Brothers Keeping: Joseph and Job by Tristam Joseph
confidence in Him break asunder, certain of His showing me how to sink roots here, into the soil of His holy ground, drawing on its nourishment and water for life's abundance.
Reckoner: You acknowledge your blessings have sprouted profusely, but have you ever pruned their wild proliferations, restricting their growth to patterns pleasing the Lord?
Job: You are asking if I ever stunted their growth, restricting their development, confining their flowing freely as the will allows. As long as my sprouts maintain my upright blamelessness, following the inheritance my coding assures, they want nothing threatening to slay their individuality, leaving them untouched as they are, proudly reflecting results of my seed.
Bystander: Individuality faking spirituality, feigning love for anything but one's independence, lusting after unfulfilled wants, counterfeits any desires reconciling one to the Lord.
Reckoner: The flowers of your endeavors cannot thrive without living water, never springing from unholy beds of blamelessness, wilting and decaying before their time, destroyed by the heat of happiness, dissipating in life's tormenting sun. Asking withered blooms do I know you, you remain unrecognized, hearing your brethren deny you, saying I have never seen you as you cling to remnants of your past achievements, now inert stones with nothing more to claim, the happiness of your ways having vanished.
Job: Your truth comes with no argument from me, agreeing with wisdom our fathers wrenched from the Lord, testifying to His power and omniscience, believing He knows all, watching our movements, our deeds and misdeeds, but does He ever entertain justice, giving us a ruler to measure our ways? Can He fathom our actions with a yardstick marking inscriptions to determine just decisions? Does He record things beyond our understanding, marvelous things without number, but never revealing them for us to perceive? Will He show how I can be just before Him, appearing to tell me how?
Bystander: Acts of God must always be honored according to His holiness and almighty being, never appearing open for scrutiny for they can never be unjust, never for contending with a person's pride seeking to demand His counsel, prying to reveal His motives, giving Him a message to remain silent when exposed to our demands, but He ignores human wants to know, frustrating our desires to penetrate secrets of God's majesty, reminding us of His riches' depth, how unsearchable are His wisdom and knowledge, how inscrutable are His judgments and ways. Can you profess to know the mind of God?
Job: I may be helpless before God's power, but I still have reason to question His ways, determined to hear His answers, why one of His creation should come to loathe life.
Joseph: God trusts me with His silence, testing my patience, a reticence promising great meaning, believing it waits to reveal greater sense for my visions and fuller understanding of His wisdom. He blesses me when I never plead to know His ways, waiting for His time to reveal His plans for my life. I sometimes sense His wrath, but trusting all His plans for me, I am satisfied with His silence and beg for nothing more, trusting patience will reward my silence. He knows I belong to Him, hearing my prayers, genuinely praising Him, demanding, no, seeking nothing more than greater abundance of His goodness. I wait in silence, humbling myself under His mighty hand, trusting He has plans exalt me, finalizing His purpose in due time.
Job: Free to utter my complaints, I must speak further, reclaiming my lamentations, voicing my soul's bitterness, asking again why God condemns me, judging to unfairly distress me, despising works of my hands, as I watch Him favor designs of the wicked. Does God know ways of humans, thoughts of ones He created? How could He not? His design instills me with fear, ever present to confront me with judgment, afflicting me with disappointment, torturing my flesh to suffer, troubles all done unjustly, perhaps decided on a moment's whim, concluded after counsel with evil advisors.
Bystander: Running your tongue increases chances of stumbling your thoughts, entangling them with nonsense, fating you to speak lies, mumbling dripping words incoherently, an inevitable outcome for blathering ones, never ceasing to speak, wondering if the nature of some, seldom corralling their words, predisposes them to fabricate unreality, such being the outcome of gossip. Who can object, saying it isn't so?
Bystander: Did God not call on goodness to assist in your creation, to equip you to be righteous? If you consider making the Lord your refuge, the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you, no plague will come near your home.
Job: God molded me in His image but He prepared me to be only blameless and upright, leaving me to determine how my ways should be constructed and conducted. He may have thought I could be endowed with a framework for righteousness, filling it in completely with His image, but He did not consider the impossibility of this for a human being when He created us with free will.
Bystander: Have you attempted to be righteous or did you merely watch it as an impossibility, discounting its value even before trying it out as a virtue?
Job: Incarnation of His nature, making me righteous like Him, is incompatible with human nature. Our knowing God has never tried to create an individual completely righteous with free will, a creature never being understandable except perhaps by Him. I could never choose to be righteous, negating any need for free will, requiring nothing for modifying anything coded in me to be righteous. Observe animals, obeying all the Creator's laws imprinted in their being, never creatures with free will, responding to only inherent directions, unable to ever claim any different instructions, following a form of innate righteousness, plodding through life with no freedom to change innate commands. God decided to improve on His creation by fashioning humans, giving them free will and then expecting them to become righteous. His error was using one of His beastly creatures to make humans while forgetting to delete the codes confining them to their beastly nature. God realized His error when He made the mistake of creating us to be forged out of goodness, but He corrected His blunder by designating our disobedience, falling into following our beastly ways, as sinful, condemning all humans from birth. Does God have reason for my creation, giving purpose now for my afflictions, with me never believing they could be merely for His amusement?
