Welcome to Deep Roots, the new monthly podcast from Oak Hill.
My name is Tim Ward and I teach hermeneutics and word ministry here at college.
My name is Eric Ortland. I teach Hebrew and Old Testament at Oak Hill College.
Thanks so much for joining us.
In future months in these podcasts, Eric and I are going to be the co-hosts,
interviewing, chatting with some of our colleagues here at college.
But in this first one, I'm interviewing Eric.
Now we're focusing in on the Book of Job and what it says about suffering.
Eric's been doing a lot of study on that. He's got one book on Job out.
There's another one, because you need two books on this.
There's another one about to come out.
Eric, give us the headlines. What are we about to get into in the Book of Job?
I find the Book of Job unique in all the Bible,
the way it analyzes suffering, for how it reveals what God is up to,
why He allows suffering, what He wants from us in it,
and what promises He makes to us in it.
I think there are very compelling and comforting answers given to those questions in this book.
Now Eric, I need to say, I've heard you preach on the Book of Job,
and I've read the first book that's out.
Haven't you read the second one? Because it's not out yet.
I want to say, I've heard you say things from the Book of Job
that I've never heard anybody say about the Book of Job before.
And I've become persuaded that they're right.
And there's a particular pastoral angle that I don't think I'd ever seen in Job before.
So I've had that advance preview.
I'm really looking forward to what we're going to get into.
I am as well.
Eric, two books on Job. What's going on?
Well, in teaching the Book of Job, it's been my observation,
first of all, that the Book of Job is not very well understood.
I've very frequently, either in the classroom or in church,
had people come up to me after I've been speaking and said,
that's my story, either myself or someone I know.
I recognize myself or the story of someone I love in the Book of Job.
Also, I think English language commentators have not served us well
when it comes to the Book of Job.
Reading commentaries on Job, they are all over the place.
And almost every commentary is something helpful,
but I was very unsatisfied with what I read on Job.
I think there are too many books on the Bible out there already.
No one has enough time to read all of them.
I didn't want to add to the pile.
At the same time, I thought there was justification to have a book on Job
that made a long argument about a particular reading of the book
and why it was better than other current alternatives out there.
That'll be this one, Pia Singh Leviathan, just out with IVP.
But there's a second one which I don't have a copy of because it's not yet out.
It's called Suffering Wisely and Well.
It's coming out with Crossway.
And that book is everything pastoral, pastorially helpful in the Book of Job,
stated in as simple and direct and clear and helpful a manner as possible.
So some people will be interested to see the nuts and bolts.
They will be interested to see different ways the Book of Job has been read
and why I think those are wrong.
Some people, for very good reasons, won't be as interested in that.
And they will simply want to be ministered to from this part of God's Word.
So people should not read both.
They will get the same argument in both books, but they're geared for different audiences.
Great. And the title of the real practical one that's about to come out?
So the title of the practical book is Suffering Wisely and Well,
the Grief of Job and the Grace of God.
Brilliant. And I've had the privilege of hearing you preach parts of Job,
which I think have really fed into that.
So I'm really looking forward to that coming out.
Now, we are going to get into some of the detail of the Book of Job itself,
but let's kind of jump to the end point first and then we'll rewind.
Sure.
I know from hearing you and talking to you,
you think that within the whole Bible,
the Book of Job has very particular and actually unique things to say to us
about our understanding of suffering, about our experience of suffering.
Tell us what you think is unique in the message of Job in this.
Yes. Yes. So the Bible has a lot to say about suffering,
and it makes many glorious promises to Christians who are suffering.
I think that there is something going on in Job
I don't see anywhere else in Scripture that does not contradict those other parts of Scripture.
But, and I feel a sense of urgency about this
because the book is not very well understood as far as I can tell.
I think there are four really important truths in the Book of Job.
First of all, why does God allow these Job-like experiences
of very intense suffering that do not seem to make any sense?
An essential quality of a Job-like ordeal.
And one way to know if the Book of Job is a good book to turn to in the Scripture
is this horrible sense of confusion and inexplicableness
where God let your life fall apart, and you can't match that up
to any increase in sin in your life.
It doesn't seem to be making you a better Christian.
