NOTES for Job 23:1-24:25
Job himself understands how right Eliphaz is to call him to turn to God in prayer and repentance. But, he says, this understanding does not ease his suffering: God remains invisible and beyond his reach. ‘Oh, if only I knew where to find him and could approach his throne!’ These sorrowful words express the thoughts of very many people who, in every age, have suffered from God's inaccessibility. Job says that the opportunity to bring his tragedy before God would be precious to him: ‘If only he would pay attention to me!’ The Creator's attention would be enough for Job; compared with that, the content of his answer to Job's lament is secondary.
Job's friends tend to think that God needs nothing from a human being, and therefore God's attention is too great a gift for a person; to dream of it is excessive boldness. As far as we can judge from Job's own words, he thinks so too, yet he cannot do without the Creator's attention. His words recall Psalm 8:4, where the psalmist exclaims: ‘What is man, that you remember him, and the son of man, that you visit him?’
Nevertheless, it is impossible to touch God, to meet him in direct experience. ‘I go forward, and he is not there,’ says Job; ‘No one has ever seen God,’ the Evangelist John repeats. God knows a person's entire path—Job has not the slightest doubt of that. Yet a person still does not see him; even God's commandments, which reveal the Creator's will, do not make an encounter with God possible. The impossibility of meeting God except through the barrier of the law is one of the Old Testament's important themes. Isaiah and Ecclesiastes, the author of Job and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and other prophets devote their most important words to it. ‘Those awaiting the consolation of Israel’: this is how the Evangelist Luke describes those who dreamed that a direct encounter with God would one day become possible, those who hoped for it while scarcely daring to hope.
Job says that with all his heart he needs God, needs God himself to answer him. But until this happens, Job tries to understand the Lord's ways through reflection—and this makes his heart falter and fear overcome him. Indeed, when God is far away, all of life turns to darkness.
In this darkness, which Job believes only God's own gaze can penetrate, cruelty and unimaginable suffering, terror and injustice fill the earth. Violence and impunity reign in the human world, and so for Job God's answer is not merely a dream but an urgent necessity. What he really needs is not an answer to why God allows all this, but an answer about what the Creator's heart is like.