Book Review #4 – “The Gospel According to Job” by Mike Mason (this post is in process and incomplete at thi time)
Book Review #4 – “The Gospel According to Job” by Mike Mason; published 1994 by Crossway Publ.
[Full title, “The Gospel According to Job: An Honest Look at Pain and Doubt from the Life of One Who Lost Everything.” (448 pages).
Brief Bio of Author. Mr. Mike Mason has a literature degree, as well as a seminary degree from Regent College in Vancouver, BC. He was born in Canada in 1952 and has lived there ever since with his wife and daughter. He has authored six devotional books, most notably the award-winning “The Mystery of Marriage,” as well as many short stories and two children’s fantasy novels. He considers this work on Job to be a devotional commentary, and hopes that readers will transform the readings into their own personal prayers.
Background of This Book. As reported by Mr. Mason, this book was developed during a time of great personal suffering, when he was in “desperate straits.” He decided to turn to an intense study of Job for many years, jotting down thoughts on scraps of paper and whatever he could get his hands on, including toilet paper, in the middle of the night, at dawn, whenever “the lightning struck.” Those scraps of paper began to grow into stacks of notes that were basically short meditations. As Mason says, “The chapters of this book were written not with ink but with blood. Virtually every page was first composed under great pressure, at odd moments, done not in an ivory tower but in an ebony hole. This book records every inch of a tunnel that was dug with a teaspoon from barbed wire to freedom.” The book is organized for easy reference, moving from the opening “Prologue” in Job 1-2, to the conclusion when Job is “full of years” in chapter 42. Mr. Mason expertly combines the skills of being both systematic and imaginative, scholarly and creative.
From the Author’s Introduction. “The Lord never gave Job an explanation for all he had been through. His only answer was Himself. But as Job discovered, that was enough. Anyone who has ever suffered knows that there is no such thing as ‘getting a grip on oneself’ or ‘pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.’ The only bootstrap in the Christian life is the Cross. Sometimes laying hold of the Cross can be comforting, but other times it is like picking up a snake. Faith involves our deepest passions engaged by the reality of God. The person of faith is one who, like Job, knows what it is to be torn apart by the enormity of God. Just the presence in Scripture of a book so dark, so chaotic, so thoroughly eccentric as Job, should come as an immense comfort to any suffering believer. For the book says, in effect, ‘This is what faith is often like. So do not be surprised if you find yourself confused, doubting, afflicted, all but crushed. It does not mean you have lost favor with God.”
A Little History to the Book of Job in Scripture. The book of Job has remained a bit of a mystery down through biblical history. Traditionally it is considered the oldest book in the Bible, predating even the Book of Genesis. It has stood the test of time in terms of it being a classic masterpiece of literature, and yet scholars are undecided where to place it. There is no reference to Israel, or the Temple, or the Law of Moses, or to any Scripture at all in fact. Job hasn’t come down in history as a religious figure, since there is nothing remotely Jewish about him, even though the book is a crucial part of the Hebrew Bible. Job is somehow both Jew and Gentile, or neither, depending on how you want to look at it. No one has ever been able to locate “the land of Uz,” so Job is both eastern and western, biblical and extrabiblical, sort of an Everyman that we can all relate to. According to Mason, the Land of Uz might as well be the Land of Oz. Job the man is traditionally considered to have lived for 240 years, with him being seventy years old when the story begins. So, this book could be placed in the patriarchal era, probably somewhere in the period between Noah who died at the age of 950 years and Abraham who died at 175 years. So, there is something free-wheeling and unpredictable about this story of Job, something wild and adventuresome to those of us who like to explore Scripture and the Faith that it inspires.