“Do you think I care if Aslan dooms me to death?’ said the King. “That would be nothing, nothing at all. Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose and were a black sun.”

“I know,” said Jewel. “Or as if you drank water and it were dry water.”[1]

 This quote is from The Last Battle, the final book in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series. Tirian, the king of Narnia faces a real paradox: Aslan (the lion who symbolically represents Christ), whom he had always believed to be good, was rumored to have reappeared and was reported to be evil. To Tirian and his friend Jewel this was like finding the sun to be black or water to be dry.

For 27 chapters of the book bearing his name, Job has been confronted by a black sun and by dry water. The God he had always feared and faithfully served had seemingly turned against him. The divine justice he had taken for granted had failed him. And his plea for relief had been met with total silence. He had concluded, as did King Tirian, the King of Narnia, in the quote above, that it would be better to die than to live in a reality that contradicted every good he had believed to be true.

                Yes, Job suffered horribly and wanted the pain to end. Yes, he resented the false accusations leveled against him by his so-called friends. Yes, he protested his innocence in the face of circumstantial evidence of his guilt. But none of those things hurt him as much as waking to a black sun or drinking dry water. The good God whom Job had always believed in and longed for seemed no longer to be good! Job’s sufferings seemed to be evidence that God was the opposite of what Job had always believed. This was incomprehensible. What could Job do in the face of such a contradiction?

                What can any of us do with such a contradiction? I am sure many people have faced similar paradoxes. What if we discover that a trusted friend has stabbed us in the back—“et tu, Brute?”[2] What if we discover that an organization that we had sacrificed for, or a movement or religion or country to which we had given 100% commitment, or, worst of all, the view of reality in which we had lived our entire life was actually false—this must be shattering! It would create extreme cognitive dissonance, emotional collapse, PTSD, and loss of self-identity. It is a form of death. But such contradictions happen. Some may respond with denial—retreating into an irrational state of affirming their former so-called “truth.” Others may erupt in anger—renouncing the person or thing that had betrayed their trust. For a religious person, this may lead them into confirmed atheism. A few people may react to such dissonance by withdrawing into an emotional shell or by contemplating suicide. After all, as King Tirian said, after your identity has been lost, death may seem better than life.

                Job was on the edge of such an abyss. He stared down into this abyss, but one thing restrained him from falling in: if only by a thread, he held onto his faith in God—though he wasn’t sure why. But for Job, his former faith created a greater paradox: God was both good and not good at the same time! To be more precise, the God who administers justice for everyone was being unjust to Job.

                That is like saying the water is wet and dry at the same time! How would Job handle such a contradiction?

[1] C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle. (The Chronicles of Narnia, book 7. Macmillan, 1956) p. 32.

[2] William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (3:1).