40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Job 2:11-3:26 (Episode 387)

Episode Date: October 24, 2023

Job has three friends come to him and they sit in silence for seven days. When Job finally speaks, he laments the day he was born and that he didn't die. Why is he still alive when he desperately seeks death. And why does Job never talk about Satan? Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen.  Show Notes: Support 1517 1517 Podcasts The 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 on Youtube   What's New from 1517: 2023 HWSS Conference Livestream Signup Free 2023 Advent Resources 2024(May 3-4) NWA Tickets are Now Available! Join the 1517 Academy All Charges Dropped, Vol. 2 More from the hosts: Daniel Emery Price Chad Bird

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the other podcasts that are living over there. And while you're over there, make sure that you register for the Here We Still Stand regional event. That's the event in northwest Arkansas. It sells out every year. It's the first weekend in May.

Two days, Chad will be there, and I will be there as well, along with a whole bunch of other people. Hey, we're having a pre-conference at that event this year. First time that we're doing a pre-conference. And you know what our pre-conferences are like if you've been to a conference. It's live podcasting. Live podcasting, extravaganza. And will this podcast be recording? you know it will. So you want to come and hear a live recording of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament,

make sure you sign up. Come hang out with me and Chad in the beautiful Ozarks. It's going to be a good time. A link is in the show notes, or you can go to the website, go to the events page, and scroll around until you find it in the list of events. Chad, we are still in Job chapter 2, but we're at the very end. We kind of stopped at a natural spot. This was maybe a little bit of a It's kind of weird. It's not like it was a bad chapter break, because you get into other things in the next chapter, but it definitely is a break in how this goes. Job has been suffering, man. He has had a deal, a challenge has been accepted by God regarding his piety, and man, oh man, is he going through it. And so the devil has taken away all his prosperity. He's taken away

his servants and his livestock and even his children. His houses have collapsed. Job, he wasn't going to sin with his lips. He's not going to utter a word against God through all that. And so God decides that he's going to brag on him a little more, and the devil says, well, you got to let me touch his body, dude. Like, for so far, I've just taken away everything around him, but you haven't let me touch him. So let me touch his body a little bit, and we'll see what happens. and God says, all right, but you can't kill him, and Job might be wishing that that was not the case right about now, as he is in a dirt heap scraping boils from his body with broken pieces of pottery, and his lovely wife, the one person in his life that the devil did not remove for

maybe obvious reasons, now says, hey, you holding fast to your integrity? Because I think you should probably stop this charade, curse God, and die. Job tells her, you sound like one of those foolish women. I don't know who those foolish women are, but that's who she sounds like. And we ended with Job saying this remarkable thing, man. And in some ways, Chad, like an impossible thing to say. It's an impossible thing to come out of the mouth of someone who is suffering like this, who is a sinner, which of course Job is. This is something that could only be uttered from faith, which is, shall we receive good from God and not evil in all this? Job did not sin with his lips. And that's where we ended. It just seems like an impossible response.

Yeah. And I think it seems that way. And it fits, though, with the rest of the seemingly impossible descriptions of Job. He's like the cream of the cream of the crop as far as people ago he's a sinner yeah i mean we all are sinners uh but uh he's he's got it you know he's got and at the beginning he's got everything he's righteous he's god-fearing he has all this stuff but even when all this is taken away he's still that way so that's he is uh the remarkable of remarkable and that last confession yeah shall we receive good from god and shall we not receive evil when you see that contextually given everything he suffered that is yeah it's one of the most remarkable confessions that we have in the scriptures. So with all that happening to

him, now we're going to meet his three friends. In times like this, you need some friends to come along. This is what you need. I would hope, Chad, that if I was really going through it on this level, you know, like my boys would come around, lift me up, encourage me. Come on, man. Like, you know, when you're hurting, maybe this is, I can't speak to the ladies. I don't know how this works with the ladies but i know for guys like sometimes when everything's falling apart you you need your guys right you need the guys to come along and and it kind of holds you up a little bit and you need you need friends not like these friends i'll show up in ash heap arkansas i mean yeah i won't bring the book of job i'll just bring the psalms there we go so we can we can

