To Love for Nothing: Miroslav Volf on the Story of Job

“Let me ask you a question,” said Satan to God, “Does Job love you for nothing?”

On September 25, Miroslav Volf, the founding director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture, delivered a chapel message on Job 12:1-12 at Biola University titled, “On Loving for No Reason.”

“You might be puzzled as to why I’m going to speak to you on the book of Job,” said Volf, as he drew the connection between Job and the theme of love.

Volf’s sermon suggested human options to facing the problem of evil before identifying the option he views as most essential to expressing love towards God.

According to Volf, the plot dilemma in the book of Job is the question of what Job did wrong. Did Job wrong God, as his comforters suggested? Or, did God wrong Job, as Job’s wife believed?

Volf preached that the first option, that Job had wronged God, suggested what Volf called a “moral world order.” The moral world order is a consequentialist take on man’s relationship with God, a system in which God grants mankind favors in exchange for mankind’s worship and love of Him. Righteousness results in health, wealth, and longevity; wrongdoing results in a less salutary lifestyle.

However, said Volf, when Job’s comforters offered this explanation, Job rebelled, defending his innocence and faithfulness toward God. It is not that Job has never sinned, but that his sins are in no way proportionate to the suffering he has undergone. Later in the book, God appears and confirms Job’s defense.

Concerning the second option, that God has been unfair to Job, Volf points out that this narrative presupposes that God needs defending. If God is going to permit evil, he needs to be excused if he is still to be worshiped as God, which is essentially what Job’s comforters said.

“God doesn’t need their defense against another human being – one who is suffering!” said Volf.

Was it right for God to show up in all His glory at the end of the book? Did He appear simply to silence Job? Volf says that God came to confirm Himself as creator and sustainer of the universe, someone who doesn’t need to be defended or explained.

The key to understanding Job, preached Volf, is in the opening scene of the book, where Satan challenges God on Job’s love for Him. Loving God for nothing, while Satan’s accusation, is also Job’s reason for loving God and, argues Volf should also be our only reason to love God and other people.

“The whole point of Job is that if you love God for nothing, you don’t end up with nothing,” said Volf, contrasting that truth with the common tendency of people to treat God as a butler, or as a servant who owes them goods.

Loving for nothing is a concept that extends to human relationships as well.

“When we’re in love, we do a lot of dumb things,” said Volf. “The dumbest thing we can go, though, is ask the person we’re in love with why he or she loves us.”

According to Volf, we never love people for a particular reason because loving a particular feature implies that love is finite. For example, if you love a woman for her pretty face, does that mean you won’t love her if her face gets ugly? If you love her for her mind, will that change when she gets Alzheimers? If you love someone for nothing, says Volf, only giving everything from the bottom of your heart regardless of what you get back, then you have attained the mystery of love, which is the key to existence. If we love God from the bottom of our hearts for nothing, we get everything, because we get God.