Job 42:5-6, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I retract my words and am comforted in dust and ashes.”
The translation above interprets מָאַס as a retraction of Job’s previous arguments against God’s justice and נָחַם as the comfort that flows from repentance. Like a castle of sand beneath a tidal wave, all of Job’s accusations against the justice of God are here dissolved before the sheer reality of YHWH Himself.
And the result? Anger? bitterness? wounded pride? dead faith? No—*comfort.* To have every argument struck from his hands and to be laid in the dust of final humility, wholly without a word before the radiance of the God who is Himself the answer to every clawing question of the human experience—this is true and lasting comfort. The suffering soul longs not for the impersonal answer to its “whys” and “what ifs” and “what now’s,” but for the eminently personal presence of the “who” in whom every question dies away like thirst before an inexhaustible fountain.
And we meet this “who,” this God, this “Answer” supremely in the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ as He hangs in our place upon the cross. There YHWH appears in and as the Mystery of mysteries—Every horror or loss or injustice or imbecility borne by His people in this world is present *there,* present *in Him,* borne *by Him* to the uttermost. Nothing in all our experience remains outside His experience in that moment. Therefore, in Him, we may approach whatever suffering we endure and find it borne in love in the Body of our God.
Does this tell me why it happened? Does it tell me when it will be over? Does it give me a philosophical argument to “defend” God from accusations of injustice? No—but it tells me something else that envel