say some psalms of lament together so when job's three this is uh 211 now when job's three friends heard of all this evil that had come upon him they came each from his own place and so we get introduced to these three guys whose names are Eliphaz the Temanite Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite so of these three Eliphaz the Temanite he seemed to be the leader of the three I mean he he's the first to speak so Job's going to speak first at the beginning of chapter three So Job is going to open, he's going to break the silence and he's going to begin. But Eliphaz is going to be the first to respond to him. And he has the longest speech of all three of these.

And he, I would say he's probably the most rhetorically talented. He uses the most rhetorical devices in these speeches. And also, interestingly, you get to the very end of the book, Job 42. And notice what God says. After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz, the Temanite, My anger burns against you and against your two friends. So he doesn't name all three of them at the very end. He names Eliphaz.

So he seems to be the leader of these three. He's called a Temanite. That is synonymous with Edom. So that's why a lot of people think that the source of this might have been Edom originally. But anyway, that's where he comes from. The second guy is named Bildad, the Shuhite. We don't know too much about where he came from. you know what the shoe height means or anything like that uh and then the third zophar he's the

guy with he only uh speaks a couple times and uh we know his name we know he's a name of that but we really don't know anything about anything about that place so most of what we're going to figure out is just gleaned from the speeches of these three guys as we go we go through so first of all they uh well what's what's interesting about it chad is that when you first read it and you're it's gonna take for you to get to chapter four uh before you start really seeing how this plays out but initially like when you just start you know from verses 12 and 13 this seems like exactly what you should do like what they're going to do seems like start well yeah this is what you do man like uh i mean it even has a uh a motivation ascribed to them which is that the goal here is to

show him sympathy and to comfort him and that this is really good and they're gonna they're gonna wait with it like there's some sitting in grief and and suffering that's good uh but i don't know it seems as though uh the patience runs out like they're over there waiting for something to happen that isn't gonna happen yeah yeah yeah when joe finally opens his mouth they're probably i'm guessing here but they're probably expecting a confession yeah like thanks guys for coming uh i know there's been seven days of a pretty intense silence here but i think it's finally time that i just came clean and told you what i've done that has resulted in this divine visitation of punishment upon me and my family and when he doesn't begin that way we'll uh well

we'll see when we get there but uh they each begin to respond in their own way but yeah they they make at a an appointment they they come to show him the sympathy and comfort to comfort him now later it's kind of funny uh chapter 16 job will say miserable comforters are you all which is one of my favorite lines in the book of job oh yeah you guys are you're just top-notch comforters let me tell you you're making me feel better every time you open your mouth my soul is uplifted by your speech so i mean to give the guys credit they do start out well they see him from a distance and it says they didn't recognize him and that makes sense i mean if uh if i'm stripped down to my loincloth which is probably what was happening here with joe and i'm covered head

to toe with sores i've been scraping them uh i probably would not be recognizable either you know dirty filthy lost weight just disfigured uh so their first response is actually all of this beginning is great they see him they don't recognize him and so what they raise their voice and they wept so you know we do get have to give the guys credit i mean they they begin with this great sorrow i really do think these guys are friends and now maybe they'll turn out to be great friends or or or or great comforters for sure but the reason they came was was a good reason yeah they really actually i think they really cared about job and uh they tear their robes they sprinkle dust on their own head sort of they're getting dirty too just like job and

they sit with him on the ground seven days and seven nights and no one spoke a word to him but they saw that his suffering was very great so that's uh that's pretty remarkable i i mean if you take this literally can you imagine i go say it's to your hospital room not even a dung heap all right you're in the hospital bed you're suffering and i just sit with you and neither of us says a word for seven days that's that itself is hard hard to fathom but that's what happens so a whole week goes by they just sit in sorrow in silence in in sympathy and are being there basically you know the what do we call that the uh the ministry of presence some people talk about just being there yeah well there's something to be said for that you know you're not alone

