by Gowdy Cannon
There are not many chapters like Job 31 in our Bible. This beaten down and defensive man with nothing left, backed into a theological corner about God’s justice, spends forty verses defending his integrity. I suppose this is understandable, considering what Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar had driven him to with their simplistic view on suffering and God; yet it still smacks of pride. We know that Job did not consider himself perfect since he claims in verse 33 that he had not tried to hide his sin. Still, he really seems to have his list of good deeds memorized.
I do not know enough to castigate Job over his defense, however. We know that God straightened him out, in one sense, at the end of the book; yet we also know that God confirms that Job spoke rightly about Him. In Ezekiel 14, God twice lists Job as one of three very holy men. Regardless, I think Job 31 serves as a clear model for how people of all cultures and all times can live with integrity. Job gives between eleven and twelve qualities of how his life has demonstrated integrity. Here I want to focus on two. Because these two qualities are both so countercultural to us, and especially to my own community, I feel that they are the most urgent and essential to understand.
Sexual Integrity
For nearly three decades now, American television, whether comedy or drama or something else, has assumed that two people who are dating are also sleeping together. Sometimes you may see teenagers struggle with having premarital sex, but the answer given to their struggle is typically to wait for some ambiguous “right person.” Marriage is rarely, if ever, offered as the standard. That type of thinking is not limited to Hollywood but has easily infiltrated the church as well. The idea that sex should be reserved for marriage is largely considered antiquated today, and even those who profess Christianity often succumb to this thinking.[1]
Beyond this clear mandate to save sex for marriage, we also know from Jesus that refraining from sexual contact between two consenting people is not the full extent of Biblical sexual integrity. Since Jesus stated that lust is also sexual sin, He would have also prohibited pornography, which is rampant everywhere in the world and especially in the United States. I hope that we are not desensitized to the statistics: Internet users have made more than 7 billion porn searches since 2015, 64% of men look at pornography at least once a month, and one in five mobile searches is for pornographic content.[2]
Job’s words on this topic stand in sharp contrast to this data. Not only does Job claim not to have slept with another woman, but he also claims to have made a covenant with his eyes not to look at another woman with lust. We can easily think of Jesus taking a higher moral standard than that in the Mosaic Law (and He did), but in Matthew 5:28 He was not saying something unique to the New Testament. Job had already put lust on level with adultery. He even started his diatribe against it in chapter 31.
The words that Job use are notable and worth scrutinizing. The fact that he has a “covenant” with his eyes communicates something extremely serious. We can understand this if we understand the relationship that God had with Abraham, Moses, David, and now with us through Jesus. Garnett Reid says of 31:1, “Here he uses language of formal pacts common in his culture. A ‘covenant’ is a pledged agreement making a promise and assuming to keep that trust.”[3] Covenant is a meaty, heavy word of relational commitment. It is what man-woman marriage is supposed to be.
In addition to this significant word choice, Job also speaks in stark contrast to our liberating view of sex without consequences. In verses 9-12, he says that if he has slept with another woman, then for punishment his wife should sleep with another man. He then adds that lust is a shameful sin and a fire that burns all the way to destruction. He could not be any clearer or more adamant about how much of a horrific betrayal he considers adultery and lust to be. I do not know that I view it that seriously; Job compels me to desire it more passionately.
N. T. Wright writes that a second-century pagan doctor named Galen noted that two beliefs distinguished the Christians he knew from the culture around them: belief in bodily resurrection after death and belief in sexual restraint.[4] Christians in all cultures everywhere should be quite strange to the heathen world around them. For us, just as for Job and for the second-century church, I cannot imagine another topic as crucial to our strangeness as sexual ethics. We should learn from Job’s words on how to understand sexual sin.
Integrity in Hospitality
Over the span of several verses (31:13-23, 32), Job also explains how he has treated the four main groups of marginalized people in the Old Testament: the poor, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. He again offers searing self-rebuke that he would deserve if he had not gone above and beyond in helping these susceptible victims of injustice, saying graphically at one point that the just punishment for mistreating the orphan is to have one’s shoulder pulled from its socket.
