A Fresh Perspective

For many chapters God has been silent and that perhaps as much as anything is basic to Job’s agony and dilemma. In our text today God finally responds. God speaks. But God does not speak to a single question Job agonized over. Instead of answers God responds with more questions. Basically God asks: Who are you to question how I do things? Where were you when I created all these different forms of life? What do you know about all of this? Can you influence the elements of this vast creation? Do you have the wisdom to run things? So instead of answers, Job gets more questions that seem to be aimed at putting him in his place. But the amazing thing about this is that this seems to be enough. I will say more about that later. But first note how God speaks. God speaks out of a whirlwind. What’s the significance of that? Maybe it’s a way of saying that you can’t hold God down, you can’t limit the way God works to four spiritual laws, or the Nicene creed, or the Baptist faith and messag...

Job believed God was responsible for the good and the bad that happened to people on earth. So after the first series of catastrophes where he loses family and fortune he says, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” When Job is afflicted with painful soars all over his body and when his wife questions his loyalty to a God who would do this to him, he says, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” When Job’s friends first hear of his troubles the text says “they met together to go and console and comfort him. . . They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” If only his friends had continued that course. If only they would have absorbed some of Job’s frustration and anxiety without trying to correct him or set him straight. But when Job opens...

This is a strange story to say the least. Terrible things happen to Job because God gets in argument with Satan. Satan here is a member of the heavenly council, not the symbol of evil we come to know later in the New Testament. With God’s permission Satan inflicts great disaster. In most of the Old Testament God was believed to be the cause of both good and evil. For example, Amos who prophesied in the first half of the eighth century B.C.E. asks: Does disaster befall a city, unless the Lord has done it?” And the implied response is: Well, of course God has done it. God brings blessing and God brings disaster. That’s what God does. Satan says to God: “Have you not put a fence around Job and his house and all that he has?” This is why he is staying the course, suggests Satan. So God decides to let Satan go after Job to prove Satan wrong. I hope you understand that this story is fiction. Scholars would call this sacred myth. It is a kind of extended parable. Job is actually ...