For the longest time I didn’t like the Book of Proverbs. I wouldn’t read it, wouldn’t refer to it, didn’t even like to talk about it. I felt like the book had let me down somehow.

I now know it’s because I didn’t know how to read Proverbs.

There are three different types of literature that must be differentiated: Laws; Promises; Proverbs.

For example, Deuteronomy 6:5 says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” That’s a command. It’s something we are to do all the time, and there are no exceptions.

Romans 8:38-39 says, “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” That’s a promise. There’s nothing in there that we’re supposed to do. It’s God’s promise to us, and — again — there are no exceptions.

But Proverbs 10:4 says, “Lazy hands make a man poor, but diligent hands bring wealth.” Not really a command. Not really a promise. There are exceptions to this rule. Lazy people sometimes win the lottery. Hardworking people sometimes mismanage their money.

Here’s another one that’s sometimes hard to grasp: “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it” (Proverbs 22:6). That sounds like a promise, but it’s not. Even in the Old Testament there are examples of really good parents who have really lousy kids. If you read this verse like it’s a promise (which is how I used to read the Proverbs), you may be setting yourself up for frustration, confusion and anger if your children decide to depart from the path they were raised to walk.

Proverbs are generally just the way things work. But there are exceptions. I used to read the Proverbs as if they were iron-clad promises from God that this is how things will be. Work hard, and you’ll get rich. Pursue God’s wisdom, and people will love you. Put the quarter in, and the candy bar comes out.

I didn’t have to live very long before I realized that life doesn’t work that way. With my lack of wisdom at the time I assumed the problem must be with the book of Proverbs. I now realize that the problem was with the way I was reading it.

I’m teaching on the Proverbs this week. Anyone out there have a favorite Hebrew Proverb?

The church claims to have the Total Truth — that is, truth that impacts every single area of life. And yet our society knows better than to ask Christians about sex. They know we’ll most likely say, “No! Stop! Don’t do it! Turn back! Pretend it doesn’t exist! It’s dirty!”

How did we get that reputation?

Well, I’ve been reading Philip Yancey’s book Rumors of Another World. In one chapter called “Designer Sex”, he traces some of the development of our anti-sex attitude.

Before Christianity came on the scene, sex was considered something of a sacrament — a means of grace — a holy thing. In fact, Jewish people would often pray and recite psalms as they were consumating their marriage. Pagan religions like the Greeks and the Romans actually went so far as to include sexual intercourse in their liturgies. A temple prostitute, for example, would pray for a certain god or goddess to inhabit her body. Then men would have sex with her as a means of communing with that god or goddess.

That’s the religious atmosphere into which Christianity was introduced. It didn’t take long for Christians to push the pendulum too far in the opposite direction. In fact, Augustine suggested that sexual intercourse was how original sin was transmitted and believed that sex for any purpose other than procreation was sinful.

St. Jerome went even further and said that marital sex was only one step above fornication. According to Jerome, virginity was the ideal and should be maintained as strictly as possible. He is quoted as saying, “Anyone who is too passionate a love with his own wife is himself an adulterer.”

Before long the church decided that since Jesus died on a Friday, there should be no sex on Fridays. Then someone mentioned that Jesus was arrested on Thursday, so maybe we shouldn’t have sex then either. Of course, Saturday is the day he was dead, so having sex on Saturday seems wrong. We should take that day to think of Jesus’ poor, grieving mother — who was a virgin! Oh, and what about Lent? Maybe we should give up sex for Lent. And Advent. And Pentecost.

Eventually, once you took out all the days of fasting and feasting and mandatory celibacy, you were left with only 44 days of the year that were cleared for sex. And even then you were only doing it in order to get pregnant. Do not enjoy it!

Michelangelo’s Sistene Chapel is an amazing thing to see. The problem is all the people are nude. So, one pope commissioned a painter named “Daniel the Trouserer” to paint clothes on them.

It was around that time that some pope decided that all priests should be celibate. And then they banned women from singing out loud. A woman singing out loud in public? That could inspire lustful thoughts in a man.

Eventually, Victorian clergy advocated covering the legs of your furniture.

What kind of man lusts after the legs of the furniture? Don’t answer that.

Here’s what gets lost in all of our puritanical prudery: God actually created sex. And sex is brilliant! It’s amazing. Just think of the body parts used. The soft parts and the millions of nerve endings. The economy and irony of the organs. The internal and external. The combination of visual appeal and mechanical design.

Sex is not meant to just be functional. It’s meant to be enjoyable as well. That’s part of God’s design. And the Song of Solomon is in the Bible as a testimony to this.

Oh, and one other thing: Growing up I heard that the book wasn’t really about sex. It was, we were told, about Christ and his relationship to his bride, the church.

People who say that usually haven’t really read the book. There is nothing in there to justify that idea. And the people who read it initially knew. This book is a celebration of sex and romance. No two ways about that.

Question: Why would we want this book to be about anything other than sex?

Just curious: Have any of you ever heard a sermon from Song of Solomon?