Job’s treatment of one of these groups stands out in particular as being countercultural. In speaking of the stranger in verse 32, and even of all travelers in his area, he reveals a level of hospitality that I imagine is foreign to many American Christians by stating that he constantly welcomed them into his home. He is speaking of the one from another country who lived among his people; this is what “stranger” (or “alien”) meant in both the Old and New Testaments. Christ uses it in reference to Himself in Matthew 25:35. Additionally, in Hebrews 13:2, the word hospitality comes from the Greek word philoxenia, which means “love of the stranger.” Job had constantly welcomed people into his home that others in his society had likely treated poorly and taken advantage of.
Such kindness stands in opposition to how many of us live. Despite the fact that we live in a “melting pot” and that government-sanctioned segregation is a thing of the past, evidence suggests that a majority of Americans do not have friends outside of their ethnic group.[5] Additionally, Reid comments on Job’s context, “Since no welfare state existed in the ancient Near East, people lacking life’s basic necessities depended on the compassion of others.”[6]
Job stepped up as God had always intended for his people to do. Even in an affluent culture like ours where the government, for better or worse, offers provision for the poor, I have seen that immigrants (especially those non-English speakers) are still convenient targets for abuse and deception. While I cannot prove this from any text, I believe that this is why God included the foreigner along with the poor, the widow, and the orphan as those to whom we should practice hospitality. Those are the most vulnerable groups due to their lack of relational protection.
Rosaria Butterfield, through whom the Holy Spirit has convicted me deeply about this, states, “A truly hospitable heart anticipates every day, Christ-centered table fellowship and guests who are genuinely in need. Too many of us are sidelined by fears. We fear that people will hurt us. We fear that people will negatively influence our children.”[7] That is like an arrow to the soul that pierces me for my good.
In many cases, apathy and self-kingdom building are at the heart of why we are bad at hospitality in general and, when we do practice it, why we typically have culturally similar people sit at our tables. I also have little doubt that much of this extends from how homogenous our churches have been historically in the U.S. We naturally bend towards people who are like us in every demographic possible, and research less than twenty years old bears this out with race and ethnicity in relation to the churches we attend.[8]
Conclusion
Job’s spiritual resume in Job 31 hits me like a sledgehammer every time I read it. It is so striking that I have tried to memorize all forty verses, though I have yet to put them in my long-term memory. Beyond knowing them, I advocate that we also desperately need to live them. Nearly all of his speech is countercultural to the way that many of us live, especially Job’s fierce commitment to sexual purity and hospitality. Perhaps he was bragging or being overly defensive, but God has used it to set a standard of integrity that should transcend time and culture. May we all allow the Holy Spirit to transform us by using these God-inspired words.
About the Author: Gowdy
Cannon is a 2002 graduate of Welch College and has served the past seventeen
years at Northwest Community Church (formerly Northwest Free Will Baptist
Church), first as youth pastor and then, for the last nine years, as the
bilingual pastor. He has been married to Kayla for four years, and they just
welcomed their first son into the world, Liam Erasmus, this past January.
[1]Ted Olsen, “The Sex Lives of Unmarried Evangelicals,” Christianity Today, May 2, 2013; https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/may/sex-lives-of-unmarried-evangelicals.html; accessed April 29, 2019.
[2]“Pornography Statistics,” Covenant Eyes; http://www.covenanteyes.com/pornstats; accessed April 30, 2019.
[3]Garnett Reid, Intentional Integrity (Nashville: Randall House, 2011), 12.
[4]N. T. Wright, Surprised By Hope (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 43.
[5]Christopher Ingraham, “Three Quarters of Whites Do Not Have Any Non-White Friends,” Washington Post, August 25, 2014; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/08/25/three-quarters-of-whites-dont-have-any-non-white-friends; accessed April 30, 2019.
[6]Reid, Intentional Integrity, 56.
[7]Rosaria Butterfield, The Gospel Comes with a House Key (Wheaton: Crossway, 2018), 11, 35.
[8]Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race In America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16.
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