Note: the following is the manuscript for the message and will not match exactly the recorded message above.
Introduction
For those who have read or listened through the entire book, have you decided on the overall theme or purpose of the book?
What questions does it answer?
What do you think we are meant to learn about God, ourselves, and the way the world works from the book of Job?
A common answer is that the main purpose of the book is to deal with the age old problem of why bad things happening to good people.
It is common for people to turn to the book of Job in times of suffering. We hope to find some explanation for why there is so much suffering in the world.
Perhaps our hope is that Job will provide us with a model for how to respond to suffering. Or, we want to learn why God has allowed something to happen.
Yet, as we will discover throughout the series, this question is not given a satisfactory answer in Job.
Instead, what we are given is a brief and somewhat strange story in the first two chapters that feature Job getting caught in the middle of a cosmic challenge about his motivation for righteousness, and then 40 chapters of humans and God debating about Job’s righteousness and God’s justice.
The human characters in the book believe in the principle of retribution, or deed-consequence justice. This is a principle central to the book of Proverbs. If you make wise decisions, you will experience prosperity.
[Read Proverbs 1:20-33]
Job is a righteous man, as identified by everyone in the story. Job 1:1 – he was “blameless and upright; he feared God and shunned evil.”
Job 1:8 “Then the Lord said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”” same in 2:3.
Job 1:22 “In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.”
So, why has the worst possible disaster happened to Job?
One could understand if Job had some missteps, that perhaps a few little consequences would follow. But, overall, he is as righteous as they come.
If the deed-consequence principle of justice is true, then how do we explain what has happened to Job?
Central to the whole story is this problem. Job may have lost everything, but the real problem is that God has not executed his justice in the way that Job believes he should have.
We will see through the speeches that this is what Job and his companions are really wrestling with. Either Job has actually done wrong and is getting what he deserves, or God has behaved unjustly, or the deed-consequence justice system is not the only way God governs creation. We will discover that the last option is true. That God governs ultimately with wisdom far beyond human comprehension.
We have a long journey ahead of us. Today, we will be introduced to the setting of the story. The context, the characters, and the overall message of Job.
Next Sunday, I will be away and John Peacock will be speaking. Then, in two weeks from now we will look at chapters 1-2 and begin our pilgrimage through the story of Job.
Each Sunday, we will tackle multiple chapters. The point is to dwell on the story. To enter into it. To chew on it. Job is not easily digestible, so we have to work on it long enough to get it into us. To be honest, 17 sermons isn’t enough. But we will do our best.
I wrestled for months with whether or not I’ll spend this amount of time in Job. I was convinced that we need to, but I had doubts. Then I read the following passage from a book by Walter Brueggemann called Preaching from the Old Testament. This is what he says about preaching on the book of Job:
“Engagement with the plot of the book of Job cannot be done summarily. The work, rather, must be unfolded in a paced and disciplined way in order to allow the congregation to enter into the work of the drama as we might in any good theatre performance.” (Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2019), 165.
And this is really how Job is presented to us. Sort of a cosmic theatre production about the justice and wisdom of God and the suffering and motivation for righteousness of Job.
The Genre of Job
In understanding the book of Job we need to know what sort of book it is. This is always a starting point for reading, listening to, or watching anything.
I remember watching a conference speaker once whose audience very clearly misunderstood the nature of the speaker’s material. He started out with a little joke which turned into the audience laughing at just about everything the speaker said, even though he was being very serious.
His intention was not to be funny, but obviously the audience had misunderstood his intention until he stopped and told them he was being serious.
If you think you are watching a historical documentary but it turns out to be Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you will be severely misguided in your understanding of medieval history.
So, you can see why knowing the genre and purpose of a book is important.
The genre of Job fits best within the category of wisdom literature and is mostly poetry. In essence, the entire book is a thought experiment about how God governs creation in the midst of both prosperity and disaster.
It was written for Israelites, as it was written in Hebrew, but the story does not take place in Israel and Job is most likely not an Israelite.
A major question asked by many students of the Bible is whether the events of Job really did happen. There is really no benefit to accepting it as fiction even though the book itself contains no context that would place the story accurately at any point in history.
My opinion is that the book of Job is a parable based on the events of someone who experienced a similar tragedy.
