Thy will be done

"There are only two kinds of people in the world: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God finally says, 'Thy will be done.'"

Thus Dorothy Sayers, whom I have quoted for years in theodical discussions. But since yesterday morning I've been wondering...what if that isn't true? What if there is only one kind of person in the world: those to whom God says, "Your will be done"?

Six of us, ranging in age from low twenties to advanced and respectable old age, are sitting in a small circle of chairs in the corner of a church fellowship hall. We have just gotten to one of those embarrassing ask-and-ye-shall-receive passages, and inevitably the conversation shifts to unanswered prayer, especially unanswered prayer for healing. Then one person raises the topic of Job -- as an illustration that we don't know what's going on behind the scenes, and if we did, there's a very good chance we'd approve wholeheartedly of what God is doing.

You see [this gentleman observes, if you'll pardon some the inevitable paraphrasing due to a leaky short-term memory], if you take the time to read Job carefully, all the way through in one sitting, one of the things that strikes you is the fact that Job spends suprisingly little time complaining about the loss of his children and possessions. For most of the book, he isn't begging to have his children and his camels and his wife...um, bad example, sorry...anyway, he isn't begging to get his money back or to get his kids back. What he seems to want back more than anything else in the world is his reputation. Once his "friends" have accused him of being a sinner, there is no room in his mind for any of his other losses: he wants his friends proved wrong about him. He knows what they're saying about him isn't true, and it just drives him crazy, for chapter after chapter after querelous, indignant chapter.

Now, what Job doesn't know -- but we do -- is that this isn't the first time his reputation has been slandered. The poem opens, after all, in God's court, where Satan (the very word "satan" means "accuser") complains bitterly that Job's reputation for virtue is undeserved. "He only does what you want because he knows you're the mother of all sugar-daddies," Satan says, combining malice with (at least in my admittedly free translation) the mother of all mixed metaphors. "He's just using you. He's not really a nice guy at all."

We know exactly how Job would have reacted if he had been standing there to hear the accusation -- because the author of the Book of Job has taken pains to show us Job's reaction to a false accusation. Job, we can be confident, would have complained that Satan's accusation was false and would have demanded justification. Trouble is, justification might turn out to be harder than it looks.

Think about it: If God doesn't temporarily remove Job's blessings, then Satan can keep right on making the same accusation from now until God gets tired of it and banishes Satan to his unpleasantly warm room with no supper -- and even then Satan won't admit Job's okay. And even if God does temporarily remove Job's blessings, Satan can still claim that Job is only behaving himself because he knows what's up and is playing a role. There is only one way Job can truly be proved utterly innocent of Satan's charges, and that is for God -- without letting Job know what's going on -- to take everything away from Job that Satan says Job's in it for, and thus prove that, even without all of that stuff, Job will remain faithful to God.

So that's exactly what God does -- because that's what Job would want God to do if he knew the whole story.

Well, that came up yesterday morning in a discussion that I was sitting in on, and it wasn't a new idea to me. But a corollary occurred to me as I drove away from church that had never before crossed my mind.

One of the differences between myself and my wife is that Dessie, by temperament, is biased heavily toward the words-of-affirmation love language, whereas I am biased way over toward physical touch. A side effect of this difference in temperament is that I find it very easy not only to say, but to feel that the opinions of silly people who don't know me well are of absolutely no importance to me -- but that is very difficult for Dessie. In other words, there are certain people whose opinions matter to me because I respect their judgment, but otherwise people can think whatever they want to think about me, and if they're accurate, props to 'em, and if they're wrong, that's their problem, not mine. But it bothers Dessie very much to feel like people have a bad opinion of her, even if those people are people she knows are silly jackasses.

So, I'm thinking about that this morning in the car, and I suddenly thought, "What if Job hadn't been the kind of person who is passionate about his reputation? What if Satan went up to God and said, 'That Kenny -- you know he's really a total jerk and hypocrite, don't You?' If Satan did that, and God picked up the phone and called me and said, 'Hey, listen to what Satan just said about you,' I know exactly what my response would be: 'Um, and why exactly would I care about Satan's opinion as long as You and I are okay?' Isn't it pretty likely that, given that response from me, God would hang up the phone, turn to Satan, and say, 'Tell you what, Lucy, you go ahead and think whatever you want to think about Kenny, because neither he nor I care in the slightest about your opinion'?"

And the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me to believe that if Job hadn't been the kind of guy who cared more about his reputation than he cared about money and family -- and whether you think that's how he should have felt or not, the poet certainly seems to me to go out of his way to paint Job that way -- then I don't think he would have lost his wealth and kids in the first place. I think the Job-poet shows us a man who thinks he's being mistreated by God when in fact God is simply giving Job what Job would have chosen had he known what his choices were.

Well, maybe I have that right and maybe I don't. But that train of thought had one more station to go, and even if the literary criticism in the middle isn't right, I think my final conclusion is valid, and that is this:

There is only one kind of person in the world: the kind to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." For in the end, each person who goes to hell, goes to hell against God's wishes because he insists on going there and God finally gives up and lets him have his way. But for each of the redeemed, when we see no longer through a glass darkly but face to face, we will find that God has something different to give each of us, and on that day we will discover that what God has given us is nothing more nor less than what our hearts most deeply desired all along.

P.S. Actually, there are only 10 kinds of people in the world: those who think in binary, and those who don't.