this is what happens uh when you lose someone too it's you know it's you need to be alone sometimes but it's also good to be have people around you so you don't feel like you're isolated yeah this is actually fairly instructive if you do have a friend who's suffering greatly it's probably unwise to go in with your prepared words of consolation and comfort and there's maybe

a time for that, but initially the best thing you can do for people who are I mean Job is known to have mourning here as well is to just sit with them in it so this sort of shared grief

where you don't pretend like you have some words that can that time is later there is certainly a time in our context we would say to give that person a gospel

the hope of the resurrection and all that kind of stuff but it's usually not immediate especially if you're in their actual presence but it's rather to sit there and say I'm going to to whatever degree I can sort of bear this with you

right i'm going to to sit in it with you and that's the that's the best thing you can do at least initially for sure yeah yeah at least initially for sure yeah i mean i i think back to when luke died and you know a lot of people said a lot of things but they wasn't the words much that mattered it just was they were there they cared you know that's the initial impact you know that's what made the the impression upon me it didn't have to be some you know long speech or anything just saying sorry you know my heart's broken for you or no words or whatever it is i mean all that stuff just makes makes an impact and over time you're ready to hear words but at first yeah just being there makes a makes a huge difference so anyway that that's first two

chapters so uh chapter three joe breaks the silence uh he is the one who which is which is good i think he's he's the first one who needs to speak here and man when he does we Yeah, we see a different side of Job. He's been saving it up. If all we had, yeah, if all you knew about Job was the first two chapters, which, unfortunately, I think is sometimes kind of the shallow impression that people have of him. Oh yeah, this very stalwart, faithful, almost, you know, stoical, uh, acceptor of all of this misery that's fallen upon him, this patient, faithful, um, bearer of burdens, you know, all that kind of stuff. Well, I don't want to discount that, but that's a very small

side of Job. You have to read the rest of the book to hear about the rest of what he's going through. so job opened his mouth and which is a phrase we we see actually quite a few places in the bible sometimes i think it's just stereotypical uh sometimes i think it's used for like a rhetorical way of opening an important speech i think this occurs in matthew 5 jesus opened his mouth yeah on the sermon of the mount and began to speak so it's this idea of okay this is it's not just simply saying he started to talk it's a rhetorical way of signaling something important is about to he said so here job i think when he opens his mouth it's the idea it's been shut for so many days so long and now he's finally ready to speak and what he does after he opens his mouth is it

says he curses the day of his birth now that's it's an important uh object there he never curses god like his wife told him to literally in fact in hebrew it's a little bit debated how this should be translated because even the most translations render it the day of his birth in hebrew just literally he cursed his day now he goes on to curse the day of his birth explicitly but you know maybe he's talking here not even you know specifically about his birthday but just the day of his life we might say or where he's at now or whatever it might be but anyway that's literally in hebrew just the cursed his day and job said so this first chapter is going to be basically divided into three sections he's going to begin by cursing the day not only of his birth but even

as of his conception and then it's going to go on to say well if i had to be born i wish i could have at least died when i was born that's verses 11 through 19 and then the very end he's going to say, well, since that didn't happen, since I didn't die when I was born, then let me die now. That's the gist of this entire first chapter. So here's a guy who's at such extremities emotionally, physically, in every other way that you can think of, that death would be welcome. Now, he never says anything about suicide. So it's like suicide is not even on the table.

But what he wants, if he can't change the past, if he can't change the fact that he was conceived and born if he can't change the fact that he didn't emerge from the womb was stillborn then at least god could be gracious enough to take him out of of this life so that's where we're going with this so verse uh verse three i don't know how much of this i'll read but let me at least take this first section let the day perish on which I was born, and the night that said, A man is conceived. Let that day be darkened. May God above not see it, nor light shine upon it. Let gloom and deep darkness claim it. Let clouds dwell upon it. Let the blackness of the day terrify it. That night, let thick darkness

