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Job 13-15 – Praying through the Bible #162 – A Prayer About Resurrection
My relative was schizophrenic. Those who suffer, endure mentally twisted hallucinations and delusions forming false realities. Making this practical, pain can make us experience what I’ll call “sane schizophrenia,” producing unearthly realities. Pain can produce an irrationality of hope superseding human experience. This pained induced thinking then enables us to expand beyond man’s reality, to think like God; helping our mind grasp the unimaginable in the “sane” world. Pain can create hope.
“Schizophrenia” literally means “split mind.” And while a split personality is a misnomer, pain can also produce a seemingly split mind in anyone, including believers. The result is differing voices speak in our heads trying to drown out the others. We can find ourselves thinking blasphemous thoughts one moment while praising God the next. Pain can construct confusion.
Job prays, “Only grant these two things to me, God, so that I will not have to hide from Your presence” (13.20). The two things are: 1) Remove Your hand from me; 2) Do not let Your terror frighten me (13.21). Job wants to confront God in a way more personal and effective than prayer. Let’s focus on Job’s hope, lack of hope, and confused hope.
Here is the reality of man: “(1) Man born of woman is short of days and full of trouble. (2) He blossoms like a flower, then withers; he flees like a shadow and does not last” (14.1-2). Here is the reality of nature: “(7) There is hope for a tree: If it is cut down, it will sprout again, and its shoots will not die. (8) If its roots grow old in the ground and its stump starts to die in the soil, (9) the smell of water makes it thrive and produce twigs like a sapling” (14.7-9). Here is the confusion from pain: “(10) But a man dies and fades away; he breathes his last — where is he? (11) As water disappears from the sea and a river becomes parched and dry, (12) so man lies down never to rise again. They will not wake up until the heavens are no more; they will not stir from their sleep” (14.10-12). Here is the irrationality of hope: “When a man dies, will he come back to life? If so, I would wait all the days of my struggle until my relief comes” (14.14). Through struggle, without any empirical experience, pain contemplates a resurrection. Through creation, Job hopes that if trees have hope after death, can man?
Then another voice from the divergent mind of Job speaks: “as water wears away stones and torrents wash away the soil from the land, so You destroy a man’s hope” (4.19). Does the same God who gives hope through nature take hope away in death? Does the God who creates resurrection within nature plan to include us? This is the “sane schizophrenia” we all live and die with hoping to live again.
Prayer Challenge: Scripture challenges us to be of one mind with one another; Job shows us the struggle of being of one mind with ourselves. Pray for clarity amidst pain looking for resurrection.
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