Eliphaz the Temanite and the Problem with People
The war in Ukraine continues even after a year and a half of fighting. A recent terrorist attack by Hamas into Israel sparked a response that could bubble into a war that includes other countries in the middle east. We pray for peace, the return of hostages, and the safety of Palestinian civilians who are caught in the crossfire. Other conflicts rage throughout the world, which get less attention from the American media. Six African countries have gone through coups in the last couple years. Last month, Azerbaijan attacked the state of Artsakh, as human rights organizations feared that the Armenian population there was at risk of genocide. Domestically, inflation continues to make lives hard for the working class and poor, especially now as student loan repayments have come back. All this is happening while we watch the government continue to fail to pass a spending bill that will prevent a government shutdown, a deadline that is rapidly approaching.
In times like this, those of us facing the turmoil of life may wonder how to make sense of it all. Certainly, Job would have been feeling something similar. The book of Job is very unique within the Bible. It is an extended poetic debate between Job, his friends, and eventually God, largely around the question of why bad things happen to good people. The frame story establishes that Job is a righteous man, but he loses everything, all his property, his livestock, even his children, in a series of terrible tragedies. He is even afflicted with a terrible, painful sickness, but still he doesn’t speak badly of God. Rather, he curses the day he was born and sits in mourning.
His friends initially sit with him in silence, but eventually they make the case that he must deserve what he got. The innocent don’t suffer, but by the end of the book, God condemns Job’s friends for speaking without understanding. Ultimately, the answer to the question that this book offers is a shrug. It isn’t for us to know why bad things happen to good people. God’s ways are unsearchable, beyond our comprehension. This may appear unsatisfying to those going through hardship, but I’m not sure the book ever set out to achieve human satisfaction in the first place. Job places much more importance on God’s power, sovereignty, and otherness. God is so far beyond anything we can understand that it doesn’t make sense for us to say that God is wrong, and whether that answer satisfies us or not doesn't matter. We need to accept the reality that some things are mysteries for which there is no satisfactory answer.
However, early in the book, we do see something that might give us some comfort in times of struggle. In chapter four, Job’s friend Eliphaz starts talking to him and his speech continues into chapter five. In Job 5:6-8, Eliphaz says, “For misery does not come from the earth, nor does trouble sprout from the ground, but humans are born to trouble just as sparks fly upward. As for me, I would seek God, and to God I would commit my cause.”
There’s a few important parts of this. First, while Eliphaz claiming that misery doesn’t come out of the ground may be indicating that Job is responsible for his own suffering, it also is a good reminder about the fundamental goodness of Creation. Evil doesn’t spring up from the ground because the ground isn’t evil. Scientifically speaking, we might say that the ground is neutral, amoral, simply not interested in doing good or bad. However, from a Christian perspective, we can assert that it isn’t just neutral, the ground is good. God created the earth to be good, providing rich blessings to all. If the ground doesn’t bless us, this is a corruption of its original purpose, a result of human sin according to Genesis 3. Our hardships don’t come from God’s good Creation. Where do they come from?
“Humans are born to trouble,” says Eliphaz. It isn’t the ground. It is us. We are the source of our own problems. Trouble doesn’t enter the picture until we talk about humans. And that corresponds to reality pretty well. While we cannot necessarily account for natural disasters, most of the hardships that humans experience come from either outright hatred, fear, or simply callous mismanagement. Even most deaths caused by natural disasters could be prevented by better management of resources, better engineering and building materials, and improvements to search and rescue operations. Our relationships to one another, whether personally or on very large scales, cause our problems. One could even argue that this is true in the case of Job. Two of the five tragedies that befell him were raids by people and another one could easily have been attributed to poor building practices. Even in writing about divine testing of a human, the writers of Job still imagined people doing the damage.
But if we are the root cause of our own problems, why haven’t we improved things yet? All we need to do is stop hating each other, plan and manage resources better, and communicate effectively and most of our woes will go away. Unfortunately, our sin goes too deep. We fear that someone would take advantage of it and get ahead and cause the same problems even after a solution. And that fear is probably well founded. People often abuse power and mistreat others for their own gain. We would need everyone to agree to stop doing that and genuinely love others as well as they love themselves. But that seems impossible. There will always be hate.
Our only hope is to commit our cause to God. If there is any chance that the entire world can learn to love enough to end our troubles, we will need to rely on God, setting aside our own conventional wisdom and embracing God’s call for us to listen and learn love. Jesus sets an example of praying for enemies and forgiving readily, even before an apology is made. God teaches us to set grudges aside and learn mercy and forgiveness.
The sad truth is that all of the conflicts our world faces today are complicated. There is no easy answer to the problems posed. We cannot simply take one side and say that they are guiltless or that their enemies are pure evil. We can argue all we want about who is right and who is wrong, and this isn’t to say that we shouldn’t hold people accountable for evil things they do, but determining who is most right or wrong won’t solve the problem or end the violence. The only thing that has a chance of accomplishing that is God’s love breaking down the barriers and forming new relationships between people that will, just as God’s creation from the very beginning, be good.
