The story of ancient Job has intrigued readers for centuries. Job’s was a life of happiness with wealth, success, and a large and loving family. Then it all fell apart. Every conceivable bad thing happened to him. He lost his possessions, tragedy struck his family, and he became desperately ill. In his extremity Job loses any faith in God. His story is trying to make sense of it all.
Oh that I knew where I might find God,
That I might come to God’s dwelling!
God has made my heart feint;
The Almighty has terrified me;
If only I could vanish in darkness,
And thick darkness would cover my face!
Job
There are many levels of interpretation of the sad story. It seems that when life was smooth and successful, Job had no problems in having faith in God. After all, don’t wealth, success and possessions indicate that God is smiling on you? When you lose them, doesn’t that show God is displeased with you, or that God has disappeared, or that God was an illusion in the first place?
Perhaps Job’s existential angst was caused by a false belief that there is a connection between the purpose of God and the material circumstances of life. The wealthy and well know God’s kindness. The poor and sick know God’s displeasure.
Perhaps his mistake was to think that there is an overriding purpose in all that happens, an invisible guiding hand that would make all well. It’s easy to believe in when life is smooth. It’s harder to stomach when life falls apart.
The existentialists in the twentieth century suggested an answer. There is no overarching purpose. There is no point to the universe. There is only angst, only abandonment. The sooner we make peace with the randomness and indifference of the universe, the better for us. Yet, they did leave us with some hope: our radical, authentic choices. We can’t affect the universe, but we can be authentic in our choices. If Job had learned from Sartre, perhaps his life would have been bearable. The stoics had said something similar, “Be concerned only with those things you can affect or change. Be indifferent to the rest.” Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer has it too, “God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”
Missing from Job, missing from most existentialists and missing from the stoics is love. Kierkegaard (the father of existentialism) left us with a happier existentialism than Sartre. Though human experience may be angst, our radical choice is to leap into the abyss, trusting that love will catch us. Paul Tillich said that, “Faith is being grasped by an ultimate concern.” There is no greater “ultimate concern” than love.
+Ab. Andy