I grew up going to church. My father is a preacher. I’ve probably heard 2,000 sermons in my life. I can’t remember anyone ever using Solomon’s Song of Songs as their text.

In a world so schizophrenic about sex, why has the church mostly just said, “When it comes to sex, we have one word, and that one word is: NO!”?

Evolutionary biologists and psychologists say the sex drive is all about procreation.

The entertainment and advertising industries say the sex drive is all about recreation.

People will go to ridiculous places for advice: Dr. Ruth. Loveline w/ Dr. Drew. The weird Canadian lady — she’s creepy. There’s even a new reality show in HBO that follows two sex therapists in London.

And yet the one place people will not go to with their questions about sex is the church. That can’t be right.

I’m asking you: have you ever considered asking someone at church a sex question?

The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys. And he also had seven sons and three daughters. The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah and the third Karen-Happuch. Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers.
Job 42:12-15

Q: What are the names of Job’s sons?

A: We don’t know.

Job has seven sons, and we don’t know the name of one of them. But we know the name of each of his three daughters. Curious.

And the daughters were given a portion of the inheritance along with the sons. This also is curious.

See, in the ancient world sons were what it was all about. Sons could work in the field, and sons could take over the family farm. Sons would carry on the family name. Sons could provide for you when you got old. Sons were useful. Providing an inheritance for your sons was a strategic thing to do.

Daughters were liable to get married, take on someone else’s name and move away. They might end up working someone else’s farm and providing for someone else’s parents. You’d never give them a portion of the inheritance. But Job does. Why? Just because.

What am I getting at?

Job now delights in (look at what his daughters’ names mean) and gives to the least strategic, least useful offspring. Job gives to those who may never give him anything in return. Job has become more like God. He learned a lesson, and the lesson wasn’t, “Stop crying, or I’ll give you something to really cry about!” The lesson was that God doesn’t give good things to people as a reward for doing right; God gives good things to people just because.

Job learns that lesson, and — even though he questions God — he clings to God all the way through this ordeal. In the end, he comes out looking a lot more like the God he’s been holding onto than ever before.

Satan was wrong about the human race and about God. And this book was written and preserved for us — to show us our true potential. Can a human being still hang onto God with love and service and obedience even if it doesn’t seem to pay off?

One could. One did. Job didn’t know when he was sitting on the ash heap broke, confused, sad and miserable how God was using him to vindicate his whole crazy adventure — that a community could be created where God was both the center and the circumference.

Job’s story inspires all of us who live in Uz. Don’t quit. Don’t give up. It inspires us because we know what Job did not: one day this God would descend the Upper Stage to the Lower Stage and become one of us and offer to exchange all our suffering for his righteousness so that we could ascend from the Lower Stage to the Upper Stage.

And he doesn’t do it to gain anything. He does it just because.

Job’s asks for an audience with God. He wants to face God and demand some answers. In chapter 38, Job gets his request. God shows up, but he doesn’t answer any of Job’s questions. Instead, God has some questions of his own:

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
Or who laid its cornerstone —
While the morning stars sang together
And all the angels shouted for joy?

Job 38:4-7

Why does God do that? Why ask Job questions he can’t possibly answer?

Is it to show that he’s smarter than Job? Is it because he’s just tired to Job’s whining? Is God warning Job: “If you don’t stop all this crying, I’ll give you something to really cry about”?

I don’t think that fits with what we’ve learned about God’s character and nature thus far in the Bible. God doesn’t seem that interested in flexing his muscles and intimidating humans. That would be like me demanding that my kids be impressed with how strong I am. They’re kids! Only an immature person does stuff like that. “Look how strong Daddy is. Aren’t you impressed? You better be!”

God is pointing out Job’s limitations — especially Job’s finite mind and limited perspective. But — as OT scholar Ellen F. Davis points out: “God’s questions indicate something important about the kind of person he is — the kind of person who creates in such a way that the morning stars sing together and anges shout for joy.”

God asks:

Who cuts a channel for the torrents of rain,
And a path for the thunderstorm,
To water a land where no man lives,
A desert with no one in it,
To satisfy a desolate wasteland
And make it sprout with grass?

Job 38:25-27

In Israel, life depends on water. No one would waste water because it was such a valuable commodity.

Q: Why would God water a land where no one lives?

A: God is generous for no reason at all. God is good for no reason. God does stuff like this without gaining anything in return. He gives for no reason other than it’s his nature. God’s long speech shows us a person who absolutely delights in creatures that are of no use to him whatsoever. God gains nothing from doing this. He does it because it is who he is.

God created donkeys that will never never be tamed and oxen that will never plow, ostriches that will never fly, hippos and crocodiles (behemoth and leviathan) that will never really be useful. This whole section is not really about nature or animals as much as it is about the God who made nature and animals. These creatures are pretty much useless, but God created and cares for them.

Why? Why would God create a world and fill it with useless things? Because that’s who he is. He doesn’t need anything, so he doesn’t take this utilitarian view of creation like we do. Maybe this is what God means when he says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways” (Isaiah 55:8).

