canter Bridge

‘He rushes at me like a warrior’, Job says of God.

In working up to this declaration of divine warfare against his broken life, Job is relentless regarding the plight of a man who once walked in friendship with God but has seen that amity turned inexplicably into violence:

He shattered me / He seized me by the neck and crushed me / He has made me his target / His archers surround me / Without pity he pierces my kidneys / And spills my gall on the ground / Again and again he bursts upon me.

Then, that awful description of celestial ambush:

He rushes at me like a warrior.

Job cannot know the drama that the book’s prologue has alerted us to imagine lurking behind the scenes of the man’s disintegration. Presumably he is ignorant of that satan’s cynical challenge to the integrity of worship. He knows only his boils and the aching loss in his heart where children and grandchildren once danced.

‘Even if I speak’, the verbose sufferer tells his friends, ‘my pain is not relieved’. The lush poetry of Job ‘s complaint may delight us. It does nothing for him except stave off the sharpening accusation of his friends.

What we readers know—a mystery from which Job is excluded—is that his description of the Lord’s warrior-like assault is not accurate. Strange as it seems, his perception of events is more true than that of the friends whose description of the facts is arguably more aligned with reality. Yet it is not accurate in the simplest sense of the word.

The Lord has not declared war on Job. He has simply relaxed his protection of this pious Easterner long enough for enmity to touch him. He is not Job’s enemy.

Saul’s victims must have felt something similar of their would-be executioner. ‘He rushes at me like a warrior’ seem words oddly appropriate of this pursuer of the Jesus movement. Their lives suddenly ransacked by his pious indignation, dragged off to Jerusalem to meet their accusers, they must have wondered whether God himself had not turned against them.

He had not. He remained inexplicably passive as suffering first probed, then broke down the door and dragged them off in a violent assault upon all that they had believed to be true.

‘My spirit is broken / My days are cut short / The grave awaits me’, Job had cried. Words like those might well have fallen from Jerusalemite lips as Saul had his way.

Yet God had not become their enemy.

Nor ours.