God creates, cares for, gives to, and delights in animals that don't appear to be good for anything. Why should God love a world like that? Anne Dillard writes, "Because the creator loves pizzazz." He revels in the beauty of the least strategic creature. What God is really telling Job is, "I'm worth it. Life, following me-it's all worth it. Don't give up. This pain is not going to last forever. I am the kind of God who is worth getting close to."
That is because God is gratuitously good — and uncontrollably generous — and irrationally loving. He just gives for no reason at all. It's his nature.
"God loves pizzazz." Maybe that's why we're here.
Made to Charm Him
My favorite author writes,
And when I begin to think about God's wild extravagance, his wastefulness, his passion for the unnecessary and the excessive and the completely useless, I am struck by a thought so wonderfully freeing I can do nothing but laugh. What if that extravagance extends to me? I am not a soldier for God, or a valued servant in the kingdom. I am a jester! I am the celestial equivalent of a peacock — a tiara — a talking doll. We were not made to serve God. We were made to charm him.
Job never does find out about the conversation in heaven. In that sense, his story is our story. On this earth we live on the lower stage. Winter comes, and we don't know why.
But Job finds out about something better. He finds out who God is.
"My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you." That's enough.
God knows. God cares.
When God himself came to the earth, he came in winter. Jesus, like Job, was known as a "man of sorrows." He was acquainted with grief.
Where was God? He was on the ash heap. He, like Job, was so torn by suffering that no one recognized him: "We considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted." He himself would go through the winter of the absence of God: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
On the cross is the ultimate paradox: God experiencing the absence of God so that he can draw close to us in our loss and grief and even in our God-forsakeness.
Nicholas Wolterstorffwrote a book called Lament for a Son when he entered into winter after his son died in a an accident while mountain climbing. Woltersdorff writes of how we are told that no one can see the face of God and live. "I always thought that meant no one can see God's glory and live. A friend suggested that perhaps it means no one can see God's suffering and live. Or perhaps his suffering is his glory."
Never did we see his glory more clearly than when he was on the cross, taking our God-forsakeness on himself. Karl Barth wrote of the great miracle that God would rather be the suffering God of a suffering people than the blest God of an unblest people.
If it is winter in your life, and you wonder where God is, you don't have to wonder anymore. He is the God of the ash heap. Jesus was, in a sense, never closer to us than when he was farthest from the Father. Perhaps his suffering is his glory.
The Glory of Maybelline
Most of the last chapter in the book of Job is an epilogue. God tells Job's comforters, "I am angry with you ... because you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has."
(Imagine their amazement: Job complains about God, they stick up for God, they know they're right; then God shows up and says, "No, Job was right.")
God says that if Job will pray for them, he will forgive them. We can guess that Job and his friends had a very interesting conversation. He prays. God forgives.
Then, in the final words the writer tells something we would tend to miss even though ancient readers would catch it. He tells us that Job had more children, then he gives names of Job's daughters, but not of his sons. In Hebrew genealogies that was unprecedented and unheard of. What's more, they are strange names. The subject of names in the Bible is worth a book on its own; they are vital expressions of human character and divine intent.