And this sense of bewilderment as to why God would let something so terrible
and nothing good is coming.
I think Job chapter 1 show us that God sometimes allows
terrible suffering, nightmarish suffering,
that has nothing to do with letting the sin in our lives catch up with us.
He is not angry with us, he is not punishing us.
And strange as it might sound, it has nothing to do with making us better Christians.
And we'll have a chance to go into why I think that's the case.
Okay, that might be a slight draw drop moment, because okay.
Yes.
Let's leave that hanging, we're going to come back to that.
It's a surprising thing to say, but I think that's what's going on there.
Rather, God allows these times to deliver us into and seal us
in the only kind of relationship with God that will actually save us.
Where God is loved and valued for his own sake,
irrespective of what he gives or takes away.
And that is the only kind of relationship with God that will save us,
as opposed to treating him as a means to some other end, or a big Santa Claus,
or something like that.
I think that's very relevant to every Christian, Job 1 and 2.
Secondly, in the book of Job, we see what God wants from us
in a Job-like ordeal. And it's really very simple.
He just wants us to stay a Christian.
Don't curse him, don't cut off your relationship with him,
don't say, Lord, you betrayed me, and walk away from me. That's it.
Job is deeply ashamed of some of the things he says by the end of the book.
God sets the bar very low. Just stay a Christian.
Thirdly, how do we talk to Job like suffering?
Again, it would be great to come back to some of this stuff at the end,
where we see the people on the book, I'm just kind of picking out the lines
that are jumping out at me.
God sets the bar really low.
Yes.
I can't remember having said that in a sermon.
At least as regards Christian experience and Christian growth.
Sure.
There's interesting stuff going on here. Let's keep going.
Okay. How do we talk to the modern...
Every person watching at home, you probably have at least one Job
in your church and probably several.
And for the pastors listening, I'm sure everyone knows exactly
what I'm talking about because they've faced it so many times.
The majority, about something like 80% of the book chapters,
the characters talking to each other.
How we talk to each other really matters in the book.
How do we talk to Job like suffering?
It's basically very simple. Don't blame people. That's it.
This is a long and difficult, complicated book,
but in some ways it's very simple. Don't blame the Job you're talking to.
And fourth, what promises does God make to Job like suffering?
And it's here in particular, without contradicting the beautiful promises
that God works all things out for good, that our light momentary sufferings
are working out for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.
God doesn't make those sorts of promises to Job.
He essentially says, I see the evil and chaos in my world better than you do.
I am more keenly aware of that than you are.
I keep a tight leash on it for now. I tolerate it for now, but I won't forever.
And there's coming a day I'm going to destroy that evil.
And that's all he says. So in a nutshell, I think that's what is unique
and important and precious about the book of Job.
Brilliant. Thank you. That's a fantastic overview.
Now, let's dig into this a little bit more.
And now let's work through the book in the three main sections.
And just help us a bit with each of these sections.
What's going on there reminds us of what the content is
and how you see from those particular passages these applications arising.
So we've got chapters one and two. It's clearly the introduction to the book.
Remind us what's going on and how do you see these applications arising out of it?
Yes. So chapters one to two are as brief as they are, mesmerizing and troubling.
We begin with Job. He is, in verse one, he is described,
to use New Testament language, we could say he's a saint in complete armor.
He is a mature Christian. He is not perfect.
He's the first to admit that he needed to confess sin.
But he is whole and has integrity in his relationship with God.
And his life is blessed. He has a picture perfect life in an old covenant framework,
which itself is important. God is playing fair with us.
And he is saying obedience and loyalty to me will make a huge difference
in the life of the world to come. It will make a huge difference right now.
Unbeknownst to Job and Job's ignorance of what we learn in chapters one and two is crucial for the whole book.
I'd like to circle back around to that later.
He is the subject of a very unfortunate conversation in heaven,
where the accuser says about God points Job out to the devil.
And the devil says, oh, well, of course Job says he loves you.
Anyone would if you treat him that well. He says that.
Actually, what's going on, Job is a gold digger. He secretly hates you.
And he is mouthing pious falsities just to hold on to the picture perfect life you've given him.
Take that away. You will see how he really feels about you.