While it is entirely possible that the story of Job is based on a real event, the value of the story does not depend on its being historically true. The purpose is to help its readers gain wisdom in understanding the way God governs creation.
Tremper Longman III, ed., Baker Commentary on the Old Testament: Job (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2012), 34.
The fundamental issue at question in the book of Job is whether it is good policy for God to bless the righteous by bringing them prosperity. If someone is motivated by rewards, doesn’t this corrupt their righteousness?
The challenger, which we will look at in a bit, argues that it is not good policy and suggests that the Job’s righteousness is based only on the benefits he receives for being righteous.
Job 1:9 ““Does Job fear God for nothing?” Satan replied.”
This question, however is only a means to an end. The main question of Job is, “How does God run the world?” The answer to that question is wisdom.
With that brief introduction to the genre, let’s look at the characters in Job.
The Characters of Job
There are five main human characters and two non-human characters. The human characters are Job, Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu. The nonhuman characters are God and a character referred to as Satan.
Job is described as living in the land of Uz, which is a relatively unknown place East of Israel. The important thing about the location is that it identifies Job as a non-Israelite.
The writer tells us that Job is blameless and upright. This does not mean that he was perfect or sinless. It means he behaved according to God’s expectations.
He is also described as one who “fears God”. This means he took God seriously and respected him. In short, Job is a model of devotion and integrity.
Three of the other four human characters are introduced in 2:11, when they came to comfort Job and sit with him for seven days and nights.
When reading the book of Job, many people accuse these companions as being bad comforters. The main thing to get from their speeches is that they wrestling with an explanation for God’s justice system in light of Job’s tragedies. They assume that God always acts within the deed-consequence policy, so Job must not actually be righteous.
The final human character is a young man who shows up out of nowhere and is previously unmentioned. Chapter 32 breaks the poetry pattern with a brief introduction of Elihu, who then proceeds to rebuke the others in their assessment of the situation.
We will get to know these characters in more detail as we look at their various speeches. Let’s look at the two non-human characters.
The interesting thing about the book of Job is that the name for God is different in the poetic and non-poetic sections. Only in the non-poetic sections, God is referred to by name as Yahweh.
Within the poetic sections, Job and his companions use a few different variations of the generic name for God.
This is another clue that Job is a non-Israelite but the book is written to Israelites. In verse 1, it says that Job feared elohim, which is a generic word for a deity.
The author of Job does not identify Job as one who fears Yahweh specifically. This is a similar usage as in Genesis 20:11 when Abraham lied to Abimelek about Sarah being his sister and not his wife. When Abimelek confronted Abraham, “Abraham replied, “I said to myself, ‘There is surely no fear of Elohim in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.’”
The use of elohim to refer to God is common in Genesis and requires looking at the context of the passage to know whether it is referring to the God of Israel or some other deity. In some cases, it is referring to other so-called gods. In the case of Job, we can be confident that it is referring to the God of Israel.
Finally, we come to the other non-human character referred to as Satan in English translations. Satan is a transliteration, or an English pronunciation, of a Hebrew word hassatan which means the challenger.
It can be used as either a noun or a verb. As a verb it means to oppose as an adversary. As a noun it can be used to identify the role of humans or other beings who stand in opposition to someone.
This may seem like unnecessary academic instruction, but it’s actually an important detail to understand. For many or most of us, we picture this opening cosmic scene as the devil coming up from hell into heaven to cause problems.
But that is not what’s happening here. The name translated as Satan is not actually a name at all in this and all other uses in the Old Testament. It is a title and is used for more than just the challenger here in the book of Job. Here are two examples of it being used to refer to humans:
In 1 Samuel 29:4 where the Philistine army commanders refer to David as a satan: “He must not go with us into battle, or he [“satan” referring to David as an adversary] will turn against us during the fighting.”
1 Kings 11:14 referring to an adversary of Solomon as a satan: “Then the Lord raised up against Solomon an adversary, Hadad the Edomite, from the royal line of Edom.”
The most surprising example is in Numbers 22:22 where the angel of the Lord stands in opposition to Balaam: “But God was very angry when he went, and the angel of the Lord stood in the road to oppose [satan] him. Balaam was riding on his donkey, and his two servants were with him.”