God’s motives are not our motives. We’re always concerned with how something is going to benefit us; God doesn’t need anything — isn’t lacking anything — so he’s not concerned with how a thing is going to benefit him. The God of the Upper Stage is gratuitously good and irrationally loving and ridiculously generous.

And I mean ever one of those words — especially ridiculously. In fact, it was his generosity that brought the most horrible ridicule upon his Son Jesus when he was here on earth.

Job never finds out what happened on the Upper Stage. Instead, he finds out something better. He finds out the kind of person God is, and that’s enough for Job.

Job has questions. He doesn’t say that he’s never sinned. He says that his spiritual life doesn’t correspond with his change of circumstances. In other words, he lived a very righteous life and enjoyed tremendous blessings. Then his blessings went away and were replaced by tremendous suffering, but (and this is really his argument) his spiritual life didn’t change in such a way as to merit such a drastic change in his circumstances.

His friends ask, “So, why has all this happened?”

Job says, “I don’t know.”

If his friends had been wise, they would have said, “We don’t know either.”

But that’s not what they say. They argue with Job, and here’s a wise principle: never argue with someone who is in mourning. Logic doesn’t often go hand-in-hand with grief.

Eventually, Job says, “I wish I could sue God. If only God would show up and we could talk about this man-to-man.”

In chapter 38, Job gets his request. In fact, it’s kind of funny and ironic. Elihu (another one of Job’s friends) is in the middle of telling Job why God doesn’t have to show up when God actually shows up.

If we misunderstand this next part of the story we’ll end up with lots of bad theology.

God never answers Job’s questions. God could have explained the first couple of chapters to Job. He could have told Job about the Upper Stage and the conversation he’d had with Satan. But he doesn’t. He just asks Job a few questions of his own — questions that Job cannot possibly answer.

Why?

The doctrine of divine retribution is so neat and tidy. No muss, no fuss. If you suffer, it’s because you deserve to. If you succeed, it’s because you earned it. I think that’s part of its appeal: it makes so much sense to us. It is how we would run the universe if we were in charge.

Another part of its appeal is how close to the truth it is. God loves to bless obedience. And God does discipline his children. And we often bring bad things on ourselves. If you smoke two packs a day, overeat and refuse to exercise — don’t go blaming anyone but yourself for the health troubles you have later in life.

But God rejects a simplistic one-to-one correlation like divine retribution because it inevitably turns God into some kind of vending machine and righteousness becomes a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself.

Let me reiterate that last thought: righteousness is NOT something we use to gain something; righteousness is what is gained.

But if God is dealing in tit-for-tat tactics we will eventually stop pursuing God and start using God to gain what it is we really want.

If that’s our theology, then good circumstances don’t breed gratitude; they breed pride. And bad circumstances don’t build character; they build despair.

Job ends the silence. They’ve been sitting together on an ash heap for seven days in silence. And if Job would just repeat what he said and did in chapter 1:20-22, I think the story would be over. But he doesn’t. Instead, he pours out a level of bitterness, confusion, sorrow and anger that is difficult to read. In fact, it’s so difficult to listen to that his friends — who up until now have maintained their silence — can remain silent no longer. They feel like they have to respond and defend God’s honor.

Eliphas begins and basically says, “Job, innocent people don’t suffer. You are suffering. You must not be innocent.”

Job pushes back.

Bildad wades in and adds something so hurtful, so insensitive and callous — I just want to smack him. He tells Job that his children — the 10 children who have just died — deserved it. Somehow or other, they brought this upon themselves.

Those of us who are aware of what’s gone on in the Upper Stage know this isn’t true. But what must that have sounded like to Job?

It probably sounded like some of the people who are blaming the people of New Orleans and Biloxi for Hurricane Katrina.

Job goes ballistic, and Zophar pushes one step further saying, “Job, your sin caused all this.”

All three friends are saying the same thing. It’s called the Doctrine of Divine Retribution, and it goes like this:

If you are good, then you will receive blessing and prosperity.

If you are bad, then you will receive misery and poverty.

In other words, God treats people the way they deserve. If you’re suffering, you have no one to blame but yourself. If you will just repent, then you will suffer no more. After all, God doesn’t allow good people to suffer, does he?

The really scandalous thing is that this is still being taught in Christian churches all over the place. It is blasphemous because it makes a mockery of human suffering — the same human suffering that God himself entered into on the cross.

Talk to someone who has suffered, and they’ll tell you that the people who inflict more harm than good are usually Christians. Christians who say things like: “If you just had more faith” or “God is refining you” or “You could think of this as a wake-up call”.

We heard it after 9/11. We heard it after the tsunami in Sri Lanka. We hear it now in the wake of Katrina. Eliphaz even claims that this is a divine insight — a Word from the Lord (4:12). Ever hear that?

We have to be careful about this kind of thing. Eliphaz is sincere, but he is wrong. And that kind of theology breeds a kind of death — the death of hope, the death of gratitude, the death of joy, the death of grace. Life becomes just one endless cycle of reaping and sowing.

That’s many things, but it is not what I would call “Good News”.