So that terrible verse in chapter one, verse nine, does Job fear God for no reason?
The implied answer, no.
That's a deeply nerve wracking verse for me.
If I had to bury one of my children and I went to church the next Sunday,
as it were, and sat, not literally, but grieving, not repressing my emotions, Job doesn't do that, but grieving,
would I be any less enthusiastic about worshipping God for who he is in himself?
If there's a Christian for whom God allows some terrible tragedy and their response is,
how dare you do that to me? You betrayed me.
Then that person has just learned something about their motives for being in a relationship with God in the first place.
It is very easy, without realizing it, to treat God as a means to some other end.
In other words, God's generosity, irrespective of his generosity in the forgiveness of our sins in eternal life,
his generosity in secondary earthly blessings, we can get overly attached to those, perhaps without even realizing it.
It seems to me that for every Christian at some point in their lives,
I don't think that God will allow suffering exactly in the same extremity that Job goes through with all his children.
I'm not implying that. There's something unusual about Job's piety and his suffering,
and yet there will be a kind of quality of Job-like suffering, where God really gives you a solid reason to give up on him,
where you find yourself thinking, I treat my own kids better than God treats me.
And you can't see any good coming out of it. It doesn't make any sense.
And helped by the Holy Spirit, along with Job, you say, the Lord gave to me, and God has definitely taken away from me.
Blessed be his name anyway, irregardless of what he...
Now, that's so crucial, because if I can't learn to do that in some doubtless imperfect but sincere measure right now,
I'm going to be bored in heaven, in the eschaton, when God is all in all.
My family will always be so precious to me, but marriage is a part of this age.
My wife will always be so precious to me, but there's no marriage in the eschaton.
My children will always be so precious to me, but the relationship won't quite be the same.
If I can't learn to enjoy God for himself, regardless of what I lose, God is fitting our souls for eternity through Job-like suffering.
My sense is that this is... we don't necessarily have this as a life category in our context.
We tend to think of suffering in terms of the consequences of our sin or spiritual growth, which are both perfectly valid explanations.
But I hope more Christians have this as a possibility for interpreting what's going on.
Just help me out here. So, you're saying Job-like suffering, which is to us apparently inexplicable.
I can't tag it to some sin I've committed and then... it's not one of those.
Yes.
You've said it may not even in God's purposes be creating spiritual growth in me, but it's preparing me for eternity.
How is preparing me for eternity different from bringing about spiritual growth in me now?
Because I thought the way God prepared me for eternity was he brought about spiritual growth in me now.
Of course. Of course. It's a perfectly valid question. I don't want to draw two fine distinctions here.
What I have in the back of my mind is the list of Christian virtues and passages like Romans 5 and James 1.
Suffering producing endurance and endurance character might be reversed. I can't remember.
But those... things like that. Those very necessary Christ-like virtues and fruit of the Spirit that suffering produces in us.
I understand in Job 1.1 the author to be saying Job already has those.
He already has the character, the endurance, the fortitude, the spiritual muscle.
So the suffering that introduces... that God introduces to his life can't give those to him or they don't need to because he already has them.
Ah, okay. Okay.
Furthermore, the note... the note that almost the last... almost the last thing Job says is, now my eye sees you.
He is simply taken up in God himself.
There are a couple different ways we could attack this.
The whole point is does Job love God for God irrespective of how Job might or might not grow?
Maybe we could say in some sense Job grew in his vision of God.
But specifically in terms of Job's spiritual characteristics.
If Job grows spiritually as a result of the ordeal, the accuser could turn around and say,
well, okay, Job is happier as a result of these virtues being more his own.
So does Job really love you, God? Or does he just enjoy being a better person?
Okay.
There's a sense in which... there's a sense in which, strange as it might sound,
you can't benefit from a Job-like ordeal except in a deeper knowledge of God and a deeper vision of God.
And if you want to say that's spiritual growth, that's fine with me.
I just want to distinguish this from crucial, beautiful, true passages like Romans 5 and James 1.
Okay. So just to ground this.
So let's say in my church there is a really godly person.
They're not perfect. They're not getting glory. But they are really godly.
And they go through some deep inexplicable suffering.
Yes.
