The Terror of Arbitrary Power

A Meditation Based on Job 9-10

Note: I am developing a work that offers post-evangelical meditations on the book of Job. This section reflects on what Job says in chapters 9-10. This section was drafted over the last week. Perhaps it will speak to you. I hope to bring this book out in 2026, with Orbis Books.

He is not a man like me, that I can answer Him,

That we can go to law together.

No arbiter is between us

To lay his hand on us both.

Your hands shaped and fashioned me,

Then destroyed every part of me. (Job 9:32-33, 10:8)

Job’s lament that even if he could take God to court, it would be no use, is very powerful. Job says that even if God is at fault for Job’s situation, Job can never be sedeq (just/righteous) compared to God. There is no winning in this courtroom; God’s status as God is a trump card that always wins.

Job is raising a question about whether God is Just or whether God is simply Power. If God is simply Power, especially Absolute Power, then God can do whatever God wants to do, and no one can challenge God on any other grounds. The question of God’s justice is not relevant because God is not defined by justice, only by power. And because no one is as powerful as God, God always wins.

But Job is fully aware that this is not what his religious tradition has said about God. Job’s friends, as spokesmen for the tradition, have been asserting repeatedly that God is just, not only powerful. That is why they continue to feel the need to interpret Job’s situation as divine punishment for sin, whether Job’s sin or his children’s sin. This would mean that God is acting on the basis of the principle of justice, not arbitrary power. Job is not at all convinced, and that is why his generalized lament over his suffering has now moved into a more specific protest directed to God Himself. (You will see why I have introduced the capitalized male pronoun very shortly.)

In the United States, a president began serving in office in January 2025 whose vision and practice of presidential power has looked more like the terrifying arbitrary power that Job describes than (arguably) any previous president in American history. Many other people in many other lands and many other periods have suffered under rulers of this type, but in this nation, we have had a political tradition in which the rule of law and the separation of powers were understood as limiting every official’s exercise of power, including that of the chief executive.

Careful readers of the Bible will not be surprised by the quest of a leader for unconstrained and absolute political power, because it surfaces often, from Pharoah to Caesar. But it is indeed an unhappy surprise when it happens in one of the world’s oldest democracies.

The enthusiastic and ongoing evangelical Christian support for such a (mis)leader raises many questions, including this theological question in this textual context – could it be that many evangelicals (and other believers) are comfortable with unconstrained executive power in part because this is their vision of God’s power? Can the Ruler (or perhaps also the Father, the Husband, the Pastor) do whatever He wants to do because God can do whatever God wants to do, and no underling dare challenge such a Power?

Certainly it is true that many who have left conservative religious communities have done so in part as a response to the abuse of centralized, religiously sanctioned, patriarchal power.

In our text, Job, like Sartre, has “no exit.” He won’t kill himself and God won’t kill him. Thus he begins his magnificent protest. Like Abraham challenging God’s justice in Genesis 18, but from a position of much more brokenness and vulnerability, Job challenges God to be a God of justice, not just of arbitrary power. This has implications for how believers understand both divine and human power. Thank you, Brother Job. We join you in your protest.