Lets delve into Job chapter three. We find Job cursing the day of his birth. An interesting idea; have we ever considered doing it? It doesn’t seem rational and actually makes no sense. Job didn’t care about the sense of it, nor what anybody thought at this point. He only knew that according to his own theology, he was being punished by God, must be hated of God, and was terrorized by the thought of a future in God’s hell.
So, Job’s right-and-wrong-God-value-system gave way to a world in which comfort, on any level, became the exclusive goal. A fanatical blotting out of his pre-existence, a current death-wish contemplation, a seeking of quiet, a quelling of fear, (ugly and never ending dread) — overwhelmingly replaced the God of Job’s former days, Who is now unfaceable.
I have read about post-traumatic-stress disorder. Symptoms reveal the possibility of “hyperarousal” which reflects itself in the persistent expectation of danger, (the human system of self preservation seems to go into permanent alert). One result could be panic attacks or acute paranoia.
Another befalling could be what Judith Herman, M.D. calls “intrusion.” Here the traumatic moment has an indelible imprint on the soul. (Is this obsession)? “These poor folks re-live the event as though it were continually recurring in the present, the event is encoded in an abnormal form of memory, or the event breaks spontaneously into consciousness producing flashbacks and nightmares,” she says.
Lastly, from the same source, the traumatized may be misfortuned with “constriction,” the numbing response of surrender. “In this occurrence the system of self defense shuts down entirely. Sometimes situations of inescapable danger may evoke not only terror and rage but also paradoxically, a state of detached calm, in which terror, rage and pain dissolve and maybe depression occurs.”
In addition, safe environments appear dangerous to some traumatized. They are hiding even from reminders of the event. Events register in awareness, but are disconnected from their ordinary meanings. Numbing, anesthesia, loss of sensations, alteration of time sense-slow motion, passivity, indifference, emotional detachment, surrender of voluntary action, suspended initiative, suspended judgement, subjective detachment, enhanced perception or imagery, altered sensation, analgesia, distortion of reality, de-personalization, de-realization, all can also occur with victims of trauma.
What are we saying? Job’s rant, though undiscernible, was at least honest. We privy, in Job chapter 3, to the inner workings of a depraved and beaten human psyche. That psyche holds God in the past tense and seeks peace in the remaining but temporary habitation — a post-traumatic world. Job didn’t ask for this sphere of existence, but as surely as it would be for you or me, he frantically scrambles to find that world’s boundaries.
Have you ever had your entire value system plowed over, and faced building a new one? Have you ever been made to scrutinize value precepts, wracking the brain to sift out truth from error? Job was here. According to his old system Job must be the worst sinner that ever lived. Somehow, to Job, that didn’t sit right. It didn’t equate. A big part of him was wondering how he deserved such a thing. Frankly his norms and standards had failed and a monkey wrench caused it and promised to keep it pinched.
We must admit, when an event as severe as Job’s happens, not many survive that trauma, including real believers. Any theoretical notion of God dies now; anything of un-spirited “letter” bulges out. The letter kills, remember? The Spirit gives life. The temporal dies, the eternal goes on, imperfect fails but the perfect stands. Moralists flounder, and legalists vanquish; Pharisees meet their rebuke and those who have known God be the “hearing of the ear” must yield to those whose “eyes see Him.”
In defense of every human, real and personalized death and dying do not seem to fit the sentimentalized God of most, regardless of our particular twist of Him. Nevertheless, have you grasped that God raises the dead? God resurrects, He is resurrection. One’s hypothesis of dying must be exposed and itself die for God’s resurrection to gain prominence in that person. Death is temporal, resurrection eternal. We “alive from the dead” folks, (all Christians), no longer have to relate to death as an odd event. Yes, the event itself may shatter us with grief, and the pain of separation. But, we know no man after the flesh, even Christ.
Our Savior, Jesus Christ, set His face toward death and never came down. In that day, death lost its sting, and now we don’t have to fear death, for to die is actually gain, far better. If we perish, we perish, for “death” has been abolished by Christ’s own death.
Finally, has the hand of God’s destroyer blasted your conceptualized god? Self-preservers hold on, hold on, and always run from, come down from, or vehemently avoid the day of death. This is natural. Yes, there will be trauma, pain, and maybe suffering in it’s various forms. Nevertheless, when the dust settles (and it may take months or years), like Job, the Omnipotent, Holy, Omnipresent, True and Omniscient God overtakes, displaces, supersedes, fills up, and overwhelms my tiny imaginations, impressing upon my glove of a soul a glory; a presence, an aura of eternity. O blessed, sovereign, truth, and purity.
In closing, God is love. Never forget it. All spells love and all pictures love and all paints love and all displays love. He exists not an idea of love or a notion, thought, or perception, impression, theory, model, or belief of love. Not like human love, God’s love engineers a scheme of breaking the sin-deceived box, so the treasure can be poured forth. You and me cannot hide behind our figments of imagination forever. Our fantasy will soon be blown to smithereens. This is love. O happy day!!!!! O happy day!!!! love ya