That word, oppose, is the Hebrew word satan. It actually doesn’t have much or anything to do with evil or the devil in and of itself. It describes an activity or a position.
Eventually, at some point in time between the writings of the Old and New Testaments, the word Satan became a popular name for the Devil, as we see in Matthew 12:25–26 “Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand. If Satan drives out Satan, he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand?”
But even in the New Testament, the word Satan is not always used to refer to the devil, as in Matthew 16:23 when Peter objected to the idea that Jesus would have to die.
“Jesus turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”” Jesus isn’t calling Peter the devil, only that he is behaving in opposition to Jesus.
In the opening scene of Job, the most helpful understanding of the word is to think of the challenger not as a sinister or evil being, but one who is testing the governing policies of God. He is challenging God’s justice system because that is his role and what he cares most about.
In the heavenly courtroom of God, various celestial beings are brought in as a sort of council. The challenger is one of these beings and brings up an issue regarding whether humans worship God because they gets things from him, or if they worship God for who he is regardless of what they get out of it.
This is a fair question, so God allows a testing of the challenger’s theory that Job is only devoted to God because of his blessings.
The reason it is important to understand the character of the challenger, or Satan, in this way is because our tendency is use this story as a way of explaining why bad things are happening. We might compare ourselves to Job, thinking that the devil is making our lives difficult.
But that’s not what is happening in Job. It’s not really about Job or the work of the devil. It’s about God’s perfect justice and wisdom in the midst of human suffering.
I’ll leave it at that for this week and we will come back to this in two weeks when we more carefully examine chapters 1 and 2. In the meantime, I’ll include some resources in my letter on Tuesday that you can check out.
So, let’s look at the message of Job and why we are taking the next four months to study it.
The Message of Job
Why go through Job now?
Over the next five or so years, my plan is to cover the entire story of the Bible. We began in Genesis last spring and went through the first five books of the Bible over the summer.
Then, we jumped into Hebrews last fall, which shows us how Jesus is the fulfillment of all God’s promises that he made in the Old Testament.
Most recently, we went through a topical series which covered some foundational beliefs of the Christian faith. This coming fall, we will jump back to the New Testament in the letter to the Philippians in a series on the source of Christian joy and hope.
So, why study Job now? It would seem that, if we go back to the Old Testament, shouldn’t we pick up where we left off, with Israel at the border of the Promised Land?
The interesting thing about Job is that, if the story is true, it probably happened around the time of Abraham, although it was probably written later. Which means this story had been circulating around Israel likely before or around the time that the laws of Moses were given to Israel.
So, if we are going to understand the rest of the Bible, knowing the story and wisdom of Job will be important. It contains insight into how we are to think about justice, suffering, and how God rules the universe.
The most succinct and helpful one liner describing the message of Job comes from a book by John Walton and Tremper Longman called, “How to Read Job.” They say that the purpose of Job is to teach us how to think well about God when disaster strikes.
John H. Walton and Tremper Longman III, How to Read Job (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic: An Imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2015), 19.
Some would say, and I would tend to agree, that we are entering into what could be a very difficult time. Our society is not only becoming increasingly divided, but there are more and more things to be divided over.
Many of us will likely experience unexplained difficulties and will need to think about suffering and conflict in a way that will help us hold fast to what is true about God.
This is not just about having knowledge about God. It is about increasing in wisdom so that we know how to think well when disaster strikes.
What we will see in Job is that God does not promise good fortune to the righteous. He does promise, however, that he is in control of everything.
He governs creation in ways we cannot possibly fathom. And he can be trusted even when everything around us has turned to ash.
If we consider where we are at as a church, in a time of increasing health and growth, and what is happening in the world around us, it seems like a really good time to increase our wisdom. And I think Job will help us do that well.
It is common for us to think that our circumstances somehow indicate that we are in God’s favour or not. When things go badly, we might ask what we have done to deserve it. When things go well, we might be tempted to think God is rewarding us for good behaviour.
The book of Job refutes this way of thinking. It offers us a more helpful and wholistic way of understanding God and the way he governs creation.
It is the understanding that Paul describes in Romans 11:33–35 “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them?””