Though at times Job reacts with hostility, he always turns back to God. Much of what he says later is exaggerated, untrue, and virtually blasphemous, but he never renounces God.
The perennially arduous task of the conservative commentator is plain here, and one would prefer not to dwell excessively on the travails of commentators who have to claim that a person can turn back to a God whom that person had never renounced--to say nothing of the need to come up with a phrase like "virtually blasphemous."
What is important for us to remember is the fact that this predicament of the commentator--this assumed requirement to spread a matter flat like some parchment on a table--is not only unnecessary, but positively deleterious. The search for the "strait gate"--a pursuit that is seemingly left in its particulars to the efforts of theologians to resolve upon some "salvation economy"--is in fact understood properly as the believer stumbling from one non-resolution to another.
This deleterious tendency to insist upon resolution of matters is as old as humanity, and crouches in the very shadows of Genesis. Year after year and age after age preachers lament how the devil's question to Eve, "Did God really say?" (or "Hath God said?") is what precipitates the somehow-not-describable-as-sin-yet quasi-sin of Eve "questioning the Word of God." What should be lamentable most at the outset of such considerations is the usually-ignored fact that the devil is questioning Eve's recollection, not God's pronouncement.
Surely the "very good" pre-"Fall" Adam and Eve were no more perfect than anything else in Creation, including in the capacity for recollection. Eve--especially an Eve unencumbered by the theologians' insipid notion that she or her mate were ever "without sin"--could wonder whether or not she recalled correctly a prohibition against eating the fruit. This still leaves the fruit untasted, leaves Eve and Adam exquisitely well-nourished, and leaves the question of the prohibition a live issue for Eve to bring up at God's next cool-evening visit.
Eve, unfortunately, sets out to resolve the matter there and then. That's the way we sinful humans are. It may well be argued that self-actualization, or rather the impulse to self-actualization, is what makes us what we are. "Actualization" hinges upon the existence (or the intellectually-conceived existence) of a set of circumstances, and "actualization" occurs when we exert our wills upon our circumstances. None of this has to be real--what is "real" is our momentary, localized, time-and-space knot of experiences.
Eve acted within her self-conceived set of experiences. Job acted within his self-conceived set of experiences. Eve's subsequent set of experiences was less desirable than Job's--or was it? Job, as it is credited to him, knew well enough to "repent in dust and ashes." We know well enough of the account of Eve's "curse" from God after the "Fall," but do we know whether or not she (metaphorically, at least) repented "in dust and ashes"? Does Eve not credit God later with having helped her "bring forth a man?" This is the same Eve who is succored Job-like for the loss of an offspring, with Seth to replace Abel.
What we know about Eve in the immediacy of the great sin she committed is the fact that she sought a resolution of the question before her. Job, in his anguish, can be characterized most charitably as having wrestled with temptations and questions about God--and having clung in some slipping yet frantic fashion to a countervailing notion of God as being just--unaccountably, mystifyingly just, but just nonetheless. The question of Job's fate hung not on the presence or not within Job of that welter of sins that is the lot of humanity, but rather in Job's writhing engagement with his questions about God as being live--with questions that he spared the finality of his wife's taunting dare to "curse God and die."
These two Satan-mediated episodes encapsulate the proper understanding of Satan as a liar and the father of lies. That "lies" exist in the communications of the universe is not the pivotal issue that we imagine it to be. As long as we are imperfect beings, and imperfect thinkers, and imperfect communicators, then for so long we are bound to incessant, impenetrable blurrings between lies and mistakes. When we speak, Job-like, of things we do not understand, are we lying--even though we imagine we are but speaking our best understandings? Do we understand anything so thoroughly as to presents any such understanding as perfect before God?
It is the question of resolution that solidifies and renders potent the nature of lies. Taken in themselves, Satan's supposedly "devilishly" penetrating assertions to Jesus in the Temptations episode are fascinatingly moronic. Four thousand years to rehearse, we might imagine ourselves asking of Satan, and that's the best you can come up with? Yet we who can never cease to remind ourselves of the extremity of Jesus' sufferings on the Cross, can scarcely imagine what Jesus in the earlier episode had endured for forty days in the desert. It is not the saying of lies, or listening to lies, or considering lies, or weighing lies one against another, that is the true poison of falsehood--the true poison of falsehood is the elevation of any of the effectual falsehoods that constitute our thought-lives into ostensible "truths" that fester and grow rancid when hidden away from examination.
The notion of truth versus falsehood is the interface between the world we imagine that exists and the selves that we imagine we possess. Just as our "selves" are things we live with--and I mean that in the true experiential sense of selves we observe as though outside them, selves that shift and throb with constituent, nebulous characters--our "worlds" are things we live within, things that are really shifting and throbbing conceits to which we assign variable values in veracity and importance. We can cling to ourselves--or imagine we are clung onto by, it makes no difference--the various component thoughts and impulses that comprise us for good or ill, or we can wrench from God the privilege of defining ourselves, imagining that we know ourselves as stable point-sources of awareness. We can remember that we are disparate, writhing parts that comport with the demon-traversed households of inner life of which Jesus speaks, or we can imagine that we are self-possessed souls of greater or lesser awareness of our own limitations--godlings of indifferent capacities other than our imagined abilities to know ourselves.
As I wrote just above, in comparison to our "selves," our "worlds" are things we live within, things that are really shifting and throbbing conceits to which we assign variable values in veracity and importance. We can cling to the unresolved issues which bedevil us, thankful (as often as we can remind ourselves to be) for the ineffable overarching presence of God, holding onto as many live issues as we can as indefatigable wrestling-partners--for issues with which we wrestle are issues that can cede to us, however reluctantly, the wisps and whispers of as-yet-unimagined prospects. Or we can pile up ostensible "truths"--that is to say, humanly-appreciated ostensible truths--that is to say, "lies."
Anything that comes out of our mouths is a lie--objective or scriptural warrant notwithstanding. This is more than the fact that we cannot understand or communicate things perfectly, although even that set of limitations ought to give us pause in attempting to believe we speak "truth." We do not even speak with single voices. Our voices are produced by congregations of internal voices springing from disparate and shifting elements of our riotous inner lives, and the ears of our hearers are but conduits to their own internal crowds--if they are words that can even be heard by our hearers over their inner cacophonies. This is the thrust of Jesus' admonitions to his opponents about how they followed the inventions of their forebears. It mattered not if a commandment of the Law was genuine or rooted in Scripture--what mattered was the fact that the commandments (as, indeed, any notion of God or holiness that we utter) had been rendered the effectual property of generations and generations of crowd after crowd.
We are each knots of writhing internal voices, and we each live in worlds of wrestling world-conceits. We can muster up thoughts and voices to cry unto God, and it seems scarcely a question, whether we would do better to issue such pleas from the self-appreciated roiling dust of our acknowledged inner confusion and confabulated world-views, or attempt to present our pleas to God from sedate notions of seemly humility before this or that conceptualized altar. Jesus would have us resolve our potentially unresolvable issues with this world before we presume to approach the altar.
Better to cast our voices to the altar from afar, as ever we can, even as we scramble and slip in the dust and ashes of our creaturely predicaments.
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