seize it. Let it not rejoice among the days of the year. Let it not come into the number of months. Behold, let that night be barren. Let no joyful cry enter it. Let those curse it who curse the day who are ready to rouse up leviathan let the stars of its dawn be dark let it hope for light but have none nor see the eyelids of the morning because it did not shut the doors of my mother's womb nor hide trouble from my eyes so uh there you have job's opening speech that's quite a thing to hear after seven days of hearing nothing yeah can you imagine the three friends probably a shocked expression on their face when joe started it out this way uh of all the thing i think anyway of all the things they expected him to say this was not it yeah in fact it's not what i would

expect i mean if he had been silent that long i would have expected maybe the first words to be basically a lament over everything he'd lost that would make sense i mean a typical biblical lament about the loss of his family, of his kids, of his possessions, of his health, all the things. And yet that's not the way that he begins. He begins by cursing the day of his birth. In fact, going all the way back to his conception. When you've lost everything, when his family is gone, it would seem then at that point that you're like, so is it better to have been born and experience all of this suffering and all of this pain? Or would it have been better if you could say, you know what, actually, if I had not, if the day that I was born could be struck from existence,

what happens in the balance? Well, a whole lot of suffering is eliminated. At this point, it would be very difficult to ascribe anything to your life but building towards immense suffering. I'm sure he has all kinds of joyful memories of his children and all this stuff, but in suffering like this, at least initially, there's a betrayal there that feels like everything good in your life was actually just setting you up for a pain that is indescribable, right? All of the goodness that you ever experienced before from the day of your birth to this moment has all been a big, long setup so that this would be as painful as possible. And what would be better is if I could just get out in front of it all and eliminate it. Because at that point, it's not—and you know this, Chad—it's not that you can't get to the place, of course, where then joyful experiences, even if they're now in the past, you can identify as valuable and something you cherish. But in the midst of it, you're like, no, this is—these memories hurt. Like, all of the past joy has now just compounded my suffering.

Yeah, yeah. yeah i think in those in those kinds of situations pain becomes the person through which you view everything so you think uh you know it's hard to see past the wall of pain to all of the the pleasures and the goods and the blessings that came before it and that's kind of where job's at especially right now you know so he's he'll um yeah if time went on he'd be able to get past that wall of pain and to look say oh well yeah but if i if i hadn't been born then i wouldn't experienced this, this, and this. I wouldn't have experienced the joy that I have with my children. I wouldn't have experienced, you know, all the things that he goes on in the brush of the book

to talk about, you know, even the people that he's helped over the years. Uh, but right now he is just so, um, suffocated by the darkness of pain and grief that he can't, he can't see past all that. Yeah. So he's, he's one of these people that, you know, it would have been better if I had never been born yeah imagine imagine if uh if you know so someone close to you dies and you're you're in you're right in it i mean now now you have to compound that what times 10 and then a lot of other loss all the suffering and your body's falling apart it's a it's a mountain of things but then if you're in the if you're in the midst of that and someone hands you a photograph of the person you've lost like this is this you don't look at that with like this this is just a this

they might as well hand you be handed you a knife right i mean you get to the point where then you could go back and look at that same photograph with fondness and and you might it will it might still hurt and it might uh it will bring up emotion but it's not the same thing like in that moment it feels like it's going to kill you yeah yeah that's very true it's very true i mean all Everything he's going through, in my small, I mean, compared to Job, my small experience of pain rings true. And you know, if this strikes anyone listening to it, I mean, if you've never heard this before, it's just like kind of biblically outlandish. It's not isolated just to Job. So listen to this.

