Friendship with God: The Final Frontier to Which Job Points
I am on record (in Losing Susan) as saying that the second-best book of the Bible is the Song of Songs. It is a deep exploration of how sexual longing is a fitting way to speak of the love of humans and God for each other. The late theologian Robert Jenson shows (you can find the details of the argument throughout his commentary)1 that the literal meaning of the text (the meaning intended by the author) just is the allegorical meaning. (In many places, the surface story breaks down into incoherence.) If sexual longing can serve such a high function as to be a way for us to speak of the mutual love of God for us and us for him, then there is nothing intrinsically wrong with it. The arguments of the book in your hands—that marriage is the context for human sexual intimacy; that marriage is a form of friendship; that friendship, in this way unlike marriage, is natively expansive; that our human fulfillment does not require sexual intimacy but does require the development and deepening of friendships—none of these would gainsay the beautiful truths of the second-best book of the Bible. Indeed, one could see the Song of Songs as the culmination of the line of thought about loving God and God loving us—a line of thought that, as we have seen, is very slow to emerge in the Bible and yet leads us ultimately to the inner life of God himself.
However, I am also on record (also in Losing Susan) as holding that the best book of the Bible is the book of Job. In chapter 6 above, we saw how Job is a book about human friendship; it arguably shows us more about friendship than anything else in the Old Testament. And in other places, we have noticed how divine friendship is a slowly emerging desire: from Abraham (called God’s friend because God shared his mind with him) and Moses (who spoke with God as one does with a friend) to its fulfillment in Jesus, who opens such possibility of intimacy with God to all people. Now I want to say more about the book of Job, for in that book, as it turns out, we can see coming together both human and divine friendships in a manner that takes us right up to the verge of the Christian mystery.
First, there is the revelation of true human friendship. We have noted that Job’s three friends come to him immediately after his catastrophe; they sit with him in silence, the silent solidarity of friends in the face of evil. Once their conversations with Job begin, they quickly take on an edge; the friends find themselves offended; their speeches fail of mutual comprehension. Yet we should note one thing that does not happen: the friends do not, in a huff, turn away from Job and go away. They persist with him—and he with them. In this imperfect world, finite and mystifying, communications can be difficult. Sometimes friends need to tell us things that we don’t want to hear but are good for us. Sometimes friends tell us things that they think we need to hear even though they are not good for us. No words are perfect, no communication perfect, in this world of ours.
Finally, God takes Job on that journey to the wild side. Job sees how full of marvels and powerful and frightening realities the world is; he beholds the world as far bigger and more alien than ever he had thought. As a result of taking up God’s invitation, Job takes in how small and yet infinitely precious is the little, protected human world. He, and his friends, and all humanity—it’s all just “dust and ashes.” And yet it is beautiful. We see that Job realizes this beauty in the names he gives his daughters, names that signify beauty. And we see it in his adjustment, entirely unprecedented, of his last will and testament, in which those daughters will inherit equally alongside their brothers.
Let us summon up one last time that final scene of the book of Job, that tender scene of communion. His friends are there, and his brothers, and his sisters, and all his acquaintances; gifts are brought and food is eaten. And they all comfort Job “over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him” (Job 42:11). But let us note: they do not shake their fists at the Lord. They are not angry with God; they do not curse (as Satan wrongly predicted Job would). They simply accept that evils may come upon us from the Lord, who, in his confoundedly mysterious way, has made a universe in which such things happen. The Lord is responsible for what has happened to Job. But he is also responsible for Leviathan—and he has provided a corner of the universe where human beings can live together, and be friends.
This final scene takes us, I say, right up to the gospel. It shows us the accomplishment of human friendship, which is the work of the incarnation of Jesus, who on the eve of his death says, “I have called you friends.” Jesus makes friendship. But there is more.
Job wanted to speak to God “man to man,” to put it in old-fashioned terms. He wanted to address God with dignity, as an equal, not as a child addresses a parent and certainly not as a poverty-stricken, impecunious, boil-covered, tiny subject might address the king of his realm. He wanted to talk. In the online mercantile world, we know the frustrations of that anonymity of addressee: an electronic transaction goes wrong, and we click all over the website to try to find some way to get through to someone, some way to make a contact. We want someone to talk to! Job wanted that—with God. He did not call it friendship, but he wanted it.
When finally God does speak to Job, he says, in effect, “You wanted to speak to me? Here I am; let’s have some Q&A.” God appears in awe and power, although also with that sense of saying, “Please, let’s have this conversation.” The conversation points not only to the wild awesomeness of the vast universe beyond Job’s ken but also to their inequality. Job and God are not on the same level. Some wit has summarized the book of Job as saying, “I’m God and you’re not.” That certainly is in the mix of things.
Yet before the catastrophe comes upon Job, and again at the end, there is communication with God in the form of prayer. Both at the beginning and at the end, Job in the role of an intercessor turns to God. It is almost the first thing we learn in the book, that Job regularly offers early morning sacrifices for his sons (in case, in their customary feasting, they have “sinned, and cursed God in their hearts” [Job 1:5]).2 And at the end of the book, he offers prayer for his friends. This latter prayer, significantly, is done after the Lord speaks directly to Eliphaz concerning his speech and that of the other two friends: “Ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (42:7). The Lord is displeased with what they have said about him. But we should not fail to see that the Lord actually speaks, and speaks directly, not only to Job but also to Eliphaz. Not only does Job get the satisfaction of his desire to hear the Lord speak to him, but that desire of Job’s is fulfilled also for Eliphaz. What was it that was wrong with what Eliphaz and the others had said about God? Was their mis-speech about God as bad as cursing God in their hearts (which, at the beginning, Job feared his sons might have done)? This seems unlikely. How then had they failed to speak “the thing that is right”? Could it be that they never desired God to speak to them?