And I'm wondering then, or as a Christian friend, I might be tempted to want to say to them,
it looks as if God wants even more discernible sanctification fruit in your life.
Yes.
And that's kind of the thing I've got to say to them.
Yes.
You're wanting to say, maybe no.
That may be an appropriate thing to say.
We need the help of God's Spirit as we talk to each other to know where in the Bible to turn.
But I hope more people have as a live possibility to hear these deeply comforting, refreshing words.
You're not supposed to learn anything. God is not trying to teach you a lesson.
He just wants you to hold on to him.
Let's shift now. We were just in chapters one and two.
Of course.
Now, oh, we've just got the bulk of the book, right?
All these really long speeches between these different characters.
There's Job and these three friends.
Yes.
There's character Eli who comes up who may be a good guy, maybe not a good guy.
Yes.
People debate. We're not going to get into that.
No.
But they are long.
Yes.
They take a long time to read.
Yeah.
If you even read one of those chapters out in church, people might come up and go, hey, that was a long reading today.
Why are we doing this? Yeah.
What's going on in those speeches?
And again, how are you drawing the key applications you're seeing out of all those speeches?
Yeah. Yeah. That is a great question.
I think there are several things going on.
I think at a most basic level, the book, maybe I'm wrong.
I think the book of Job is trying to frustrate us and wear us out and make us really anxious for God to speak.
I think it wants to impress upon us.
So if I've tried having quiet times right through the book of Job and halfway through I'm thinking, I know this is the word of God, but I'm struggling.
Am I kind of getting the point?
I think you are. I think you are kind of getting the point.
I think the book of Job itself reflects the experience it explores.
This is a tiring, difficult, exhausting subject.
And getting through the book that talks about suffering is tiring and difficult.
And I think we're supposed to have this keen sense we just want God to show up and speak to Job.
And the human characters, regardless of what they say is true, have no idea how to explain what happened to Job.
It's interesting to me that by the end of the book, Job takes back everything he says.
I repent and dust.
Job says, I cannot believe I have been criticizing my only true friend in all this.
And yet all of Job's...
Oh, so it turns out God is the real friend.
It turns out God is the real friend, not the friends, as it turns out.
At the same time, Job's speeches in which he criticizes God are still recorded for us.
Why are they there when what Job says is wrong?
When the way Job tries to interpret his situation, his suffering chapters 1 to 2, is very understandable.
And yet we know because we've been given more information.
He gets it completely wrong.
He understandably draws the conclusion, I haven't given God any reason to turn on me.
Maybe he's not the person I thought he was.
Maybe he's not a good person.
And you know, if when people suffer in our churches, if they feel safe enough around you,
they will probably start to say similar things.
It's very frightening to hear from Christian brothers and sisters to hear them say that.
So what would be the contemporary equivalent that we could easily find ourselves hearing or even saying,
which is like what these so-called friends say?
So this is terrible to say, but if you hear a friend in church say something like,
I don't know how God is not an abusive parent.
If I did what God did to me to my kids, that would be abuse.
How is God any different?
Now, for the most part, we keep that under- we know we shouldn't say that stuff.
If Christians feel really safe around you, they might start to utter those dark thoughts about God.
And that's essentially what Job says.
Now, I think Job's speeches are recorded to help us be better friends to the modern day Job's we meet.
So an essential quality of a Job-like ordeal is ignorance.
If Job knows this is a test, then the devil can always turn around and say,
well, of course Job said that. He knows it's a test. Job can't know it's a test.
God has to allow Job to fall into a position where Job, where God looks mysterious to him.
He will say in chapter 10, why'd you turn into my enemy when I didn't give you any-
Anyway, as we read Job's speeches, we're thinking Job, you poor guy, you just don't know enough.
And if you just hang on, this is all going to work out really well.
And probably similar thoughts will occur to us when we talk to modern day Job's.
Working through this difficult, tiring book is training us in a kind of enduring friendship with modern day Job's.
Where we stick with them, we don't correct them, we don't sermonize at them, we don't win a theological argument.
When someone starts saying really terrible things about God, it is so tempting to get in a theological argument with them.
But it's useless. Even if you win, people in pain say crazy things.
