When you don’t agree with what I’m doing….

Job 25 is a very short chapter. Only 6 verses. It’s Bildad’s next response to Job.

Bildad: God is awesome! Totally awesome! He rules over everything. He’s in charge of all that exists. No one can begin to measure His strength. His light touches everyone.

So how can we ever begin to measure up? Who are we compared to God? How can we call ourselves pure? We’re nothing compared to God. Absolutely nothing.

It’s all about perspective, isn’t it? We touched on this before in ‘Know your place’. He’s right. Compared to God, human beings are……Not as powerful or wise or in control or pure or good as we sometimes kid ourselves we are, that’s for sure.

Job: Hang on a minute, Bildad! What have you done exactly to help those without any power? What have you done to support the weak? What advice have you given to those that need it? What great insight have you shown?

Who gave you these words to speak?

The dead are in deep trouble. Suffering beyond measure. God makes sure of that. All light is gone. We’ve only glimpsed the extent of God’s power. What we’ve heard is just the tiniest whisper compared to mighty roar He is capable of. We can’t comprehend His power. We’ll never be able to.

I promise you that as long as God gives me breath, I will not say anything I shouldn’t. However much I suffer, I will not lie. As long as I live, I will stay faithful to my God.

So I’m never going to agree with you lot. I will hold onto my innocence. I know I have done nothing wrong before God here. I have a clear conscience, whatever guilt you try to lay at my feet.

In the end, you’re accountable to God, not me. I’ll leave it to God to deal with you.

All I can do is remind you of the power of God. I’m not going to try and hide anything from you. You’ve seen as much as I have. That’s why I don’t understand the things you’re saying. We all knows what happens to bad people in the end. We’ve seen it. We’ve talked about it enough. He faces the full wrath of God in the end.

Job continues in the next chapter – chapter 28 – but it’s entitled ‘Interlude: where wisdom is found’. So that sounds fascinating and we’ll give that a blog of its own, if that’s OK.

What struck me today is how we deal with the situation where others are convinced we are doing the wrong thing, but we are convinced that we are walking in God’s way. Maybe this has never happened to you. It has happened to me a bunch of times.

For example, I wrote and self-published two novels that received an extremely mixed response. Extreme responses. I have had to live with the consequences of those responses. Some Christians felt that my novels contained ‘erotic material’ that was not appropriate for a Christian to write. That put me in a whole new category of wrongdoing, so that they didn’t really know what to do with me – which ended up looking like ‘we can’t stop her being here, but we’ll do all we can to silence her and make sure she has no role, so that she can’t do any further damage’. As you can imagine, this was pretty distressing. Still is. Initially it caused me to stop writing. I lost all my confidence. I began to question whether I had been in the wrong. What puzzled me is that when I examined my conscience, it was clear. I asked God to convict me about it and He did not. I was happy with what I had written. I had tried to convey reality in all of its messiness. To hold up a mirror to real life and write what I saw. All of it. Leaving nothing out. I wasn’t writing to titillate or arouse. Far from it. What I recorded felt necessary to the storyline. And the storyline reflected universal themes of life and death, human reactions and actions, flawed humanity, glimpses of hope and goodness….the nature of life itself.

I had a long five months of inner wranglings. Working out if the accusations against me had any substance. Trying to understand what God was saying to me. Wondering if I could ever write fiction again.

In case, you’re wondering, I am. I’m halfway through my third novel and loving every minute of it. It’s received good feedback so far from a couple of trusted (honest) readers. There’s no sex in it yet. Not because I’m deliberately avoiding it, just because it hasn’t come up. It’s all about redemption and forgiveness. The ups and downs of redemption and forgiveness.

So what have I learnt from this experience?

• not everyone will like or approve of what we do
• sometimes there is some truth in the criticism – be open to seeing that
• don’t let other people’s opinions stop you from doing what you believe you were created to do
• being popular and commercially successful is not necessarily a sign you are doing the right thing (Rob Bell’s podcast called ‘Empty Seats and Elephants’ is excellent on this – about the response to his book ‘Love Wins’, when many then branded him a universalist and the bottom fell out of his fanbase.)
• find a way to talk to and listen to God openly and honestly
• listen to one or two people whose opinions you really trust – not those you know are going to say what you want to hear
• when we do something, we do it because it is the right next step for us (deep in our heart we know what this is) regardless of whether it makes any sense to anyone else or not
• allow others the space to have their opinions – we will never be able to persuade everyone to like who we are or what we’re doing. Sometimes we have to let it go.
• take time to reflect and respond. Don’t respond from a place of hurt and bitterness. Work through that first.
• obviously it goes without saying that some things are clearly wrong. Where they go against what God has commanded us to be and do. Some things in life are black and white. Most aren’t however.

I’ll leave it there. I hope that helps. I guess in the end, I’m with Job on this –

‘So I’m never going to agree with you lot. I will hold onto my innocence. I know I have done nothing wrong before God here. I have a clear conscience, whatever guilt you try to lay at my feet.

In the end, you’re accountable to God, not me. I’ll leave it to God to deal with you.’