This is from Jeremiah. I think Jeremiah takes it up a notch. Cursed be the day on which I was born, the day when my mother bore me. let it not be blessed cursed be the man who brought the news to my father a son is born to you making him very glad let that man be like the cities that the lord overthrew without pity joe i mean joe was lamenting but jeremiah is like cursing the guy that brought the good news to his dad that his son was born and let that guy be like sodom and gomorrah i mean so uh this is not isolated to job this happens to jeremiah too so there's some i mean they are not hesitant to uh

to use the most exaggerated language imaginable to talk about the grief that has been boiling up inside them job and jeremiah both as well as you see this kind of stuff happening all over the psalms too well one of the things that's nice about the scriptures is that when you have the words so when you have someone open their mouth is that the bible doesn't is that does not read like an instruction book of here is the appropriate way to respond to this and that and the other thing, and here's how faith can inform your suffering. It doesn't know what it does. What it does is it says, and here's how this sounds. When someone is in this situation and they open their mouth, this is the sort of thing that comes out. And Job, of course, unarguably is a man of

faith look at the way that he's talked about and this is what comes out of his mouth which means that you can know that the faithful suffer and it sounds like this yeah yeah oh it's uh you can use this you can use psalm 22 i mean is there is was there ever a greater man of faith than christ himself right of course not be perfectly trusted right and what is to cry from the cross my god my god why have you forsaken me uh so that is i think that's why lament is the the quintessential cry of faith you don't cry you don't lament to a god that you don't believe doesn't exist you don't lament to a god that you think is not there the very purpose of lament is to cry out to the one that you believe is there yeah so lament rather than being a signal of the absence of faith is

actually a sign that faith is very much present it doesn't mean that the faith is happy with the situation of course it isn't that's what lament is all about so uh yeah these opening verses you got i love the man some of the language here uh and we're reading in english of course and the hebrew is as i think i mentioned a couple episodes ago very complicated but it's just so rich too because the the day the light the that contrast between it and the and the night the darkness the deep darkness the thick darkness all of this is kind of woven in there um you get to the end i i have to mention this phrase look at verse nine let the stars of its dawn be dark let it hope for light but have none nor see the eyelids of the morning what a beautiful phrase it's a it's it's

probably like the uh some people explain it it's like so the morning here is almost a personification almost like a woman's name and uh so some people explained it like you know when the sun's coming up you see the first rays of light it's kind of like eyelids that you're seeing these eyelids or eyelashes or other eyelashes of light that are coming out there so it's in the midst of this painful dark poetry you've also got this this light that's that's coming through what else was i going to mention oh yeah uh we should we should say something about leviathan he comes up here in verse eight i don't think we have ever encountered him in 40 minutes have we uh i don't i don't think that i don't think leviathan has ever come up now because he does and he's going to come up elsewhere

in job he's going to come up uh in isaiah as well as some other places too but i don't think that we have encountered him so far so leviathan is uh this uh like sea monster yeah that uh that yeah He's a big part of, if you've ever read anything about Canaanite mythology, this idea of a primordial chaotic sea monster is a huge motif in that. So what you'll see oftentimes in the Psalms, you see it, you see it in Isaiah, you see it, of course, here in Job, uh is biblical writers will uh will borrow and adapt some of this what we would refer to as mythological imagery and language to to talk about you know whatever there's there whatever there's they're discussing it's not in a it's not an endorsement of the mythology but just like you know preachers and writers today will borrow from uh events or or images or people from

greek roman mythology you know maybe we compare samson with hercules or whatever it might be so the biblical writers did too it seems to be what's being said here is that so let those cursed who curse today who are ready to rouse up leviathan literally in hebrew it's like their skill to rise up rouse leviathan maybe the idea of uh joe saying you know i wish the people who could like call upon this sea monster would do it and he would rise up and swallow the sun or something like that but we'll we'll hear more about leviathan as we work our way through job because he's got uh quite a bit more more to say about him but that's that's kind of the background of what this figure is so basically uh those first uh first 10 verses are job saying

that he wished he had never been not only born but that if he could go back and he could take the night in which he was conceived and kind of just blot that day out of the calendar, then he would do it. But of course, this is all... I mean, it's a lament, it's a curse, but it's sort of vain in the sense of you can't do that.

You can't go back and cancel the day of your birth. So maybe it's this. I can't remove the day of my birth from the calendar of history. I wish I could do that

I can't do that. But since I can't do that, all right, fine. Like, if I were going to be born, why couldn't have I died immediately? Yeah, that's where he goes next. So, verse 11, why did I not die at birth and come out of the womb and expire? Why did the knees receive me, and why the breasts that I should nurse? But then I would have lain down and been quiet. I would have slept.