And if someone says something about God that you, if another Christian does that you find really troubling,
you beat them in a theological argument. That doesn't really address the pain that gave rise to that crazy-
So, as we're reading these long speeches by these three friends,
and maybe Elihu as well, if you think he's getting it wrong, which I think you think he is getting it wrong.
I think he is.
Oh, is that basically, God's sake, through that, if you've got a friend who's going through like what Job is going through as in mysterious suffering,
don't talk to them like this.
Basically.
That's it.
Basically. And even, yes-
And what are the key things they say, which we shouldn't say.
Yes, yes. So as we hear Job speak and we can't speak back, we're being trained to listen to Christian brothers and sisters say terrible things
and just stick with them and not argue with them, which is what the friends do.
The friends draw the reasonable inference, the reasonable but completely incorrect inference.
So, I'm sorry, let me interrupt myself and back up a little bit.
In the first chapter of the book, in verse one, Job is a deeply sanctified, godly sinner, but a deeply sanctified saint.
And as a result, the consequence is his life is blessed.
As Job and his friends see him lose the blessings of his obedience, the friends draw the reasonable conclusion that Job has lost his obedience as well,
and he has compromised integrity with God in some secret way.
So Job needs to confess that and God is a good person, he will restore Job and the end of Job's life can be even more blessed than the beginning.
So they continually pressure Job to confess whatever sin it was that provoked God's wrath.
And from their perspective, that is a reasonable inference to draw and it is completely wrong because it's not Job's sin that brought this terrible-
it's just exactly his integrity.
I think the text is trying to scare us and as we listen to the friends talk and we think, they're actually being quite reasonable.
And in some ways, to an extent, they could quote other parts of the Bible in support of what they're saying and they're getting it completely wrong.
They're torturing someone that God thinks so highly of and they are incurring God's anger.
At the end of the book, God says, Job has to pray for you and sacrifice for you because I'm so angry at how you talk to him.
If that doesn't make you stop and soberly reconsider how you talk to people at church, then almost nothing will.
Thank you. Just a final question on these speeches.
Yes.
Thinking of Job's speeches, God says at the end Job has spoken well.
What is that talking about?
Do you really expect me to know that, Tim?
You're the Old Testament guy here, Eric.
I don't know if this is the case, there are a couple of places in the book of Job where the poet narrator was writing it out.
I wonder if he was chuckling to himself thinking, boy, this is really going to knock them sideways.
Job's friends are so reasonable through the speeches.
And Job says so much dodgy sounding stuff.
Job will very admirably hold on to God.
He won't curse God.
In Chapter 16, he says, God is using me for target practice.
Literally, he says he slashes open my kidneys and it's just terrible.
How did Job speak rightly about it?
Okay, now, I don't think that that can be a carte blanche approval of everything Job says because not even Job approves of everything he says.
Okay, right.
I think there are several things going on.
First of all, the friends only talk about God. Job talks to God.
The friends, as the speeches go on, say less and less about God.
Their theory of blessings for obedience dominates the whole horizon, and God stands as a midwife to that.
I don't think the friends would have passed the accuser's test.
They don't give much evidence of loving God for God.
And actually, ironically, when Job protests, he shows how much he values God.
So in Chapter 3, he says, this is not explicit, but I think what's going on in his mind, from Job's perspective, it looks like he's lost the favor and friendship of God for no reason he can think of.
He hasn't.
God's heart toward Job is unchanged, but it looks to him like he has.
And Job says, he doesn't say, I wish I was dead.
He says, I wish I had never been born in the first place.
I wish I had never enjoyed that blessed life all these years.
So the unstated implication is, if it turns out God and I haven't been friends this whole time, I'm not interested in the blessed life, which actually turns out to be really good theologically.
Job is not interested in the blessings of obedience if he can't be friends with God.
So I suspect things like that.
There's one other point where it's a little bit complicated in the Hebrew, but I think Job essentially says, I can insist, it's in Chapters 9 and 10, Job says, I can insist I did nothing to deserve what looks like this punishment as much as I want.
But unless Job looks on me and says, Job, you're right, all my claims to rightness mean nothing.
So there's an odd echo with Pauline justification and God saying, you're right in my eyes, and that's the truth about you.
