It is the aversion of God's face, what feels like his absence, that is the psalmist's greatest pain. C.S. Lewis wrote after the death of his wife, "Where is God? . . . Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence."
This is hardest part of winter of the soul. It's not just this or that bad event.
We can't find God. He doesn't answer. "Why do you reject me? Why do you hide your face?"
Job and the Absence of God
Certain books of the Bible — Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and many of the psalms — are wintry books. But in all human history, no one has embodied winter more than a man named Job. In his book we come to the page where Waldo is hardest to find.
The story begins, "In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job." The reader has to try to figure out where Uz was. The directions are deliberately vague: "He was the greatest man among all the people of the East." The writer's point is that Job is not a part of Israel. You could put the setting like this: "A long time ago, in a place far, far away . . .
The problems in this book are the problems of the human race. All of us will wrestle at some time with the absence of God. In the beginning everything is as we think it should be. Job is "blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil." He is so cautious he even offers daily sacrifices for his children — "just in case," he thinks. Maybe they sinned. Maybe God is easily offended.
God gives him a wonderful life. The amount of blessing he experiences is directly proportional to the amount of obedience he offers.
But winter is coming to Uz. Uz will be a place where very bad things happen to a very good man. Uz will be a place, not just where suffering comes, but where it comes without warning and without explanation, creating confusion and despair.
Then suddenly in the story there's a radical shift in scenery. There is a dispute between Satan and God, and Satan is allowed to wreak havoc on Job's life. Philip Yancey notes that the writer sets up this book like a play, but the action is going on in two locations. Picture a theater with two stages; a lower stage and an upper stage.
This is crucial to the story: We know what is going on in both settings, but the characters on earth do not. All they can see is what's happening on earth. All Job knows is that he has lost his livestock, his wealth, his servants, and his children. We wait to see his response.
He grieves. He worships. He falls to the ground. He cries, "May the name of the LORD be praised." In all this, he "did not sin." We switch back to the upper stage for one more brief conversation. At first glance, the action in heaven looks very strange. It looks like a cosmic wager between God and Satan, where God uses Job and his family as pawns to win a bet. But it's not.
The key question on the upper stage — in fact, the key question to the whole book — comes when Satan asks, "Does Job fear God for nothing?"
In other words, Satan is saying, "Job is devoted to you and worships you because it is in his self-interest. Quid pro quo." Satan is charging God with being naive. "You think Job loves you. The truth is, he loves you the way children love the ice cream man; the way aging actresses love Botox. Turn off the faucet of blessing and watch how fast he turns off the faucet of devotion."
The question is, can a human being hold on to God in the face of suffering? After all, suffering is the test of love. So Job gets hit with a second wave of trouble. This time there are some subtle differences in his response. He does not fall to the ground in worship. He does not say, "The name of the LORD be praised."