Then I would have been at rest with kings and counselors of the earth who rebuilt ruins for themselves. with princes who had gold who filled their houses with silver why was i not as a hidden stillborn child as infants who never see the light there the wicked cease from troubling and there the weary are at rest there the prisoners are at ease together they hear not the voice of the taskmaster the small and the great are there and the slave is free from his master so yeah it's quite a it's quite a description of uh of it's not named here explicitly but he's talking about sheol the place of death right yeah well yeah i mean why couldn't

i have gone to the place of death where everybody else has basically passed the troubles of this life yeah well he even argues that hey okay so would have been nice is if i'd been born and then like died immediately uh even maybe like i wish my mom hadn't nursed me that would have been great uh you know considering the situation i'm in like that would have been better and then and then kind of goes into this thing where he's like look uh who who experienced his death like i could have gone to where everyone else goes everyone is better off than me right now like everyone who has died is in a better spot than me kings with all their gold they have houses of silver rebuilding massive monuments they're better off than me but you know who else is better off than me

thieves uh like everybody prisoners like the wicked like there's there's not a single dead person that's not better off than me right now yeah he democratizes everybody he's like well you know it doesn't matter how much they had this life or how wicked or how good or anything like that they're all better off because they've gone to the place of rest they're they're dead he's not really thinking here about you know he's not thinking in the christian way of heaven and hell he's just thinking of the they're gone right they're in the place of death and there you got the small it kind of brings them together verse 19 the small and the great are there it doesn't matter how small you are in life doesn't matter how great you are in

life no matter if you're slave or master whatever then you're at rest you've ceased from you cease from troubling. So, you know, why, if I didn't, if I didn't die at birth, uh, then that's, that's a, that's unfortunate because then I would have entered into this place much sooner than where I am now, where I'm stuck in my sufferings. So having said that, uh, he's gonna, he's gonna go in the last section, verse 20 through to 26 to, uh, basically say, well then, okay, if I had to be born. And then if I didn't die at birth, then why can I not die now? So verse 20, why is light given to him who is in misery and life to the bitter in soul who long for death, but it comes not and dig for it more than for hidden treasures who rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they

find the grave? Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? For my sign comes instead of my bread, and my groanings are poured out like water. For the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. Then he ends with three nots, and one is, I am not at ease. I am not quiet. I have no rest, but trouble comes. And in many ways, that kind of sums up this. Everything that Job is experiencing is condensed into those four statements at the end. I'm not at ease. I'm not quiet. I have no rest. So I don't have those three things but what i do have in spades coming at me on all sides is trouble yeah it's it's uh it's almost like he he's saying here there's a lot of people that would like to not die that do

what is the deal with someone who like i got right now i i i dig for death like it's a hidden treasure Like, I would—there's nothing better for me right now than if I could die. And it does not come. Like, this whole arrangement is off, right? So maybe there's someone out there who is dying who would like not to. We could swap, because that's the only thing I want right now. Gladly trade places with you. Yeah.

Absolutely. And did you notice, too, verse 23? this struck me when i was going through this so why is light given to the man whose way is hidden whom god has hedged in remember earlier how uh when satan first approaches god he says well of course of course job uh is the way he is because you've you've hedged him in right you've protected him from all these terrible things and you've blessed him in all these ways and now job comes along of course he didn't hear this conversation but he employs the same metaphor God has hedged me in

so it's the idea not he's hedged me in to protect me so my tall fences that kept trouble away have now become iron bars that have shut me in he's switched the imagery in other words God has trapped me here well sometimes you have it backwards right

so Job seems to have it a little bit flipped here where he's like man God has built like a wall around me in this suffering and you're like no God removed a wall And that's what's going on here. So your problem is not that you are hedged in, my friend.

