Which Characters in Job Can We Trust?
00:00:00.000 | In a tragic pandemic like the one we're experiencing right now, the Book of Job becomes especially
00:00:09.480 | relevant to each of our lives.
00:00:11.600 | But that book poses a significant dilemma any Bible reader has to resolve.
00:00:16.940 | It's this dilemma.
00:00:18.320 | Which characters in the Book of Job can we trust?
00:00:21.680 | Most of the book's characters say things we cannot trust.
00:00:24.560 | And the question today comes from a listener named Joel to Pastor John, who joins us over
00:00:29.200 | Skype today.
00:00:30.200 | Thank you for your wonderful podcast, Pastor John.
00:00:32.240 | I'm a long-time listener and now a first-time caller, as they say.
00:00:36.100 | In the wake of this coronavirus pandemic, I have turned repeatedly to the Book of Job.
00:00:41.040 | As you've said in past sermons, the book is timeless and therefore relevant to our present
00:00:45.760 | suffering.
00:00:46.760 | I've read through Job before, and I understand the cycle of conversations between Job and
00:00:51.360 | his friends.
00:00:52.360 | But I was reading through Job 5, Eliphaz is speaking, and I came to verses 17 to 19.
00:00:56.960 | I began to ask myself, "When Job and his friends speak of God in their ranting, how do I distinguish
00:01:02.880 | theology that's true about God from their own mistaken assumptions about God?"
00:01:08.840 | The obvious answer is to survey the landscape of Scripture to find consistencies with other
00:01:13.240 | texts.
00:01:14.240 | But can we put any stock in what Job or his friends are saying in the Book of Job?
00:01:19.520 | Pastor John, how would you answer?
00:01:21.440 | Like the Book of Ecclesiastes, and like some of the parables of Jesus, and like the stories
00:01:30.360 | in the Book of Judges that describe—I just finished reading Judges this very morning
00:01:35.600 | as we're recording.
00:01:36.600 | Oh my goodness, what a terrible book—describing what happens when there's no king, describing
00:01:44.560 | sins.
00:01:45.560 | And Job also, like those three, Job also narrates ways of thinking and speaking and acting which
00:01:55.200 | are sinful.
00:01:57.080 | The speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Job's involvement with them for 29 chapters
00:02:02.760 | are mingled with bad theology and good theology, and the good theology is regularly misused.
00:02:10.320 | In fact, I think that's one of the main points of the Book of Job, to show how good theology
00:02:16.520 | can become bad pastoral practice.
00:02:19.720 | Really, I don't think you'd spend 29 chapters on the misuse of good theology if that weren't
00:02:27.920 | part of the point.
00:02:30.240 | There's nothing unusual in all of this in principle, in the way you'd write something.
00:02:35.080 | We all tell conversations that we've had, and we tell about events we've been a part
00:02:41.760 | of, and some of the things we narrate in the conversations we disapprove of, and some of
00:02:47.040 | the things we tell about in our experiences we disapprove of, and we expect listeners,
00:02:52.640 | as they listen to us, to distinguish what we're narrating as disapproved and what we're
00:02:59.260 | narrating as approved.
00:03:01.880 | We need to give them clues; we have to help them understand which is which.
00:03:07.080 | So what makes Job unusual is not that the book includes ways of thinking and speaking
00:03:14.180 | which are sinful, but that the dialogue containing these errors is so lengthy, from chapter 3
00:03:24.520 | through chapter 31, where Job and Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar interact for 29 chapters.
00:03:33.840 | That's unusual.
00:03:35.920 | So Joel's question is, is there value in these speeches?
00:03:41.520 | That's one of his questions.
00:03:43.240 | And how do we sort out in this book what to approve and what to disapprove of?
00:03:49.560 | How can we embrace his life lessons that God intends, and what should we chew up and spit
00:03:56.400 | out?
00:03:57.680 | And I think that there are five ways that God intends, as the one who inspired this
00:04:06.440 | book, five ways that he intends to help us be able to profit from and rightly handle
00:04:15.100 | and interpret the book of Job.
00:04:17.400 | So here they are.
00:04:18.400 | Number one, the inspired author.
00:04:21.720 | So not everything Job says is true, and not everything Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar says
00:04:25.160 | is true, but what the author says as the inspired writer, as his own view, that's true.
00:04:32.440 | And he intrudes himself at key points in this story to make us aware of what he's trying
00:04:41.280 | to say through recording all the bad stuff that are not his views.
00:04:47.200 | For example, all of chapters one and two, for example, are the express viewpoints of
00:04:55.360 | the inspired writer.
00:04:57.600 | Here's where we can lay it down with great confidence how we are to view God's sovereignty,
00:05:03.960 | the role of Satan, the proper response of man to suffering and to sovereignty.
00:05:09.300 | They're all laid out for us in the first two chapters.
00:05:13.080 | And perhaps the most remarkable example of this is the writer's comment about Job's response
00:05:23.120 | at the end of each of Job's two tests from the devil.
00:05:29.380 | So he says, Job says in chapter one, verse 21, at the loss of his children, all 10 of
00:05:35.240 | his children killed, he says, "The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.
00:05:43.880 | Blessed be the name of the Lord."
00:05:46.800 | And you might take a deep breath there and say, "Are you sure?
00:05:49.520 | Is that good theology?
00:05:50.880 | Should we embrace that?
00:05:52.240 | The Lord has taken away, and he's blessed?"
00:05:55.760 | And the inspired writer inserts precisely to help us grasp this, he inserts that Job
00:06:04.160 | did not misspeak.
00:06:05.960 | Here's what he says.
00:06:06.960 | "In all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrong."
00:06:14.080 | Exactly the same thing in the next chapter.
