2.3 Job as God on Trial

• The Court

  The language used in 1:6ff is reminiscent of a law court appropriate for the time of the patriarchs. Unlike today's special buildings and titled offices, a law court in ancient times existed de facto at the heart of the business district of a walled city, namely, at the city gates. Here the elders of the city would collect, and here, overlooking the trade moving in and out of the city, decisions would be made that affected the life of the city. One might think of it as a combination stock market, city hall and the savings bank. The important feature that determined whether court was in session was the presence of the important people, the elders of the city. This is exactly the situation we find in 1:6.
  
  We are introduced to a gathering of the angels (God's messengers) and the LORD. (Whenever the word appears in capitals, the translators are indicating that it is the special name of God, the tetragrammaton, YHWH. This is the personal name of God revealed to Moses, and should not be taken to be a generic "god".) This is a gathering of powerful beings, since not only is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob present, but also his powerful agents who execute his decisions, the angels. Adding to this list of powerful persons, is the being called "Satan", the Adversary (or Accuser). This is almost a legal term, sort of like saying in English, "the prosecution". The title is correctly descriptive, because in short while, Satan will be making an accusation.
  
  The introduction 1:7-8 to the accusation of 1:9 should not be viewed as banter, my impression is that it may be the protocol used to introduce a legal complaint, and in particular, a law suit by an outsider who has just arrived at the city gate. There is perhaps also a sense that the court case has been continuing for some time, and Satan has just returned from gathering more evidence. Note that the court scenes in chapters 1 and 2 have no corresponding scene at the end of the book, no conclusion. It doesn't appear that the court case is decided, or even that the book of Job is about this law suit. Rather, this law suit appears to be ongoing, even perhaps to the present time, and this is just one televised episode it. This may then explain the apparent "baiting" of the LORD, when He asks Satan if he has noticed Job. Surely such a view of God doesn't fit in with the rest of the book, it clashes with the apparent devotion that Job has toward Him. Rather it appears to me that they are both presenting their evidence to the court; Satan claiming worldwide support for his position, God presenting His star counter-example. The original complaint of Satan is not stated, but as the dialogue continues it becomes clear what is the substance of Satan's lawsuit.
  
  If it be the case that we are seeing an episode from a long lawsuit, then it is not so surprising that Satan plays no more role in the book after chapter 2. This is not a story about "war in heaven", this is not a story about the struggle of titans, this is a cameo of one man's life used as evidence in an ongoing court case between Satan and the LORD. It is an odd court case, because Satan speaks not just for himself, but for a large majority of "Mesopotamians". In a sense, God is on trial for abusing his privileges. Therefore one should not view Satan as a coequal with God nor as a personification of evil, rather he is merely the spokesman for widely held beliefs about God. And it is these beliefs, this court case, that provides the backdrop for the story of Job. These beliefs might be summarized in modern parlance as "the problem of Evil", or as a popular book title has it, "When Bad Things Happen to Good People". Satan's function in this book is as the premier spokesman for the contingent that claims "God isn't fair".




• The Accuser

  Satan, both his person and function, has been seen with such widely conflicting views that his role in this book of Job needs some clarification. Let me caricature several views of Satan.
  
  
  • The Prosecution:
    Some take the book of Job entirely out of the context of Biblical canon, and argue that all we know about Satan is in these first 2 chapters. In that case, they say, we shouldn't view him as being an "outsider" to God's court, rather he is just an angelic being who is assigned the function of "the Devil's advocate", the court jester, the foil for demonstrating God's wisdom.
    
    The difficulty I have with this position, besides the weight of other Biblical evidence, is the emotional way Satan talks to God. This is not an intellectual exercise for Satan, this is not the tone of a willing servant of YHWH, there is a clear attitude of rebellion, of insurrection in the dialogue. Nor does God address Satan as an insider, but clearly as an interloper to the court; their dialogue is confrontational and legal. Compare this to the dialogue between Abraham and God over the destruction of Sodom; in that story Abraham was pleading his case but with a very different attitude. If nothing else, this attitude of Satan indicates that although he must be very powerful to be able to confront God in this manner, he is not a member of the court.
  
  
  
  • The "Dark Side of the Force":
    In many eastern religions, Zoroastrianism for example, the forces of good and evil are nearly coequal, struggling for supremacy. The Bible has never presented this view of God nor of Satan. Yes, Satan is powerful enough to stand with the angels, but he is asking permission from God. And God withholds from Satan the absolute power over Job, saying to him in essence "you can go this far but no further." Nor does Job attribute to Satan any of his difficulties, but he says immediately, "God has done it." Satan plays merely the part of a spokesman in a labor dispute, not a king from an evil empire. Thus it would be incorrect to exonerate God by saying, "Job's suffering is Satan's fault, God had nothing to do with it." This gives Satan too much credit, credit that Job himself did not give to Satan. Nor is it logically possible to separate the responsibility from the power. If it is God who has the ultimate power over Satan and over Job, then we cannot make Satan responsible for what happens to Job. Nor can we blame the 3 friends for Job's torment, nor assign it to the Mesopotamian culture. Most emphatically, we cannot we make Job responsible for the events in this book. The beauty and the terror of worshipping a single, all-powerful God, is that God alone is responsible for His creation. All other views devolve into pantheism.
  