The final scene of the book, that communion in Job’s home with his friends and brothers and sisters, all his acquaintances, with their eating and their gift giving and their commiseration—that warm, homely communion—comes about only because Job was willing to pray (and did pray) for his friends. Job’s prayer is a seed pregnant not only with the restoration of human friendship but with the establishment of divine friendship as well. Job prays and thus talks with God, who has talked with him. Job prays among others for Eliphaz, who failed to speak truly about God and to whom God nonetheless also spoke. With his prayer at the end, we have the profoundest sense in which Job takes us to friendship—to divine friendship, the final frontier of the gospel.
For when Jesus shares his mind with his disciples, the content of his sharing is everything he has received from the Father. Jesus, being at once fully God and fully human, can give grace (the Holy Spirit) to his disciples whereby they are lifted up to a level equal with God. If the disciples are no longer, thanks to Jesus’ death, merely his disciples but fully friends with him who laid down his life for them, then they are also by that very fact friends of God.
This is not yet manifest in Job, but we can see it as the frontier to which Job has led us up. It is the case, as Robert Jenson used to teach us, that the Triune God is present throughout the Old Testament.3 He is the creator who gives everything existence for as long as it exists. But he has also, always, wanted to be with his creation, to be among them, in a pillar of fire, in a cloud, on a mercy seat. And he is through it all, also, the wind that blows history along, the Spirit whose guarantee is that there is a future of meaningfulness for us, that at the end, our lives will not turn out to signify nothing.
The God of the Old Testament is the Triune identity of Christian faith, but in the Old Testament, he has not yet effectuated friendship with human beings at large. That takes his incarnation, his becoming a character in the story, one of us, full stop. It requires that Jesus’ life be fulfilled in death, offered as the high moment in which friendship is sealed. Job, it seems to me, wanted precisely this, even if he lacked the words for it. He wanted not just to speak to God as in a court, not just to speak to God as a legal opponent, but to speak to God as a friend.
The Two Aspects of Friendship with God
What does it mean for God to be our friend? This question requires two answers, each of them necessary. It will not be clear how the two answers hold together logically. But the testimony of countless Christians is that, like the two natures in the one divine person of Jesus Christ, these two answers can be held together in an integral human life.
The first answer is that we know God in his awesome otherness, in his power. This powerful God is the creator of the ever-expanding interstellar spaces in which any of us would instantly die. He is the power beneath volcanoes. He made Leviathan. If I may speak personally, he created Susan, gave her to me as my wife, and then took her away. Also personally, Job could say that he gave him his children and wealth and community prestige and practical wisdom—and then took it all away, covering his body with boils. But there is more to this first answer. God, as we know him in this awe-ful-ness, is also, we can see, not indifferent to us. He knows us; and however inchoately, we grasp that his intentions to us are not malevolent—which is to say, Job may not grasp how God is good, but he knows he is not evil.
So, first, we know God as benevolent power. But second, to be God’s friend means we also know him as, in some way, our equal. We are not equal to God as creatures—Job can have no answer when God asks, “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). Rather, equality comes to us by grace, by God’s pure gift. God wants to be our friend, and so he makes it possible by lifting us up to his level of being. This grace is the gift of God’s Spirit.
And the result is quite ordinary. It means we can talk to God, and he can talk to us, just as we would talk to anyone else.
Grace
Here is how I start my days, now that I’m coming to the end of this book. I rise about five o’clock and make some tea. I read Morning Prayer, often going very slowly through the Psalms and the assigned Old Testament reading in particular. If I find I’m not paying attention (which often happens), I go back and read again. About 5:30 I turn to a theological book that I am studying and read it closely for another half hour. Then I go for a run, just a mile or so (I’m an old guy) down an urban trail where there used to be train tracks. There’s a coffee house at the end of my run. I take my journal with me, and with a “tall bold” and a cup of water, I write.
I write to God. I tell him what the temperature is, what I’m wearing, how my body feels, when I got up, what I did yesterday, what’s on my mind, and so forth. Sometimes I pose questions to him. And the way he talks to me is very ordinary. It’s just what a good friend would do. He shows me back myself, helps me see who I am. He may bring something to mind, give me a thought I hadn’t had before. He can open a horizon, offer an insight into other people, give me a task. Or sometimes he just reminds me of simple truths that are pertinent to the moment. If I’m anxious, he might put me in mind of his sovereignty over the future. “Victor, this is what you can do today. Let’s put off thinking about next week or next year!” He makes me smile at myself.
It has taken me a while to get to this point, but I no longer try to hide my sins from my journal. It’s more important for me to write to God about them than to worry about what a future reader may think. (Dear future reader, pray for me, and if I seem an awful person, pray for me all the more.) As I write to God with such openness as I can, he helps me understand myself more truthfully. Even when uncomfortable, self-knowledge is a good thing, particularly when offered by a friend.
When my coffee is gone, I wrap up and run back home, and the day begins. God is with me through the day, and I try to remember that. He’s a very good friend. He never misunderstands me, though I often misunderstand myself. He’s never preoccupied. Presence, tenderness, clarity, truth, love—these are always there.
The danger with this sort of friendship practice is that it can turn Jesus into merely a chum—what might be called an emphasis on his humanity at the expense of his divinity. That’s why our friendship also needs practices that bring to mind the awe-ful power of God, which is of course fully present in Jesus. This one to whom I can write familiarly is also the one who holds me in being. Indeed, I might even write that. You give me life and breath. You are like a hand wrapped around my beating heart. You can command the tsunami to stop. You give and you take away. There is no end to your power and strength and mystery. And nonetheless, you also love me and let me write to you as if we were simply friends.
Which we are, and into which, please God, may we grow forever.