Living in the Spirit
September 29, 2015

Scripture Reading: Job 1:1, 2:1-10

So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord, and inflicted loathsome sores on Job from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. Job took a potsherd with which to scrape himself, and sat among the ashes.

 Then his wife said to him, ‘Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.’ But he said to her, ‘You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?’ In all this Job did not sin with his lips. –Job 7-10

Bad things do happen to good people. We get all tangled up in affixing blame in our society. I find this need to affix blame is never helpful and can be destructive. There is a difference between blame and cause. We do need to plume the depths of cause when tragedy happens to determine our course of action. For example, many of the first responders in the 9/11 attach on the twin towers in New York City are suffering grave illnesses as a result of the contaminated air they breathed when they rushed into the area to save lives. It is important to know the cause so we can development appropriate treatments. It is a waste of time, precious resources, and energy to dwell on blame.

Getting at the root cause of problems in society is complex while we can take one segment of a problem, contaminated air for example, and deal with it, we still haven’t explained why the bombing happened in the first place and what our response should be.

This is exactly where we find Job in our scripture today. His wife calls on him to curse God, blame God for inflicting such pain and suffering. The imagery is stunning. This poor man scraping open infected wounds with a broken piece of a clay pot. He refused to blame God, I think, because while he could not understand what was happening to him, he trusted that it was not of God. It went against all Job had ever known or experienced of God.

There is evil in the world with which we must deal every day. Our challenge is to keep the faith that God is greater than any evil and that we as God’s followers in the world today are to work with all due diligence to addresses the causes and consequences of evil as we work toward the full fruition of the Kingdom of God where there is no room for evil.

Prayer: Forgive us when we waste our energies on affixing blame. Empower our work in creating a just world. Amen.

All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of American. Used by permission. All rights reserved.