Joseph: Have you exhausted your patience, waiting in vain to receive answers?
Job: I pray for hearing God's voice, trusting intercession is my only hope, realizing the impossibility of a response for why I was born, lamenting why my birth only gave purpose for the grave, silencing me before providing any comfort, beseeching God to end my afflictions, sending me to where I will beg for no return, trusting there is no place in His realm of goodness to covet.
Reckoner: You speak too much, never realizing your words can intermingle your blamelessness with confusion, tarnishing your voice with babbling ideas, claiming doctrinal purity, testifying to your righteousness in being upright, never discovering the deep things of God, unlimited in His mightiness, but never decreeing anything new to tell us what defines iniquity, while never forgetting human weaknesses. You have not learned yet to love one another, knowing little to be your brother's keeper, hardly taking notice of safeguarding another. Speak less and listen more. Wait patiently on the Lord.
Joseph: My father, spinning me garments of splendor, uncovering the vanity of my blamelessness, exposing me to chants of hypocrisy, unveiling the evil of my naked pride, tried to hide my birthright of sin, but his favor for me inflamed contempt, aggregating hatred from my brothers, jeopardizing any commitment for them to be sanctified, never living to keep God's trust. I learned to speak less, voicing only what I was led to divulge, never knowing if God called me to be a prophet, believing I would be no more than a messenger. Reluctantly I accepted father's gift, but I abhorred fulfilling the words of wisdom telling us, Every living human being is altogether vanity.
Job: I may have lived with vanity but it is not an iniquity which my blamelessness denounces, attesting to my unrecognized righteousness, judged by some to be impure and lacking.
Bystander: Does your righteousness stream from a pure heart, never requiring you to
lift hands in trivial prayer, or to consummate obligations for satisfying your Lord, never idolizing it's routine to insure iniquity will be banished from your thoughts and wickedness will never rule your actions, assuring you will never blemish your countenance with fear, quaking you before God while forgetting to love Him? Fear of the Lord without love destroys a person's comfort, opening the way to misery.
Reckoner: Job's blamelessness is a compromise, dutifully satisfied with prayers, enabled by reason to justify his wants, modifying virtues to accomplish his desires, argued to veil his innate sinful nature, acknowledging he will never try to be righteous, or more truthfully, he can never be righteous, so why try. Job may have been blameless but he can never act righteously with impurity hidden in his heart, even though he acts with mercy. Listen Job, You were not righteous, only upright, and you can only be converted to untarnished virtue if your nature began in sin. Living in prosperity as a blameless one, you invite contempt, risking loss of your human glory, ardently raised by
Reckoner: You acknowledge your blessings have sprouted profusely, but have you ever pruned their wild proliferations, restricting their growth to patterns pleasing the Lord?
Job: You are asking if I ever stunted their growth, restricting their development, confining their flowing freely as the will allows. As long as my sprouts maintain my upright blamelessness, following the inheritance my coding assures, they want nothing threatening to slay their individuality, leaving them untouched as they are, proudly reflecting results of my seed.
Bystander: Individuality faking spirituality, feigning love for anything but one's independence, lusting after unfulfilled wants, counterfeits any desires reconciling one to the Lord.
Reckoner: The flowers of your endeavors cannot thrive without living water, never springing from unholy beds of blamelessness, wilting and decaying before their time, destroyed by the heat of happiness, dissipating in life's tormenting sun. Asking withered blooms do I know you, you remain unrecognized, hearing your brethren deny you, saying I have never seen you as you cling to remnants of your past achievements, now inert stones with nothing more to claim, the happiness of your ways having vanished.
Job: Your truth comes with no argument from me, agreeing with wisdom our fathers wrenched from the Lord, testifying to His power and omniscience, believing He knows all, watching our movements, our deeds and misdeeds, but does He ever entertain justice, giving us a ruler to measure our ways? Can He fathom our actions with a yardstick marking inscriptions to determine just decisions? Does He record things beyond our understanding, marvelous things without number, but never revealing them for us to perceive? Will He show how I can be just before Him, appearing to tell me how?
Bystander: Acts of God must always be honored according to His holiness and almighty being, never appearing open for scrutiny for they can never be unjust, never for contending with a person's pride seeking to demand His counsel, prying to reveal His motives, giving Him a message to remain silent when exposed to our demands, but He ignores human wants to know, frustrating our desires to penetrate secrets of God's majesty, reminding us of His riches' depth, how unsearchable are His wisdom and knowledge, how inscrutable are His judgments and ways. Can you profess to know the mind of God?
Job: I may be helpless before God's power, but I still have reason to question His ways, determined to hear His answers, why one of His creation should come to loathe life.
