Good morning! Today’s seven psalms (9-16) are a wealth of human emotion. I’m inclined to read them slowly, lovingly, in the manner that people have been reading the psalms for countless years. I’ll keep my reflection brief today so that you can enjoy a little more time with each psalm, savoring it like a piece of dark chocolate passed from tongue to cheek and back again.
Category: Daily Bible
Psalms 1-8
Good morning! Today we start the book of Psalms, which has been the songbook of the Jewish and Christian tradition for millennia. These ancient poems capture all aspects of human emotion—including some very ugly desires—in songs to God. Millions of people read the psalms each day, and I have no doubt that some of the psalms are particularly meaningful for you. As we read a number of psalms each day, rest assured that I’m not planning to comment extensively on each one! I’ll point out significant themes or verses, and look to you for sharing those psalms which are meaningful to you, and why.
Job 38-42
Good morning! Yesterday I wrote about three stages of faith according to Brian McLaren’s “Naked Spirituality”—Simplicity, Complexity, and Perplexity. Job and his friends demonstrate these stages, and today in Job 38-42 we *finally* hear God’s response to Job. One way to describe the wisdom in it is with McLaren’s fourth stage, Harmony.
Job 35-37
Good morning! Elihu continues his arguments against Job today in chapters 35-37. His arguments are not significantly new, but intensifications of what Job has already heard from his friends. Elihu cautions against self-righteousness, praises God even when the divine ways are baffling, and declares that God’s mastery of the universe rewards allegiance and awe rather than searching questions.
I trust you can make out for yourself the finer nuances of Elihu’s points in these three chapters, so I want to discuss a related theme, starting today and finishing tomorrow with the last five chapters of Job. One way of thinking about faith that has been exceedingly helpful to me in the five years since I’ve heard comes from the progressive Christian evangelical Brian McLaren. In a lecture on preaching I heard in 2011, McLaren laid out a framework that (if not imposed too rigidly) can help us understand Job and his friends in the Bible, as well as where we encounter such people in our own lives. According to McLaren, there are at least four different stages of belief that people may be in over the course of their lives. The stages do not necessarily progress in a hierarchy of worse to better, but they describe something of a trajectory that people tend to follow. I believe that Job and his friends are in these stages, while God is calling Job to further movement along the trajectory.
Job 32-34
Good morning! Today in Job 32-34 another conversation partner picks up after Job and his debate with the companions comes to an end. The young man Elihu joins the fray to speak in opposition to Job and defense of God. Elihu is angry at Job for being angry at God, and at the three companions for not having better answers against Job. In chapter 32, this young hotshot acknowledges that none of the companions had adequate responses to Job, but he stands to deliver a better response instead. He cannot hold his opinions back any longer, lest they cause him a heart attack.
Job 29-31
Good morning! Today in Job 29-31, we have no challengers speaking, only Job. He finishes his first defense against the criticisms of his companions with nostalgia for the good times of old, lament at the grievances he currently faces, and a long list of the sins he would have had to commit to deserve such suffering. He does not spend much time criticizing God’s harsh judgment (there’s been enough of that already), but instead simply lays out his case and concludes in silence.
Job 25-28
Good morning! Today’s passage from Job (25-28) moves from the human scale of Job and his problems to a cosmic creator God of all the universe. This anticipates the move when God does manifest and speak to Job at the end of the book. In a way it also implicitly accepts the contention of Job’s critics, that God is too majestic to trouble with individual human affairs. Bildad has a brief declaration of human baseness in chapter 25 before Job talks for the remaining three chapters. Job’s reply to Bildad is sarcastic, but he then goes on to declare how utterly unsearchable God is from the human vantage point, essentially agreeing with Bildad. God can’t be bothered to whisper to such as human beings.
Job 22-24
Good morning! As we continue in Job 22-24 down this path of Job’s anguished and defensive conversation with his companions about the justice of God in the world, I’m finding myself aware anew this reading of the emotional power of Job’s descriptions. The character Job uses vivid imagery that is impossible to ignore, especially when he’s describing his misery and desolation. I find myself drawn—sometimes against my will—into an emotional, sympathetic connection with Job, wincing as he describes the brutality of what it is to suffer in life-denying depression. Could this be one of the ways the writer(s) of Job sought to have an impact with the book? Perhaps it’s no accident that readers like ourselves are challenged to increase our compassion quotient. By connecting with Job, we are also made more tender to those who daily suffer around us in body and soul.
Job 18-21
Good morning! In today’s passage (Job 18-21), several of Job’s friends try to persuade him that the wicked will get their punishment in short order. Bildad starts off in chapter 18 reasserting that the ways of the wicked fail. He describes the traps, snares, frights, hunger, disease, famine, drought and infertility that await those who live without righteousness. If words were enough to accomplish a deed, Bildad would have done in the wicked several times over in this chapter of their imagined calamities.
Job 15-17
Good morning! We continue today in Job 15-17 with the “conversation” between Job and his three companions. In actually, they talk past each other for most of the time, and I wonder how Job has the mental energy to speak or write these replies! But then, I remember that this is a debate about the goodness of God, set within the context of a “what if” story. The pathos and emotional impact of Job’s writing is so powerful that we can be drawn into the emotion of the characters. Today Eliphaz describes the caustic results of challenging God for established religion, and Job vents his deep anguish.
Pastor Oby Ballinger 