Scripture Daily

Context No. 1794 of 4322 · Job

Context · Reflection

Job 24:1-16: in context

1“Why aren’t times laid up by the Almighty? Why don’t those who know him see his days? 2There are people who remove the landmarks. They violently take away flocks, and feed them. 3They drive away the donkey of the fatherless, and they take the widow’s ox for a pledge. 4They turn the needy out of the way. The poor of the earth all hide themselves. 5Behold, as wild donkeys in the desert, they go out to their work, seeking diligently for food. The wilderness yields them bread for their children. 6They cut their food in the field. They glean the vineyard of the wicked. 7They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in the cold. 8They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock for lack of a shelter. 9There are those who pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge of the poor, 10so that they go around naked without clothing. Being hungry, they carry the sheaves. 11They make oil within the walls of these men. They tread wine presses, and suffer thirst. 12From out of the populous city, men groan. The soul of the wounded cries out, yet God doesn’t regard the folly. 13“These are of those who rebel against the light. They don’t know its ways, nor stay in its paths. 14The murderer rises with the light. He kills the poor and needy. In the night he is like a thief. 15The eye also of the adulterer waits for the twilight, saying, ‘No eye will see me.’ He disguises his face. 16In the dark they dig through houses. They shut themselves up in the daytime. They don’t know the light.

Job voices a hard complaint about the world he sees. Why, he asks, does God not set times of reckoning, so that those who know him might see justice done? For the wicked go on unchecked: they move boundary stones, seize flocks, drive off the donkey of the fatherless and take the widow's ox, turn the needy out of the way. The poor are left naked in the cold, hungry as they carry the sheaves of others. Murderers and adulterers work under cover of dark. And, Job says, God does not seem to charge them with wrong.

Job is wrestling with one of the hardest questions of faith: why the wicked seem to prosper in their oppression while God appears to do nothing. He looks at the world and sees the strong preying on the weak, oppressors robbing the poor, the fatherless and the widow stripped of what little they have, the needy driven out and left to suffer, and the ones who do these things going on unpunished, comfortable, undisturbed. From out of the city, he says, the wounded cry out, and God does not seem to regard the wrong. It is an honest and troubling observation, and Job voices it plainly to God rather than pretending it away. There is something important in Job's willingness to name this. Faith does not require us to pretend that the world is just when it is not, or to suppress the troubling question of why God allows the oppressor to prosper and the poor to suffer. Job brings the question directly to God, refusing both to deny the injustice and to conclude too quickly that there is no answer. And the wider story of Scripture, though it does not give Job a tidy explanation, assures us of what Job could not fully see: that God does see, that the cry of the oppressed does reach him, and that a day of reckoning, though delayed, is not denied. The wicked are not as unaccountable as they appear; God's apparent silence is not indifference. But in the meantime, faith holds the tension Job holds: naming the injustice honestly, feeling its weight, crying out to God about it, and trusting, without yet seeing, that the God who seems silent does see and will act. To bring the troubling question of the world's injustice to God, rather than letting it either be denied or destroy our faith, is part of an honest walk with him.

When I see the strong prey on the weak and the wicked prosper unpunished while God seems silent, do I either pretend the injustice away or let it destroy my faith, or can I do as Job did, naming it honestly to God, feeling its weight, and trusting, without yet seeing, that the God who seems silent does see the cry of the oppressed and will act?

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