Joseph: God trusts me with His silence, testing my patience, a reticence promising great meaning, believing it waits to reveal greater sense for my visions and fuller understanding of His wisdom. He blesses me when I never plead to know His ways, waiting for His time to reveal His plans for my life. I sometimes sense His wrath, but trusting all His plans for me, I am satisfied with His silence and beg for nothing more, trusting patience will reward my silence. He knows I belong to Him, hearing my prayers, genuinely praising Him, demanding, no, seeking nothing more than greater abundance of His goodness. I wait in silence, humbling myself under His mighty hand, trusting He has plans exalt me, finalizing His purpose in due time.
Job: Free to utter my complaints, I must speak further, reclaiming my lamentations, voicing my soul's bitterness, asking again why God condemns me, judging to unfairly distress me, despising works of my hands, as I watch Him favor designs of the wicked. Does God know ways of humans, thoughts of ones He created? How could He not? His design instills me with fear, ever present to confront me with judgment, afflicting me with disappointment, torturing my flesh to suffer, troubles all done unjustly, perhaps decided on a moment's whim, concluded after counsel with evil advisors.
Bystander: Running your tongue increases chances of stumbling your thoughts, entangling them with nonsense, fating you to speak lies, mumbling dripping words incoherently, an inevitable outcome for blathering ones, never ceasing to speak, wondering if the nature of some, seldom corralling their words, predisposes them to fabricate unreality, such being the outcome of gossip. Who can object, saying it isn't so?
Bystander: Did God not call on goodness to assist in your creation, to equip you to be righteous? If you consider making the Lord your refuge, the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you, no plague will come near your home.
Job: God molded me in His image but He prepared me to be only blameless and upright, leaving me to determine how my ways should be constructed and conducted. He may have thought I could be endowed with a framework for righteousness, filling it in completely with His image, but He did not consider the impossibility of this for a human being when He created us with free will.
Bystander: Have you attempted to be righteous or did you merely watch it as an impossibility, discounting its value even before trying it out as a virtue?
Job: Incarnation of His nature, making me righteous like Him, is incompatible with human nature. Our knowing God has never tried to create an individual completely righteous with free will, a creature never being understandable except perhaps by Him. I could never choose to be righteous, negating any need for free will, requiring nothing for modifying anything coded in me to be righteous. Observe animals, obeying all the Creator's laws imprinted in their being, never creatures with free will, responding to only inherent directions, unable to ever claim any different instructions, following a form of innate righteousness, plodding through life with no freedom to change innate commands. God decided to improve on His creation by fashioning humans, giving them free will and then expecting them to become righteous. His error was using one of His beastly creatures to make humans while forgetting to delete the codes confining them to their beastly nature. God realized His error when He made the mistake of creating us to be forged out of goodness, but He corrected His blunder by designating our disobedience, falling into following our beastly ways, as sinful, condemning all humans from birth. Does God have reason for my creation, giving purpose now for my afflictions, with me never believing they could be merely for His amusement?
Joseph: Have you exhausted your patience, waiting in vain to receive answers?
Job: I pray for hearing God's voice, trusting intercession is my only hope, realizing the impossibility of a response for why I was born, lamenting why my birth only gave purpose for the grave, silencing me before providing any comfort, beseeching God to end my afflictions, sending me to where I will beg for no return, trusting there is no place in His realm of goodness to covet.
Reckoner: You speak too much, never realizing your words can intermingle your blamelessness with confusion, tarnishing your voice with babbling ideas, claiming doctrinal purity, testifying to your righteousness in being upright, never discovering the deep things of God, unlimited in His mightiness, but never decreeing anything new to tell us what defines iniquity, while never forgetting human weaknesses. You have not learned yet to love one another, knowing little to be your brother's keeper, hardly taking notice of safeguarding another. Speak less and listen more. Wait patiently on the Lord.
Joseph: My father, spinning me garments of splendor, uncovering the vanity of my blamelessness, exposing me to chants of hypocrisy, unveiling the evil of my naked pride, tried to hide my birthright of sin, but his favor for me inflamed contempt, aggregating hatred from my brothers, jeopardizing any commitment for them to be sanctified, never living to keep God's trust. I learned to speak less, voicing only what I was led to divulge, never knowing if God called me to be a prophet, believing I would be no more than a messenger. Reluctantly I accepted father's gift, but I abhorred fulfilling the words of wisdom telling us, Every living human being is altogether vanity.
Job: I may have lived with vanity but it is not an iniquity which my blamelessness denounces, attesting to my unrecognized righteousness, judged by some to be impure and lacking.
Bystander: Does your righteousness stream from a pure heart, never requiring you to
Reckoner: Job's blamelessness is a compromise, dutifully satisfied with prayers, enabled by reason to justify his wants, modifying virtues to accomplish his desires, argued to veil his innate sinful nature, acknowledging he will never try to be righteous, or more truthfully, he can never be righteous, so why try. Job may have been blameless but he can never act righteously with impurity hidden in his heart, even though he acts with mercy. Listen Job, You were not righteous, only upright, and you can only be converted to untarnished virtue if your nature began in sin. Living in prosperity as a blameless one, you invite contempt, risking loss of your human glory, ardently raised by