Even though the language is different, I think Job has the same theology.
So Job expresses that in a negative way because he thinks he's undeservedly under the wrath of God, but he still shows the same high value for God and God's judgment of him.
That's where I would go to say, to explain why God says Job spoke rightly about him.
Great. Great insights.
Let's move on. Let's come to the end of the book.
Yes.
The final few chapters, God speaks in I think four chapters to close the book out before the final events of restored blessing.
You spend like a hundred pages, I think it's two thirds of this book, in just those few chapters.
Tell us why you think they're so significant.
Because it's where finally God speaks.
Yes. Well, and I think we could be forgiven a sense of confusion and anti-climax when we get to the end of the book of Job.
Finally, God shows up and he talks about what sound like a hippopotamus and a crocodile, except as far as we know, crocodiles don't breathe fire or live in the ocean.
So that's confusing, but it sounds like that.
Why does God spend so much time talking about that? And why is it?
This is the behemoth and the Leviathan.
Thank you. The behemoth and the Leviathan, which...
Oh behemoth. You say behemoth, I say behemoth.
It doesn't matter. Hebrew and English are pronounced very differently. I don't care at all.
Those chapters are confusing, maybe mostly because God says very little explicitly about himself in those chapters.
But Job ends the chapter not by saying, oh, I understand who Leviathan is better.
He says, now I see who you are. But God hasn't said very much about himself.
So what inference does Job draw? Mostly evangelical commentators think that God demonstrates and vindicates his wisdom and his power in those speeches.
I do not think that is totally wrong, but that's not sufficient enough to create the 180 degree about face that Job makes from God is the one torturing me to God is my great champion and deliverer and defender and savior and friend.
There are a couple of reasons why. The main one is Job continues to believe that God is very powerful and very wise.
He says so in chapter 12 and other places throughout the book. Job never doubts God's power and Job never doubts God's wisdom in the wise, in the sense of effective ability to administer the world or something like that.
So if that's the lesson of God's speeches at the end, that's not news. He already knew that.
It's not news. And if that's the lesson, God is trying to convince Job of something Job already believes.
It doesn't explain why Job, his eyes break open and he falls on his knees in worship.
So it's kind of there in God's speeches, but you don't think it's not the thing that really makes the turn.
It is there. It's not sufficient.
I go into detail in the book. Some commentators, at times there seems to be a barely hidden anger at God on the part of some commentators.
They read these two scary looking animals as being a reflection of God and a reflection of God's dark, chaotic or evil side.
I don't know what else to say when it's blasphemous. God essentially says, yeah, I'm a monster and the way you criticized me, that's the truth of me.
Not clear to me why would Job would worship in response to that. It's a bit of a strange response.
It's not clear why God would restore Job to health and life and favor and blessing. What kind of monster would do that?
I don't think that makes a lot of sense.
That looks like a fairly different theology being imposed on the book.
I think we can safely say fairly different theology. It's not satisfying.
In the Old Testament and the rest of the ancient Near East, one of the ways the ancient Semites symbolized cosmic chaos and supernatural evil was through animals that don't quite look like normal animal species.
You can find examples elsewhere in the Old Testament, which I go into at a wearying length in the book.
Inside the Old Testament, outside the Old Testament of other examples that look just like Bahamoth and Leviathan and are clearly symbolic of supernatural chaos and evil.
If we read the book from that perspective, everything in the book falls into place perfectly.
God is speaking to Job in his cultural language to say, Job, look, you thought it was just you and me and I just turned on you for no reason because I'm such a terrible person.
There are actually more factors at play here. Let me show you who your real enemy is and who my real enemy is.
Let me show you how terrible he is.
In chapter 41 verses 7 and 8, he says, could you fill Leviathan's side with harpoons? He talks about a sword with Bahamoth.
So this is all the language of it. Have you seen? Have you seen?
That's right. That's right.
It's a way of saying to Job, I allow that creature some limited existence for now.
There's coming a time I'm going to kill it. Tim, I think when we go through Job like ordeal, we have some vague sense that we've been caught up in something we just don't understand.
Christopher Ash in his wonderful commentary on Job, it's my favorite commentary on Job, he says, every Christian should...
You get big marks with me for saying that.