  
  
  • The Fallen Angel:
    The historical and, I believe. correct way to view Satan is as a powerful being who is in rebellion against God's rule, a fallen angel. This is elaborated by many others in many places, John Milton's Paradise Lost and C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters come to mind, so that I really don't need to expound on it to any great extent. Much of what we know about Satan is sketchy, a Genesis story, an encounter with Jesus, an apocalyptic ending, with some random warnings sprinkled through the Epistles. But then, we have always been told more about heaven than about hell, for we already know too much about hell, it is heaven that holds our hope. The verse for me that captures the essence of Satan are Jesus' words, "I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven."
    
    Briefly then, Satan's abilities are equal to that of God's other executive agents, the angels. But his power over God's creatures hangs by a very slender legal thread, it lies in Satan's right to accuse. Because God has created Man in his own image, Satan cannot claim authority over mankind unless he can prove God has mismanaged his creation. In the same way that theologians argue the necessity for Man's "free will", there is a necessity for God's "true justice" that provides Satan an avenue for attack. The key point to be made here is that Satan always accuses, he must accuse, it is his only hope for existence, it is his life. Therefore his function in the book of Job meshes perfectly with his personality, painting a backdrop of the archetypal conflict of divine justice, the cosmic law suit in which Job is just a single exhibit.



• The Complaint

  What is the nature of this complaint, of Satan's accusation? When God says, "where have you been?", Satan replies, "Oh, just covering the globe." This sounds like pretty meaningless banter since obviously God would know more about Satan's visits than the famed East German secret police: every city, every village, every hamlet his shadow had passed through would be old news to God. Likewise Satan's flippant answer is without surprise unless this dialogue is the continuation of some preceding, but unrecorded, debate. One can imagine that the debate had gone something like this, Satan saying "You're completely unfair God!" And God replying, "Prove it." And Satan storming out, calling over his shoulder, "I'll do just that." So in this episode, Satan has returned after collecting global statistics, arriving back in the court with his file folders under his arm. God knows what's in those file folders; He doesn't need to hear again about how Uncle Bill lost his faith when his two-year-old drowned in the pond. So He pre-empts Satan, and pulls out his prime counter-example, Job.
  
  Now how can Job, a righteous man but still only one after all, counter the thousands of statistics in Satan's folders? He can't, of course, unless Satan's accusation is universal, unless Satan's complaint is that no one likes God, that everyone is merely tolerating His rule. And it appears that Satan is forced to make a universal argument, for God's defense would be that Satan has deluded a majority of mankind ever since the Garden. To which Satan's rebuttal might be that "the truth hurts", and the truth just might be that God's expectations are universally impossible to attain. Hence God is telling Satan, "Look here, Job loves me. If he can be righteous then my expectations are not too high, and you really are deceiving the other 99% of mankind."
  
  Satan fairly explodes. This is like the highly visible model commune that supposedly justifies why communism is superior to capitalism, while behind the scenes is an artificial economy in which this commune consumes more resources than it produces. "This is patently unfair," Satan replies, "you expend incredible blessings on this guy just to keep him loyal to you. If you take away his material wealth, why, he would react like everyone else, he would spit in your face." And with that, Satan throws down the gauntlet. And a smart move it was. For if God refused, Satan could always say he was right, and God was chicken. And if God accepted, a righteous man would suffer, which, if it didn't break Job's faith, might still break the faith of many others.
  
  Did God need to pick it up? He knew Job's heart, did he really have to torture Job to win the contest with Satan? Why did God allow Satan to touch a hair of Job's head, after He had said "Job was a blameless man."? Just as we said above, a God that gets into petty disputes with Satan doesn't appear to be a God worth worshipping, much less dying for. Surely there must be something else happening in this court that required a continuation of the contest. And we are reminded of many other "tests" of righteous men, tests that God already knew the answer from. As a preacher once told me, "God doesn't test us to learn our score, he tests for us to learn it." For although God might know the outcome, Satan did not, nor did the jury of the court.




• The Jury

  Perhaps it is inappropriate to talk about a jury in an ancient Mesopotamian law court, since there was no sense of the modern "jury by one's peers", rather the elders of the town were the court and the jury. (Perhaps that is the problem in American jurisprudence, that the jury has become a tool of the attorneys.) One gets a sense of this from the story of Ruth, where the elders were witnesses of a legal transaction, and presumably, so were a large number of passers-by. Yet in another sense a jury which reaches a verdict (or witnesses a verdict) must pay the consequences of its verdict, just as a cosigner to a loan must pay if the loan is defaulted. When Gideon was chasing the Midianites and asked for help at the city gates, the refusal of the elders to help Gideon sealed their punishment on Gideon's victorious return. To be a witness is to be responsible for the verdict.
  
  Thus it is more than a literary style that we are placed as a passers-by in the court of heaven. We become the witnesses of the legal case between Satan and the LORD. We become participants of this cosmic court. We become responsible for the verdict. We are the jury.

Copyright © 1997 Rob Sheldon