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Excerpt 16: "Job and God's 'Terrible Majesty'”
from Chapter IX: "God's Terrible Majesty"
TERRIBLE MAJESTY: Biblical Aesthetics and the Recovery of Authentic Fear
(Publication date: soon, D.V.)
The magisterial connotation of Elohim intensifies when OT writers complement the pluralis majestatis with the precise Hebrew word for “majesty” - hod. Amazingly, the first instance of hod as a descriptor of Elohim’s “majesty” occurs in Job 37:22 when Elihu declares, “with God is terrible majesty.” This inaugural declaration of God’s majesty immediately reenforces our thesis that sublime consciousness of God inherently involves an experience of Terror, for Elihu describes God’s majesty as “terrible.” The Hebrew term for “terrible” is yawray, which indicates that an encounter with the Divine majesty produces fear, awe, dread, astonishment, and terror. The major translations have adopted that sense of awesomeness, uniformly translating yawray as “awesome”; however, given the colloquialization of the word “awesome” as an overused cliche in everyday speech, to describe Elohim’s majesty as “awesome” diminishes the ominous force of yawray as a descriptor of Elohim’s “terrible majesty.” Intensifying this dreadful and astonishing nature of Elohim’s majesty is the verbal form of “terrible,” yawrah, which means “to shoot as an arrow” or “to pour” out upon like a flood, therefore inferring that the overwhelming emotional and intellectual effect of a Divine encounter compares to being struck by an arrow or drowning in a flood.
We should remember the context within which Job makes this ominous remark about the terrifying nature of God’s majesty. Job has experienced unspeakable and immeasurable calamities that have devastated him “in dust and ashes” including, with the exception of his wife, the complete loss of his family, wealth, and health. How difficult it is for us to fathom such depths of human suffering, not just at the physical level of possessions, relationships, and vitality, but also at the emotional level of indescribable angst into which Job’s experience had cast him downward into the darkest abyss of deepest misery. So great is Job’s agony that he wishes he had never been born, and thus he despairingly cries out, “Let the day perish wherein I was born.” Job bemoans his estate as one “hedged in” by the Almighty. Job’s anguished sighs and desperate cries pour out effusively like a torrent of water, with mournful “groans” and sorrowful “roars.” Moreover, Job describes his horrible estate as one of “fear” and “dread” because his “spirit drinks” the poisonous “arrows of the Almighty” as “the terrors of God are arrayed against” him.
In an earlier passage, Job rebukes his friends for their superficial understanding of God’s "terrible majesty" and their subsequent lack of fear toward God. Job asks, “Will not His majesty terrify you, and the dread of Him fall on you?” Note Job’s use of a double descriptor for the psycho-emotive effect upon those who contemplate the Divine majesty: “terrify” and “dread.” “Terrify” derives from the Hebrew ba’at, which means “to be overtaken by sudden terror.” Ba’at occurs in numerous episodes of sublime terror when the ominousness of Elohim’s majesty overwhelms Job’s soul. In his initial reaction to the various emotional traumas he has experienced, Job curses the day of his birth; he wishes “that day be darkness! May God above not seek it, nor light shine upon it. Let gloom and deep darkness claim it. Let clouds dwell upon it; let the blackness of the day terrify it.” Even if Job sleeps, the Almighty “terrifies” him with angst-laden dreams and visions. Pleading his innocence, Job exclaims that he dreads the rod in God’s chastening hand because it “terrifies” him.
(What will it take for you to realize God's "terrible majesty"?)
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