"But you must have had a second reaction, Job, when you heard God say, 'as my servant Job has.' You must also have felt that it was no longer important for you to be so recognized. Here is the great paradox of your reaction to those words, if I am not mistaken. On the one hand, you had a surge of energy, a rush within, that says "YES, that's IT!" But, on the other hand, because you had just seen God, and had been further reduced to emotional fragility, you knew that the legal route, which you had pursued ever since ch.9, had no value to it. God blew your complaint right out of the water by his words in 38-41 and by your experience of "seeing God." So, the irony of the matter is that you, who felt that you would never give up your complaint UNTIL you are pronounced "right," have given up your complaint, and then you are pronounced "right." You are right when it is no longer important to be right. You win when you no longer are thinking about winning and losing.
I think a most important psychological process is happening here, but I don't know if I can explain it very well. Let me try, Job, and you correct me, please. There are many among us who have a stubborn streak. We not only become firmly entrenched in our beliefs, which may not be able to be "proved," but we also hold tightly to certain things we KNOW are correct. We cannot separate our interpretation of an event from the event itself. We hold it, grasp it, caress it, cherish it. That is precisely what you did, isn't it Job? You took your complaint to bed every night as if it was your child. After all, you had lost 10 children, and needed to have some kind of substitute, and so you nursed and nurtured and corrected your complaint, you polished and burnished it so that it glowed with a rare luster, and you knew that the things it contained were absolutely true. No doubt. God had wrecked your life. He had hated you. He had torn you in his wrath. He had broken you in two. He had perverted justice. You had done nothing deserving this tremendous series of losses. You were going to be vindicated. Maybe God couldn't vindicate you, but your redeemer could. You had a witness in heaven, a redeemer of your life, and you would be found to be correct.
Your whole world became telescoped to the demands of your complaint, didn't it, Job? To use a phrase from 2005, it became "all about Job." And you knew, you just knew, as you were speaking it in ch. 12 or refining it in ch.19 or finally signing the complaint in ch.31 that you were going to win. God, really, had no other choice but to vindicate you. You had forced God into a corner and he had to "fess up"--that indeed he had destroyed your life for no apparent reason.
Thus, as we say, Job, you became pretty "invested" in your complaint. You could not imagine letting your complaint go. Indeed, you had become identified with your complaint. It would have been as inconceivable for you to drop your complaint as it would for the Pope to have a deathbed conversion to Methodism. That is the reality of your life. And, I say this only because I know how we can sometimes become wed to our interpretation of events and our view of the world. We hold on tight, and will not permit another way of looking at things. Is that our glory or our shame? We know, Job, that one of the keys to successful living, sometimes, is to persevere in what you believe. But, in fact, what is the difference between perseverance that is rewarded and utter stubbornness that destroys your soul? Why isn't there anyone who can define that difference?
So, your complaint WAS you, wasn't it, Job? It was as much you as bad hair belongs to Donald Trump. You just can't imagine the guy with an attractive coif. But then, when you "saw" God in 38-41 [and one of the great paradoxes of your work is that you 'saw' God when you finally 'heard' him. Really what is at stake is two kinds of hearing, of the ear--perhaps your early learning about God--and of the eye--now. Is seeing only intensive hearing?] your foundation crumbled. It is as if you were putting on a legal case and forgot to call the lead witness; it was as if you had ignored the central factor in understanding a phenomenon. You had put God into a box, hadn't you, Job, and you KNEW the ways that God HAD to respond, the constraints of the system in which God HAD to live.
And, the strange thing is, Job, that God reacted to you exactly as you thought he would but it still eventuated in the collapse of your mental world. Now, that is a subject for at least a brief consideration. Oops, out of space. Let's go to the next.
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