Book Review #4 – “The Gospel According to Job” by Mike Mason
Book Review #4 – “The Gospel According to Job” by Mike Mason; published 1994 by Crossway Publ.
“Look at this carefully… we give great honor to those who endure under suffering. We have always considered those who remain steadfast to be blessed. You have heard of Job’s patient endurance, his steadfastness, and you have seen the eventual purposes of the Lord, how God was kind to him and brought it all together for him at the end of his story. That’s because the Lord was compassionate and merciful right down to the last detail.” (James 5:11).
[Full Title of Book, “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 perplexing mystery down through biblical history. If anyone deserved to be hopeless, it was Job, and yet there are more references to hope in Job than in any other book in Scripture. Job’s ordeals are all orchestrated by Satan and permitted by God, yet Job never has a hint that Satan is even in the picture at all. So Job’s plight is to live into the mystery of suffering in the dark. 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. The name of God is used over 150 times, even though 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. Isn’t it wonderful that Job’s tragedy ended up with a comedy of blessing?
Some Favorite Quotes:
“The Lord said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’ Satan answered the Lord, ‘From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.” (1:7). “Satan has no responsibilities. He is a restless, shiftless, roving hoodlum. Yet he had the very ear of God and could ask Him for whatever he wanted. Surely this is one of the deepest enigmas in the story of Job – not just that such awesome power and privileges are bestowed with such seeming casualness upon this cosmic hooligan, but that the man who suffers so monstrously at Satan’s hands is kept entirely in the dark as to the very existence of his spiritual foe. Nowhere in the long and exhaustive dialogue between Job and his friends is the idea of personal, supernatural evil so much as broached as a possibility. The whole story of the Bible might be summarized as the gradual unveiling of the profoundly personal character of both good and evil.”
“His wife said to him, ‘Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!” (2:9). “… the Devil’s onslaughts grow more and more personal, closer and closer to Job’s heart. First it was the buildings and servants that were attacked; then the man’s children were taken; next his body was struck with disease; now his wife has been alienated from him. Soon his closest friends will unwittingly become tools of the Devil as they assault him with cold comfort and shallow theology.”
“Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?” (3:23). “The moral here should be evident: God’s surest protection can sometimes take the form of apparent obstruction, of darkness and difficulty and pain. Indeed there are times when the very safest place for a believer to be is in the midst of obscurity and suffering, to all appearances cut off from God… In the last analysis the only way to escape Satan is to die – to die to oneself by being crucified with Christ, and so to be ‘hidden with Christ in God.’ Hidden from what? Why, from the world, from our own sinful flesh, and from the Devil.”
“Blessed is the man whom God corrects; so do not despise the discipline of the Almighty.” (5:17). “Yes, what Eliphaz says is true enough. But even the truth, when spoken at the wrong time or in the wrong circumstances – that is, when spoken without love – is a lie. In the long run it may be that the mishandling of truth will be shown up to be an even greater travesty, in the eyes of God, than blatant sin. When truth lies, it becomes a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and though it dresses up in the clothes of the Spirit, underneath it is thoroughly carnal.”
“My brothers are as undependable as intermittent streams that cease to flow in the dry season.” (6:17). “In many ways the mystery of Job’s friends is as deep and enigmatic as that of Job himself. What sort of faith, exactly, do these fellows have? There are large sections of the speeches of Job’s friends which, in any other setting, could hold their own as glorious hymns extolling the majesty of the one true God. Yet if we cannot condemn the sinner, we must still condemn the sin. One of the major themes of Job is the righteousness of one man as pitted against the religious hypocrisy of his peers… the subtlest of all evils, hypocrisy.”
“You gave me life and showed me kindness and steadfast love, and in your providence watched over my spirit.” (10:12). How strange it is that in this long book, containing so much suffering and so much mystery and so much strenuous grappling with the deep things of God, this little word love (hesed, mercy) – surely the key word not only in the Bible but in all of human language – occurs only twice…. Love is not gospel-bait; love is the gospel. Love is not means toward some other end; love is means and end together. In the Kingdom of God nothing moves, nothing happens, without love. God has no plan, no program, no agenda, except love.”
“Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him! I will surely defend my ways to His face.” (13:15). “With these words, God has just won His wager with Satan. On earth Job and his friends will continue to slug it out for a while longer. But in Heaven everything is now settled. Without at all realizing what he is doing, Job now delivers a direct answer to Satan’s taunt. Even if God Himself should strike him dead, Job declares, he will not cease to trust Him. Here is a kind of faith against which the Devil has nothing to say. Here is the faith of a man upon whom neither death nor Hell has any hold.”
“If a man dies, will he live again? All the days of my hard service I will wait for my renewal to come. I will wait until I arise!” (14:14). “Job must certainly be seen as a very early, perhaps the earliest, Christian prophet of the resurrection. Here his thinking on this subject is still groping and tentative. but later on, as he continues to probe the open wound of death, his statements grow increasingly bold to the point in 19:25-26 he will attain to the great climactic confession, “I know that my Redeemer lives… and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God!”
“My intercessor is my friend as my eyes pour out tear to God. On behalf of a man he pleads with God as a man pleads for his friend.” (16:20-21). “What a beautiful description this is of the intercessory work of Christ before the throne of Heaven as He defends the cause of all His followers on earth. How could Job utter such words if he himself were not a friend of Jesus? In saying that the ‘Spirit of Christ’ was in the prophets (1 Peter 1:8-11), Peter was really declaring, quite simply, that these early Old Testament believers were Christians. They were disciples of Christ in the deepest sense, people who had embraced what Paul called ‘a righteousness from God, apart from law…” (Romans 3:21).
“The Lord knows the way that I take. When He has tested me, I will come forth as gold.” (23:10). “This is the way Job is following – the way of admitting that he has no understanding of what he is passing through. He cannot analyze and diagnose his spiritual condition and come up with practical remedies, as his friends seek to do. All he can do is describe his symptoms: pain, anger, bewilderment. By our own natural strength and understanding, we human beings cannot take one step on the road to Heaven. We cannot do our own growing. This means choosing the way of growing by the darkness of His grace rather than by the light of conscious, self-determining effort.”
“Job keeps company with evildoers; he associates with wicked men.” “One of the great secrets of the spiritual life is that there is a legitimate place for coldness of heart. Evidently in the Lord’s view it is better to be stone-cold than to be lukewarm (Rev. 3:15). It is better to rebel against conventional faith than to practice that faith halfheartedly. When we are spiritually turned off, then God can revive us. For this reason, a boring, lifeless church service can be more sinful than drunkenness or adultery.”
“Who is this who darkens My counsel with words without knowledge?” (38:2). “These words are a stark reminder that all human thinking and speaking and writing on the topic of religion, however lofty or even inspired it may be, ultimately falls short of the reality of the living God. Perhaps it is not so much Job and his theology that the Lord here singles out to pass judgment upon, as theology itself, the whole bumbling project of human God-talk in all its presumptuous inadequacy. Although Paul himself employed theology in all his writing, the essence of his gospel is not theology but rather a living relationship with Jesus. Christ is the end of theology.”
“Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.” (42:3). “There is a strange thing that happens at the point when we finally, somehow, manage to give up wrestling with matters that are too complex, too lofty, too wonderful for the human mind to understand. What happens is this: suddenly, inexplicably, we do understand! For there is knowledge that is beyond mere knowing. Probably the last of all the parts to be wholly offered to God is our intellect, our compulsive need to comprehend everything, to create a sense of reasonable order where none is apparent. The work of Jesus is to lead us out of ourselves, out of the stale confines of our minds, and into the arena of mystery and spirit, of tears and of blood, of thunder and of the great silence of God. His work is to engage our souls in that most terrifying of all human ventures: Trust.”
“My servant Job will pray for you, and I will accept his prayer and not deal with you according to your folly.” (42:8). “Before his trials, it may never have occurred to the humble Job that his peers were in fact not his peers, that their sanctity fell far short of his own, and that without his specific prayers for them they might be in real spiritual danger. Job might never have faced this hard truth, nor developed the spiritual muscle to pray through it, without first enduring his long night of suffering and persecution. Who knows but that the whole reason for Job’s ordeal was precisely this – that in the end his friends might be saved through his prayers. Significantly, it is only after Job prays for his friends that the Lord finally heals him and makes him prosperous again.”