Loving God when we do not understand Him
Jesus told us the greatest commandment is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. Doing this is incredibly hard when life is tough. How do we love God when we do not understand Him?
One of the most profound stories of suffering in the Bible is about a wealthy, deeply devoted family man called Job. While going about his life, disaster strikes Job tragically claiming the lives of all his children, stripping him of his wealth, and afflicting him with an excruciatingly painful illness. Job enters a period of deep, lonely pain and struggles to understand why all this is happening to him especially as a devout follower of God. What exactly does it mean to faithfully love God in moments of crisis like this? How should followers of Jesus respond to the call to love God when God very often does not make sense to us? The peculiar story of Job points to some answers and offers hope in those times when we do not understand God or our circumstances.
Job’s suffering gives us three critical insights:
We cannot fully understand God
Loving God is not based on our full understanding of God
God’s character inspires us to cultivate love for God and for others
We cannot fully understand God
When life gets unbearably difficult, we want to understand why. After losing almost everything, Job seeks to understand God’s rationale for suffering:
“I loathe my life;
I will give free utterance to my complaint;
I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
I will say to God, Do not condemn me;
let me know why you contend against me.
Does it seem good to you to oppress,
to despise the work of your hands
and favor the designs of the wicked?
Have you eyes of flesh?
Do you see as man sees?[1]
Job, bitter from all his suffering, demands answers from God. Job’s questions are similar to the questions we wrestle with when we encounter tough life circumstances. He demands to know why God sees it fit to oppress His creation and let evil reign in the world. He even wonders if God can ever understand his humanity.
Job’s story is our story. His struggle to make sense of his suffering mirrors our own. Eventually, God offers Job a pointed response:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Dress for action like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?[2]
God continues to question Job about his knowledge on a range of topics from astronomy to geology, from weather to the animal kingdom. In one of His most incisive questions, He asks Job:
Will you even put me in the wrong?
Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?
Have you an arm like God,
and can you thunder with a voice like his?[3]
In our suffering, it is often easy to accuse God of malice, incompetence, or malpractice. It becomes easy to channel our bitterness into attacks on God. God tells Job that as the Creator of the universe, we can never hope to comprehend His ways. In asking Job about science, God actually drives this point home. Even today, the more we learn about the natural world, the more we understand how much more we do not know in virtually every field. By virtue of being our Creator, God knows and understands far more than we ever will, no matter how much knowledge we ever amass. The ancient sage Isaiah received the following words from God:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.[4]
Because God’s perspective is so much more expansive than ours, we will never be able to see the whole picture which would explain why certain things happen the way they do. Job himself is never privy to the reason for his own suffering. In the same way, we can never hope to fully understand how or why God allows suffering to happen – especially when bad things happen to us or to people we love dearly. Fortunately, although we can never understand God’s ways, we are never in the dark about His motives and how He feels towards us.
Loving God is not based on our full understanding of God
Fundamentally, we are created to be in a loving relationship with God. Out of a deep love for us and a keen understanding of our humanity, God gives us the instructions we need to live a fulfilling, joyful life. By following these instructions, our lives are marked by contentment, kindness, and beauty. But we can only follow these instructions when we grasp the depth of God’s love for us. This love is personified in the person of Jesus Christ, who taught:
Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”[5]
The more Jesus’s followers learned about Jesus, the more their love for Jesus grew, even though they did not understand everything He said or did. Their love for Jesus was based on the love He showed them and the power He demonstrated over the brokenness and death that they encountered in the world. Even though Jesus Himself suffered from the effects of this brokenness, He walked with deep compassion for people and worked to set them free from besetting personal struggles, inviting them to a different kind of life – one filled with freedom, strength, and joy, despite their suffering.
One of Jesus’s followers, Peter, endured a great deal of suffering. With this perspective, he wrote to his fellow believers encouraging them to trust that God would remain faithful to them:
Therefore let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good.[6]
We do not love God because we understand every facet of God. We love and follow Him because we understand that in Jesus, we find pure, perfect love with the power to redeem us and fill us with the strength we need even in our darkest days. This strength allows us to extend God’s love to others in surprising ways.
God’s character inspires us to cultivate love for God and for others
At the end of Job’s story, God vindicates Job in front of his friends and tells the three friends to have Job pray for them - essentially, reconcile with one another. This was a tough command for both the friends and Job. His friends had to have the humility to admit they had gotten everything about this situation wrong. They had unfairly judged Job and completely mischaracterized what God was doing.
Job, whose heart had endured harsh judgment from his friends, now had to find it in himself to forgive them and pray for them. How did Job find the strength to forgive friends who had wounded him so deeply? He finally understood the majesty of God.
If Job was following God out of moral obligation before his suffering, after Job encounters God in his suffering, Job follows God out of incredible reverence for God’s splendor and the forgiveness God extends to him. Similarly, when we encounter the life-altering love of Jesus, we are never the same even in hard times. We become humbled and changed by Jesus’s love for us. We become motivated to cultivate a richer relationship with Jesus which expands our heart, deepening our love of God.
When we have received God’s love in our lives, it overflows in our heart and reorients our heart with a greater, more genuine and sincere love for others – even our worst enemies.
Job’s suffering could have left him permanently despondent and bitter. He could have renounced God and lived life as he saw fit. But instead, he engaged with God authentically leading God to engage with Job and reveal more of Himself. Job never understood why he suffered as he did, but his newfound revelation and awe of God led Him to a new life and a new relationship with God that allowed him to love others more profoundly.
We too have this same invitation to encounter Jesus and allow Him into our hearts. This invitation is not a promise we will ever fully understand God because we never will. But it is an invitation to receive God’s everlasting love for us. This love gives us the strength to persevere through tough circumstances with the knowledge that despite our lack of understanding, God remains firmly in our corner.
[1] Job 10:1-4
[2] Job 38:2-5
[3] Job 40:8-9
[4] Isaiah 55:8-9
[5] John 8:12
[6] 1 Peter 4:19