When God praised Job as blameless and upright; a man who fears God and shuns evil, the Satan responded mockingly that it is easy for the prosperous to be good. But if you take away everything man has, he will curse you. God accepted the wager and delivered Job into Satan’s hands. Job’s children were slain, his goods were destroyed, and skin covered with boils. ‘Then Job took a piece of broken pottery and scraped himself with it as he sat among the ashes.’
Who did mortals think they were, that they could forge an alliance with a deity? Only the Jews had dared entertain such novel and blasphemous conceit. They had entered into an accord with God. It as the Covenant written by the tablets of Moses.
Christ, by making himself nothing, by taking on the very nature of a slave, had plumbed the depths to which only the lowest, the poorest, the most persecuted and abused of mortals were confined. If Paul could not leave the sheer wonder of this alone, if he risked everything to proclaim it to strangers likely to find it disgusting, or lunatic, or both, then that was because he had been brought by his vision of the risen Jesus to gaze directly into what it meant for him, and for all the world.
That Christ – whose participation in the divine sovereignty over space and time he seems never to have doubted – had become human, and suffered death on the ultimate instrument of torture, was precisely the measure of Paul’s understanding of God: that He was love.
The world stood transformed as a result. Such was the gospel. Paul, in proclaiming it, offered himself as the surest measure of its truth. He was nothing, worse than nothing, a man who had persecuted Christ’s followers, foolish and despised; and yet he had been forgiven and saved. ‘I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.’
And if Paul, then why not everybody else?