The heavens will expose [the wicked man’s] guilt;
    the earth will rise up against him.
Job 20:27 (NIV)

When I was a young teenager, I spent the night at a friend’s house. There was a pizza joint down the street from his house, so we walked there for a late dinner. It was a Friday night and the place was absolutely packed. When we were finished eating my friend said, “Come on,” and he proceeded to walk right out the door without paying the tab. When I suggested we should pay for our meal, he shrugged it off and continued to walk towards home.

I had never done anything quite so brazenly wrong in my life, and I remember having a hard time sleeping that night at my friends house. Every time I heard a police siren in the distance I was convinced they were coming for us. I guess I had a pretty healthy conscience!

Here’s the thing. We got away with it. The cops never showed up. I woke up the next morning and went home the next day. The pizza shop owner took the loss along with our server. I’m sure it happens all the time. I went on with my adolescent life the next day and forgot all about it.

At the end of yesterday’s chapter, Job makes the comment to his three friends that, given the way they are treating him with their accusations and lack of kindness, they should be fearing the same wrath of God that they say Job is experiencing.

Z takes this as a personal affront, and his friend quickly intervenes. Z’s discourse is another Hebrew wisdom poem on the fate of the wicked. The theme of the poem is that the wicked always come to ruin.

Except, they don’t. Not always. I walked out on my dinner tab and experienced no ill effects other than about twelve-hours of acute guilt and shame. Z’s poem speaks in grandiose black-and-white terms of the wicked having unbridled craving for wickedness that lead to God’s unleashed just desserts. Except, they know Job, and they know that he has never acted like the description of the wicked in Z’s poem. They are looking at life with a simplistic equation:

Sin leads to suffering and tragedy therefore suffering and tragedy must be the evidence of sin.

Not only is this not a true statement, but I believe it leads one to believe an equally incorrect spiritual assumption that Job’s friends are asserting:

Sin leads to suffering and tragedy therefore the lack of suffering and tragedy must be evidence of a person’s righteousness.

This type of thinking leads to me live by keeping up self-righteous, religious appearances and hiding my own sinfulness from the world. It also leads to self-righteousness by bank ledger. I walked out on my pizza tab, but it was just once and I was a good, church going kid who typically didn’t do that sort of thing, so I on the balance my pizza theft is not such a big deal.

Except, it is.

Jesus called all of this out in His message on the mountainside (Matthew 5-7). In God’s Kingdom economy, Jesus stated, I only have to look lustfully at a woman and I’m guilty of adultery. I only have to call another person an “idiot” and I’m guilty of murder. In His parable of the sheep and goats (Matthew 25:31-46), Jesus states quite directly that on Judgment Day there will be many who appeared to be good religious and righteous people who never got what Jesus was about. At the same time, there will be many who never appeared to be either religious or righteous who still got what Jesus was all about and treated life and others that way.

In the quiet this morning, my thoughts wandered back to a message I gave a few weeks ago in which I talked about “outside-in” spirituality and “inside-out” spirituality. Job’s friends have their hearts and minds stuck in “outside-in” mode. They see Job’s outer tragedy and suffering and conclude that it must be evidence of an inner spiritual problem. Job is arguing that there is nothing inside his life that justly warrants the outside tragedy and suffering he’s experiencing. Not one of the four has yet considered that perhaps there is tragedy and suffering that exists in a fallen world where evil exists along with billions of sinful people which is not connected in any way to an individual person’s sinfulness, thoughts, words, or actions.

I can’t control every circumstance of this earthly life. Sometimes the wicked prosper and escape earthly justice. Sometimes the righteous and innocent unjustly suffer. It is what it is.

All that I can do is to manage those things which I do control. As a disciple of Jesus, that means to live authentically from the inside out. A couple of years after I became a disciple I remembered the night of the great pizza heist. I stopped by the pizza joint after school, confessed to the manager, and gave him enough money to cover the loss.

If I remember correctly, it was about the same time I fell in gym and tore all the ligaments in my ankle.

My right action, and my tragic circumstances were unrelated.

If you know anyone who might be encouraged by today’s post, please share.