Job and Jesus

Just something I wanted to note from the book I mentioned yesterday.

"If there is one uncontestable theme in the Book of Job it is that God lies entirely outside human understanding. ... If anybody manages to read all the way to the end of Job without getting the point, Yahweh himself shouts it from a whirlwind for the last four chapters.  God is not the sort of being that humans can even begin to understand.

The problem with perspective goes both ways. Human beings cannot understand God, but, at the same time, Job's God shows little ability to sympathize with human beings.  God's speeches are not even as comforting as those of Job's friends. He shows no interest in Job's feelings or his pain. He sees some people making theological arguments based on false premises and decides to spend a few hours shouting sarcastic comments out of a whirlwind in order to set them straight.  The Book of Job, therefore, shows us two perspectives - human and divine - that cannot be reconciled to each other.  Job, therefore, introduces the argument that human beings have a desperate need for reconciliation with God, which is also a central theme of the New Testament.

As one who was both fully human and fully divine, Jesus Christ could inhabit both perspectives at the same time.  He could simultaneously experience both Job's agony and God's responsibility. As Paul writes in his first epistle to Timothy, 'there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus' (I Tim. 2:5)."  

An excerpt from pages 116-117  of  Re-reading Job:Understanding the Ancient World's Greatest Poem by Michael Austin