Many readers of Peanuts will know that Sparky spent several years after returning from his military service in 1946, attending the Church of God in St. Paul, where he enjoyed both its youth groups and the Bible study classes.

Fans may also know that Sparky taught a Bible study class at the Methodist Church in Sebastopol after he and his family moved there in 1958. He said his ‘teaching’ always turned to what his classmates thought about the meaning of whatever Bible chapter they had chosen to read and study that week. This comic strip, from August 9, 1976,  seemed to sum up his philosophy.

 

Nevertheless, Sparky enjoyed inserting his biblical knowledge into the strip, but we will rarely know the specific cause of how that particular idea presented itself to him at the time that he was sitting at his drawing board. Here are some that I happen to like:

 

 

When I saw this strip from 1976, it took me back to sometime in the late 1990s when Sparky was pondering out loud the trial of Job, and the significance of that biblical story.

So I went to my Bible, remembering that Sparky had said he preferred The Interpreter’s Bible. However, the Bible I have is The Open Bible, The New King James Version.

I am not exactly sure how this Bible came to be in my bedroom, but I know that I lost my earlier Bible some years ago in a fire, and this Bible appeared.

I wanted to see where Linus’s words appeared in the story, and I had to start from the beginning:

It appears that the story of Job becomes a contest between God and Satan. (in very gross terms.)

Job beginning as a great man with many good aspects to his life, who gets caught in Satan’s contest with God.

Satan’s premise is that no one loves God from pure motives but only from material blessings that he (or she, which the Bible doesn’t mention) is fortunate enough to have received.

Job becomes, if you will forgive my modern slang, a test case.

To refute Satan, God allows him to strike Job with a series of assaults.

In the story, bad fortune befalls Job, and though friends try to talk to him, he is not mollified and lashes out at God.

That is when God confronts him with the words (more or less, depending on which Bible you read) that Linus quotes to Charlie Brown in the strip.

What interests me enormously are the passages Sparky chose – a very poetic and also magical selection, ‘Who shut in the sea with doors when it burst forth from the womb?’,

 ‘Who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens?’, and ‘Who laid its cornerstone when its morning stars sang together?’

It is all very lovely to me, and I can imagine Sparky rolling the words around in his head as he wrote them.

In the story of Job, you may see some of Charlie Brown’s patience and perseverance.

—Jean Schulz