I'm not just saying that. It's my favorite book on Job.
He says, every Christian should wake up every day saying a deep, dark spiritual battle is being fought over me today.
And we have some dim, vague sense. Job mentions Leviathan distantly as that weird creature out there that symbolizes chaos.
God describes Leviathan at length to say, I'm the only person who sees Leviathan clearly and up close.
I think at the end of all time, God is going to give us a front row seat, and we are going to see that evil that God tolerated.
He kept on a tight leash. He tolerates it for now.
And we are going to see the Lord Jesus go to battle and unsheath his sword and scour every last ounce and trace of evil out of his creation and the evil that we suffered under.
And we're going to see him defeat that. God does not say all things work out for good, true as that is.
He does not say our suffering now works in eternal way, glory, true as that is.
All he says is, Job, you've been thinking, you've been portraying me as if I don't care what happens in my world.
I am more keenly aware of the suffering that happens in my world than you are.
And there's coming a time when I'm going to destroy it. That's all he says.
And for Job, that is enough. The scales fall from Job's eyes.
And he sees you're actually my great champion and defender against an evil I can barely comprehend. Job's constant.
I'm so sorry. I don't mean to cut you off. Job's constant, his obsessive desire in the debates is to reconnect with God.
He thinks he and God are friends and where he doesn't know why.
All he wants is to be friends with God again. He never talks about the blessed life a single time.
And God's speeches allow him to do that by showing him there's a third party involved here that you don't know about.
So Leviathan, Behemoth, this is now Satan in this kind of mythological form.
Yes.
I'd like to get into this just a little bit more because you've talked about God is in the end showing Job and therefore us about
in a sense the joy he will take in his end time victory over Satan and all his wiles and all his ways.
The thing which I've read in the book and heard you say in your sermons on Job, which really made me set up and think,
oh my goodness, am I allowed to think that's true? And I have never heard anybody before say this on Job.
And it was around that verse around it. I can only remember the older translation. Leviathan, look at his goodly frame.
Yes. Yes.
It's almost as if, I can't remember the way you frame it. It's as if or maybe not even as if God is taking some kind of pleasure in the power of Leviathan.
Yes.
That sounded iffy when I heard you say it. But I'm looking at the text going, it kind of says it. What's going on?
So, Tim, Augustine had that idea that if an interpretation tends towards love of God, love of neighbor, well, you can't be too far wrong.
Sure.
And an interpretation makes you think, the news can't be that good, surely. Maybe we're not too far off the mark.
Okay.
What I'm trying to get at there is there's a joy animating God's speeches. The first speech, the sons of God were singing for joy when I put the world together.
I don't tend to think of beings higher than myself singing the hallelujah chorus when I look at the world. And yet that's God's perspective on his creation.
The way God describes Leviathan sounds the opposite of defensive, morose, nervous, apologetic. He sounds joyful.
And he describes it's the word there that gets translated goodly in the RSV. The NIV, I think, has gracious. It's related to Hannah's name, which means gracious.
Why would God use such a positive word to talk about the monster? It can't be that the monster is good in some way.
Because everything he says after that is fire and claw and scale. Everything after that is this a terrifying monster that could snap you in half, Joe, without a second thought.
Why does God say that?
The way I try to think about this is this. If you were a British soldier fighting World War II, and your general was about to lead you into the trenches in a charge, and your general did so with unflinching courage, that would be inspiring.
But if your general, before leading that charge, turned to you and said, look at those Nazi tanks and the guns and the architecture and the machinery and look at the discipline.
That's impressive. And you knew that your general was still saying they're the enemy who must be defeated. They're not good.
To be able to pay them a compliment, that's maybe not the best analogy. But to be able to speak in praiseworthy terms, maybe that's not the best analogy, Tim. I don't know. Maybe that's not helpful.
But to be able to speak normally in the Old Testament, when two enemies face off, they insult each other, David and Goliath.
But for God to compliment his opponent, that's something altogether different. If God can rejoice in his world, even with Leviathan in it, if not even Leviathan, who we can barely see.
God says if you even touched him, you'd never forget it. If we could really see the evil and the chaos that's out there in God's world today, I think we'd be utterly overwhelmed.
