Week 22 Job
In Job 38-41 the Lord asked Job roughly seventy questions in a row and Job didn’t answer any of them. He just admitted: I am nothing – how could I ever find the answers? I will put my hand over my mouth in silence. I have already said too much. I have nothing more to say.
Which is a pretty hard place to land: I am nothing.
In Alberta we don’t encourage people to express themselves that way. It’s more: you’re good, you’re okay, you’re awesome, like that.
Of course Job didn’t live in Alberta, and he wasn’t exactly dealing with low self-esteem.
Job had arrived at the I-am-nothing place because he was being interrogated by the Lord. And he realized the simplest way to express his self-estimation was to say he was nothing. I’m guessing that the word nothing is used in a contrastive sense: there’s Job, and there’s the Lord, and looking at the two Job admits: I’m nothing. It wasn’t nothing where nothing is absolutely nothing, not Job-has-zero-valuation. More like nothing by contrast.
Job was still Job.
And Job was a great, great guy.
But the fact was that compared to the Lord Job was close enough to zero (without actually being zero) that he thought it was better to round down to nothing.
Up to chapter 37 Job figured he had a case, at which point he had to make an adjustment.
Notes: quote from Job 40:3-5 (NLT version). Seventy questions is an estimate.