5“The lamp of the wicked is snuffed out; the flame of his fire stops burning.”
The gloves come off! No more Mister Nice Guy! With friends like this, who needs enemies! Job’s friend Bildad is getting frustrated because Job continues to assert his innocence. But Bildad’s theology gets in the way. His theology is that bad things happen to bad people, good thing to good people. But deep down he knows that Job is good, and yet bad things have happened. “This does not compute.” His theological brain is on overload. He can’t make sense of it, so instead of sitting with this theological tension, he tries to resolve it by digging for sin in Job. These kinds of tensions exist in our understanding of God. One of the big ones that we hear when people are in suffering is this: if God is all powerful, why does he allow suffering? He could do something to stop this, why didn’t He? War, cancer, birth-defects, car accidents, strokes, kidney failure…. The list is endless. We need to learn to sit with this theological tension. We don’t have enough information to be able to evaluate things. Our knowledge is limited, and our capacity for processing and understanding is limited. It is not possible to resolve this in this life; eternity holds the answers. So rather than trying to solve it, we must become comfortable with just sitting, trusting the Word and the Author of the Word. OR we can go into a senseless attack mode like Bildad. We can lash out at the world in anger an bitterness. Your choice!
The Arnold Journey 