If not even Leviathan can dampen God's joy in his world, he's not saying Leviathan is good, if God could still rejoice in his world, then maybe Christians can be the most realistic, the most sober minded and the most joyful about the world as it is today, the real world.
The world of abuse and cancer and Holocaust and pandemics and death.
We can be the most realistic and the most joyful.
I find that much easier to say than to actually live. But the kind of confident joy God has in his world, and it's not because he's viewing his world with rose colored glasses, because he is the only one who can describe Leviathan up close.
But the kind of confidence and joy with which he describes, and even to describe Leviathan's gracious form, when it's such a horrible monster, the whole world looks different.
I have a hard time putting into words and I struggle for analogies, but there's something very beautiful and precious there. What if I could live that way with the same kind of confidence that utterly realistic about the world and utterly joyful before the redemption of all things?
I run out of words. I'm not sure how to articulate that, but that's what I see in the text.
Now, Eric, let's just bring this to land with a couple of practical questions.
Preaching and teaching, Job.
You've already said almost the point of a large part of the book is to tire you out and make you weary.
Give us some tips for the preaching and teaching of the book as a whole.
Yes.
There's not just one way to do that. I can think of a number of paths through that book.
If I were preaching it, I would try to make the small groups in the church run parallel to the sermons and have them be reading more and longer sections of the book.
I'd be encouraging people to read it through all the way so that they get the experience of the book contains its own sort of teaching mechanism. If you can make it through, you'll be a better Christian at the end.
I would take one sermon on chapters one to two, focus on why does God allow these.
I think Job chapter four is a great place to land on what the friends say and why, and why it has a certain plausibility, and yet they're getting Job completely wrong.
That would be a really convenient place. And then you could tell individual small groups, read some more speeches by the friends and get really frustrated by them and really angry with them.
I would take one sermon on God's first speech and look at how God re-describes the world to Job.
I'd take one sermon on the second speech and talk about God's defeat of evil. And I'd take one sermon on Job chapter 42 and watch Job very beautifully, very beautifully repent and worship before anything in his life gets better.
So those five weeks would be a very solid survey of the book that could be run with small groups concurrently and do justice to the length of the book.
Yeah, thank you. That's really helpful. And then the final question is back to where we began, the application of this now into suffering, our own suffering, or as we try and be a godly encouraging help to those who know suffering like Job.
I mean, this is a really big question. Just paint for us for you, what are the outlines of the biblical landscape on what God says into suffering?
Yes. And then what you see the particular contribution of the book of Job.
Yes. So I see the particular contribution of the book of Job is to make us wiser in how we interpret suffering and give us a new category to interpret, which we won't always need.
But with the help of God's spirit, we will know when to turn to the book of Job. It is a deeply valid biblical category to say there's pain in our lives because of our own stupidity.
Suffering always leads to, sorry, sin always leads to suffering, always, always.
And so it's appropriate and helpful to find, if someone is saying, why did God let this happen? It's appropriate to find the right gentle words to say, is God letting the consequences of your own actions catch up with you?
Now, if they say no, then you don't press and push and say, well, there must have been something, you know, confess, you know.
It is appropriate and right to say, is there some aspect of your Christianity that is deficient? There's some virtue you're lacking that God is supplying by means of this suffering.
And if they say, well, if there is, I have no idea what it is.
Like, if they start to say the Job-like things of, I just want to talk with God and learn what happened and he's not, he's just not there anymore.
You know, life is confusing. We may not always know with 100% certainty when we turn to the book of Job. But if the person you're talking to, if it just doesn't make sense in relation to sin, if it doesn't make sense in relation to spiritual improvement, then it may be that the book of Job is the place to turn.
And we only ask those questions slowly, cautiously, prayerfully, with a wide, with a lot of room for a margin of error.
But I think that's the unique contribution of the book of Job. It unfolds for us a particular kind of ordeal that God allows his children to go through, what he wants from us in it, and the happy ending that he has waiting for us.
Eric, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
Well, I think I'm not having you. We are the co-hosts. So thank you for letting me interview you. Look forward to co-hosting with you next time.
And really looking forward to the follow-up book, these Applied Sermons, coming out in February.
Thank you.