Your problem is that you've been de-hedged. Yeah. The hedge has been removed, and all of the stuff has attacked you. You know, I was just thinking, it's interesting, too, that, you know, we know, of course, we're privy to the heavenly scene. We saw the two discussions between God and Satan. And, of course, Job has no idea of why any of this is happening to him, which, of course, is the impetus behind one of the reasons, anyway, why he is lamenting the way he is and why he speaks the way he does throughout the book, because he doesn't know. We do. But what's interesting is that Job, you know, he never brings Satan into this.

He never says, why, oh, God, have you allowed the evil one to do this to me? His concern, his lament, his words are always directed at God specifically. So when he thinks about everything happening to him, he doesn't think about chance. He doesn't think about the devil. He always thinks in terms of God, which I like because it means that if you're taking your problems directly to God, then you're taking your problems directly to the only one who's actually able to do something about it. that's one of the things I love about the Old Testament's focus upon God did this, God did that, not saying there's not, you know, secondary causes and all that kind of thing, but one of the things

that's good about that is when you take your laments, your pains, your problems, your complaints directly to God, you're actually taking it to the source, the only source who's going to be able actually to answer and to do something about it. That's ultimately where Job is going with us. Yeah, I think Job is really informative in that way because obviously throughout the Old Testament there's not a lot of devil focus from people of faith. People of faith, they don't really attribute anything to the devil. I mean, they're never like, the devil has done this

or the devil is doing this thing to me or tempting me or persecuting me or whatever it is. They don't do that. What makes Job remarkable is that It's one of the only times where you have it said explicitly that it is the devil, that it is who is doing this, and Job still doesn't do that. And sometimes as Christians, I think we do that a little too much. So a lot of times, first of all, you might be prone to attribute things to the devil

that he really has nothing to do with. It's mostly just life in a sinful world. and the devil's probably not individually paying attention to you he's not omnipresent he's not really concerned about Chad Bird and the devil is uniquely after him

however in Job's case it is the devil who is uniquely after him Job is being persecuted by the devil himself it makes no reference to it

he directs everything to god yeah which is uh which then is going to allow him to to deal directly with uh the only one who's going to be able to answer him in the end yeah it's not going to answer him in the way he expects but he will give him give him answer and one of the great things about i mean this has been pointed out by probably every commentator on job every teacher on job but it's worth mentioning here because i don't know that we have uh maybe maybe in the opening episode but what's uh so instructive about job's approach is that in in in uh comparison with what we'll see the three friends do is the three friends consistently talk about god but they don't talk to god never job on the other hand talks to god he he will talk

you know maybe not directly but indirectly to his friends uh but he is the real theologian in the group, because he addresses his words to God and not just talks about God. And in that way, of course, just like the psalmist who takes the hallelujahs as well as the complaints and laments directly to God himself. Yeah, because you might miss that. You might think that, all right, Job's sitting there with his friends for seven days, finally opens his mouth, and this is somehow directed to them. Like, he's not asking them these questions. Right, yeah, yeah. and if as we go through the speeches too i mean we call them you can call them argument speeches whatever even these will see i mean there's not like some sort of logical logical progression

of argument you don't see i mean we'll see some kind of responses back and forth to each other but these almost stand as independent speeches they're like they're each putting forward their argument or their speech uh and there's some some element of responding to each other but it's not it's just don't don't kind of take this as like a court case okay we're okay there's his argument i'm going to respond to it he's going to respond to me it doesn't work that way uh and most of joe's speeches even though like their their audience is partially the friends the main audience is god himself he is the one that joe was crying out to in these speeches yeah you're this is a crying out to god with an but there's

an audience there to hear what you're saying yes yeah that's it and that's uh that's 40 minutes that is it man we are out of time that is uh the rest of uh chapter two and chapter three we will next week get into uh you know get a little get to hear from somebody else and see see how this hit the ear of his friends and see if uh if they're like that's a good question job i wish i had an answer for it i don't think it's going to go quite that way you have to come back next week to find out how that goes down. Chad, I will see you then. All right, see you then.