Keep a civil tongue in your head!
I’m disappointed in myself when I see clearly (for I don’t always see clearly or remember what I’ve seen) that I swing like a pendulum from one extreme to another. I may go from a weak-kneed indulgence with sinners to a flinty hardness or from dismissing knowledge of God as close to "optional" to being virtually everything. You get my point. I can see this pendulum syndrome better in others. Somehow my vision improves when I’m eyeballing others. It’s funny that. Well, one of the things that hacks me off is the Christian (I’m generalising) capacity for jumping on bandwagons, for gorging on what’s new on the religious menu and for coming out dressed in the latest garments of piety.
The issue is complex so I’m not pretending I have it all worked out—the simple things often baffle me—but I have to confess a strong feeling about the matter. I think that over this past generation we’ve become too "understanding" with others and ourselves. It can be one...rugged...life and it’s only to be expected that we’ll get fed up with it and wonder why "the Great Underachiever" in the sky isn’t making it better. When I speak of a rugged life I’m not talking about the vast majority of us (at least in the Western world). No, I’m talking about those among us that have good reason to think that their lives are very hard. It isn’t surprising that they protest before God. Who’ll stand up, in his or her fine clothes in his or her fine house with his or her fine family and with his or her mouth full of fine food, and point the finger at such people and call them whiners? (May they trip and spill their home made ice-cream on their fine carpet if they do. That’ll give them something to whine about—and they might.) Besides, didn’t Job rattle on about his troubles and who’ll call him a wimp?
But it’s right there that I feel my pulse speed up. The way some teachers and preachers talk and write you’d think that the book of Job was written to encourage us to insult God. Whatever else it was meant to do, it wasn’t written to teach us to slander the Holy Father. I’ve mentioned this to a number of people and relatively few have owned up to saying such a thing about the book. Well, fair enough, I haven’t heard anyone put it quite that way but I think I’ve heard one that took Job to task, even while he understood the pressure Job was under. The rest that have expressed an opinion in this area and about the Joban connection seem to think that if you don’t really turn on God and put him in the screws that your faith isn’t "authentic". It’s the mark, don’t you see, of authentic faith that you keep nothing back, that you pour out the bile and insult God.
One fine man insisted that this was the case though he did acknowledge that "it’s better to keep a civil tongue in your head." But why is it "better" to keep a civil tongue in your head? If authentic is better and without the slashing criticism of God we lack authentic faith, why is it better to keep a civil tongue in our heads?
We’re offered the extremes of Joban criticism (that at times is insult and slander) or the grovelling and crawling submission that is pathetic. (A Western world in its quest for authentic "freedom" and their "rights" might despise that mode of life above all else.) We’re offered as a model a hurting man that sometimes spoke in thankless libel or a tortured soul that is too filled with fear of God to breathe a word of protest, one that thinks she must like a whipped mongrel mutter, "It’s the will of God." The book of Job forever obliterates the notion that God demands that his children grovel. But why only these two extremes?
Does anyone really find it difficult to understand someone under terrible stress, hotly protesting before God? I doubt it! There’s no need for us to apologise for understanding their irritation or frustration directed toward God. But to so speak and teach that people come to think that they’re only true believers if they take a swipe at God every other day—now that’s something else. Worse, to give those who shoulder their burdens and protest little or none—to give them the impression that they’re really gutless wimps and that they lack authentic faith, that’s a damned lie! A pox on such talk! Is there no 2 Corinthians 12:1-10 in the NT? Is there no Garden of Gethsemane in the Gospels? No Habakkuk chapter 3?
Does it not sometimes sicken you to hear this individualist lust for "freedom" and self-expression dress itself up as scripture teaching that requires people to have an "authentic uncivil tongue" in their heads?
God isn’t brittle and he won’t break if we insult him; but let’s not pretend that insult and slander is really what God wants to nurture in us. That’s not what the book of Job was written for.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.