00:06:16.400 | When you come to the end of the second test and Job is, God boils from the top of his
00:06:21.440 | head to the bottom of his feet, and his wife says to him, "You should curse God and die."
00:06:27.360 | Job says, "Shall we receive good from God and not receive evil?"
00:06:34.800 | And you might stop there and say, "Job, don't talk like that.
00:06:38.200 | That's bad theology."
00:06:40.120 | And so the inspired writer adds, "In all this, Job did not sin with his lips."
00:06:47.680 | In other words, when Job affirms that good and evil, health and disease come from the
00:06:54.520 | hand of God, he's not sinning.
00:06:57.000 | He's speaking the way we ought to speak.
00:07:00.120 | Here's another example of how the inspired writer inserts his divine perspective, inspired
00:07:07.000 | perspective on Job's suffering.
00:07:09.720 | In chapter 42, verse 11, looking back over the entire event and experience, he says this.
00:07:17.680 | This is Job 42, 11.
00:07:20.160 | I think it's one of the most important verses in the book.
00:07:24.440 | Then came to Job all his brothers and sisters, and they showed him sympathy and comforted
00:07:31.320 | him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.
00:07:37.680 | That's not Eliphaz talking.
00:07:39.580 | That's not Bildad talking.
00:07:41.240 | That's not Zophar talking.
00:07:42.880 | It's not Job talking.
00:07:44.700 | That's the inspired writer putting into words what had happened really in this book.
00:07:52.100 | So my first answer to the question, how does God help us discern how to read this book?
00:07:57.720 | The answer is he causes the voice of the inspired writer to be clear as he intrudes himself
00:08:04.960 | on his own narrative repeatedly.
00:08:07.160 | Here's the second thing.
00:08:09.760 | God intends for us to be guided in reading this book by the appearance of Elihu in chapter
00:08:16.400 | 32.
00:08:17.920 | And Elihu comes, and I believe Elihu is a speaker of truth.
00:08:24.280 | I don't think Elihu is an added idiot to Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.
00:08:32.160 | I think he speaks straight and is truth.
00:08:36.160 | Not everybody agrees with me here.
00:08:37.600 | You need to know that.
00:08:38.600 | A lot of people think Elihu is just another problem.
00:08:41.320 | I don't think that's true.
00:08:42.720 | Let me give you five quick reasons why I think Elihu should be listened to as a correct perspective
00:08:50.960 | on what has just been going on between Job and Eliphaz and Bildad and Zophar.
00:08:55.400 | Number one, he arrives on the scene, chapter 32, with a different perspective over against
00:09:01.320 | Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Job.
00:09:04.880 | Number two, the writer devotes six chapters to Elihu.
00:09:10.640 | Good night.
00:09:11.640 | That's a lot of space.
00:09:14.280 | And here's the catch.
00:09:15.920 | The misguided speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar had been getting shorter and shorter
00:09:22.120 | and shorter until the end.
00:09:23.600 | They had nothing more to say.
00:09:25.340 | It wouldn't make any sense in the narrator's strategy if he said, "Now I'm going to give
00:09:29.520 | you another jerk like Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, and I'm going to give him six chapters,
00:09:35.840 | and I'm not going to say a word of criticism of him.
00:09:39.400 | No way.
00:09:40.400 | I can't buy it."
00:09:42.720 | Number three, Job repents from the very things that Elihu criticizes later on in chapter
00:09:49.080 | 40 and 42.
00:09:50.720 | Number four, God—and I think this is the one that tipped me off years ago when I studied
00:09:56.280 | this in more detail—God rebukes explicitly in chapter 42, verse 7.
00:10:03.040 | He rebukes Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar.
00:10:06.280 | He never says a negative word about Elihu.
00:10:09.760 | That's just got to mean something right.
00:10:12.320 | Number five, Elihu really does give a different perspective on suffering than Job did.
00:10:21.560 | I just commend to you chapter 33, verses 14 to 19.
00:10:26.640 | If you want to go into detail, I preached a sermon on this very thing.
00:10:30.380 | It's called "Job Rebuked in Suffering," which you can find at Desire and God.
00:10:35.440 | I think Elihu, chapters 32 to 37, are given by the inspired writer to help set right some
00:10:45.120 | of the mistakes that were being made by Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Job as they were talking
00:10:50.000 | in those 29 chapters.
00:10:51.160 | Here's my third reason that I think God gives to us to help us.
00:10:57.560 | God himself speaks in chapters 38 to 41 and gives us a true perspective on his sovereignty
00:11:04.440 | and on Job's repentance.
00:11:06.800 | Number four, the book closes with Job's repentance and God stepping in, and we get a glimpse
00:11:14.520 | of what the errors were that Job repented of.
00:11:19.160 | And then finally, and this is the one that Joel himself mentioned, the wider teaching
00:11:24.680 | of Scripture in the Bible functioned, rightly understood, as a kind of sieve to put the
00:11:31.960 | words of Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, and Job through.
00:11:36.280 | All that to say, I think God has not left us without an ample help and guidance as to
00:11:46.240 | how to sort out what is true and what is not in this book, and not only how to sort out
00:11:54.520 | what is true, but also how to use it rather than to misuse it.
00:12:02.160 | It is indeed the book we need right now in this season of suffering in the world to get
00:12:09.680 | our bearings and not to make some of the mistakes that Job made in reaction to God's sovereignty
00:12:17.560 | in his life.
00:12:18.560 | Yes, indeed.
00:12:19.560 | Very timely and urgently so.
00:12:22.240 | Thank you, Pastor John, for helping us better understand the book of Job.
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00:14:16.040 | I'm Tony Reinke.
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00:14:19.240 | Have a great weekend.
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