sets the parameters of a relationship with God quite well: “Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” God does not answer out of the calm, gentle breeze—though he does that in other parts of the Bible. In this case, the Lord answers out of the violence of the storm. Having a relationship with God is like having a relationship to electricity or having a relationship to a tornado. That is not to say there is not comfort in it, but it is the peculiar comfort of a storm. It’s precisely why our spiritual practices can capture something useful of how we relate to God, but our relationship to God is hardly the sum of them.
THE PLAYFUL, TENDER OTHER
Since this relationship is something intrinsically violent, unpredictable and uncontrollable, the next thing Job helps us learn about a relationship with God might seem almost contradictory—but deeply true. There is something tender about the presence of God and the voice of God, a tenderness that never fails to break our hearts. The the heartbreak of a relationship with God is not sentimental in the least—it is the sheer goodness of God, the tenderness of His heart that relentlessly shatters our own. We have been presumptuous to think we know what God might be saying or what He wants in a given situation, smug in our judgments. And then comes the real voice of God, which always turns out to be more tender, more gentle, more loving than what we could have imagined. That unfathomable mercy that, more than any of the extraordinary things we might say about God, ultimately makes Him the most unlike us. There is something dangerous, something tender, something playful about that God all at once. The One who will not be confused by us, tricked by us, impressed by our capacity for good or evil. There is a certain divine mischief about the One who looks at us, always knowing both the things we know but can’t afford to say, as well as the things we do not know at all. He does not lord this knowledge over us or leverage it for harm. In fact, you might say He almost affectionately teases us with it. Job is the sort of person God likes because he didn’t attempt to hide the truth of his heart from Him, the sort of person that talked to Him in shockingly familial ways. Because Job is so brazen with God, He brings out the playful tenderness of this God, who comes out of the whirlwind but is not all whirlwind Himself. When God finally responds to Job, He starts by chiding Him: “Who is this that darkens my counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up 70
NOV/DEC 2013
[GO DEEPER]
The Man Who Was Thursday G.K. CHESTERTON Come for the spy story, stay for the allegory of modern spirituality and a God we can’t grasp.
your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.” The first few times I read that text, I responded with a kind of terror at the words “Gird up your loins.” But the more I have reread Job, the more I have detected something different in God’s speech. Keep in mind, the construct of the whole story is that God likes Job—it is God who directly rescues Job in the end. Job’s relationship with God is so familiar that his friends find his protests to be blasphemous. Yet, it seems God likes Job not despite the candid way he talks to Him, but because of it. And when God responds, we detect something in the tone of these speeches different than incredulity and rage; we can hear a kind of playfulness. While there is a kind of violence to God’s appearance, there is also the familial tone of a father wrestling with his son—a kind of playful taunting. “Who is this little man who thinks he knows how the world works? Since you are the expert, why don’t you tell me—where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? And my favorite line, “Surely you know, for you were born then, and the number of your days is great!” The language of God may seem fearsome, but there is also a winsome quality to it—this is the playfulness of a father to a son he knows well. It is hard to explain how a relationship with God can have the unpredictability and occasionally primal force of the whirlwind, and yet have such shocking intimacy and playfulness at the same time. But this is what it is to know God.
THE FIGURE STANDING IN THE WHIRLWIND
Holy the Firm ANNIE DILLARD Dillard uses her love of creation to inform her relationship with its divine Creator.
The Horse and His Boy C.S. LEWIS
However broken we might feel or be, it takes a certain courage to stare into the whirlwind—to fix our gaze into the storm that knows us—without flinching, without covering ourselves, without looking away. And when we stay there long enough, a figure emerges from the storm. Like the Israelites when God appeared on Sinai, we are tempted to cower in terror, to find someone to stand between us and Him. And then comes the voice: “It is I, do not be afraid.” We stare into the storm long enough until we find that the God behind it is Jesus, that this God has always been Jesus. He is the one who has always seen and known us. From out of the whirlwind, from out of the storm, Jesus comes walking. In Matthew 17, Jesus is drenched in the same terrible glory of Sinai, His face shining like the sun, His garments blindingly white. And again comes the voice, as familiar on this new mountain as it was in the midst of the storm—except this time not just a voice, but a hand that reaches out to touch us. “Get up, and do not be afraid.” The same terror, the same glory, but with a tender touch and a voice that has always been familiar—telling us we have no reason to fear. We have come all of this way without giving proper steps to have a relationship with God, no experiments to try, no spiritual practices. For once, I’ve talked about the God I know instead of trying to tell you how you should know God, and tried to tell you what that God is like. I’ve tried to warn you of the terror and comfort you with the comfort I’ve seen and felt behind the cloud. Now I can only tell you to go chase the storm. Behold the elements of mercy and tenderness and playful, mischievous love, and keep looking into it until you see that God turns out to be Jesus.
Not the bestknown of Lewis’ Narnia series, but perhaps the most theologically profound.
JONATHAN MARTIN is the lead pastor of Renovatus, a church for people under renovation in Charlotte, N.C., where he lives with his wife, Amanda. He holds degrees from Gardner-Webb University, the Pentecostal Theological Seminary and Duke University Divinity School.