Straight to the Heart of Job

60 Bite-Sized Insights

Phil Moore

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780857219763
• eBook ISBN: 9780857219770
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

The book of Job is one of the oldest surviving pieces of writing in human history. It also deals with two of the biggest questions that humans have asked throughout history - what is God like, and why does he allow such suffering in the world?

Allow Phil to take you on a journey through the book of Job to discover insights that have shaped the way that people have viewed God and viewed humanity for over 3,000 years.

God inspired the Bible for a reason. He wants you read it and let it change your life. If you are willing to take this challenge seriously, then you will love Phil Moore's devotional commentaries. Their bite-sized chapters are punchy and relevant, yet crammed with fascinating scholarship. Welcome to a new way of reading the Bible.

Welcome to the Straight to the Heart series.

Act One – Job 3–27:

The Same Old Answers

In the Dark (Job 3:1–26)

“Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?”

(Job 3:23)

I don’t know if you have ever been to one of those surprising talent shows where somebody opens their mouth and you simply can’t believe that that sound can be coming out of them. That’s how I feel about the first of Job’s speeches, and not necessarily in a good way. Job seemed so full of faith in chapters 1 and 2 that it really catches us off guard in chapter 3 to see how much a week spent sitting grieving in the dust with his three friends appears to have altered his point of view. The first of Job’s speeches is a lament in the dark about the anguish and utter misery that he feels.

I’ve heard some people argue that Job was not really a historical person and that the sudden mood swing in this chapter reflects the fact that the book which bears his name is an anthology of poems from many different mourners. There is a rather fatal flaw to this idea, however. The writers of the Bible are unequivocal that Job was a real person. The Lord himself lists Job alongside Noah and Daniel as one of the most righteous men in history.¹ That explanation also displays a total lack of understanding about the grieving process. Isn’t this precisely how we feel in the midst of bereavement and tragedy? We have good days and we have bad days. After seven days of sitting in the dust with Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, you’d probably be having a pretty bad day too.

In verses 1–12, Job ends his seven days of silence by opening his mouth and starting cursing. It isn’t the Lord he curses, but he directs some very bitter language at the day when he was born. He calls for his birthday to be struck out of the calendar.² He calls for those who curse days to curse his birthday too.³ He wishes that he had been stillborn, for then at least he would be lying dead in the grave, instead of suffering with the living.

If we re-read the first half of Job’s poem slowly, we discover that he actually goes far further than lamenting his own birthday. His true lament is that the Lord ever created the world! On the first day, God created light, so let day be turned to darkness. On the second day, God divided the sea from the sky, so let gloom and utter darkness once more cloud the distinction between the two. On the fourth day, God created the sun, moon and stars to mark the seasons, so let the calendars be graffitied, let the morning stars burn out and let people wait in vain for the first sunrays of dawn. On the third and sixth days, God replaced the chaos of the primordial oceans with the dry land and its beautiful creatures, so let ancient Leviathan reassert its rule.⁴ Job’s frequent talk about darkness in the first stanza of this poem reflects how much he feels in the dark about God’s actions all around him. His property is gone, his children are gone and his health is gone, so he starts to fear that God has gone and left him too. Job’s initial reaction to disaster was to worship the Lord, but as the days roll on without deliverance he begins to conclude that the Lord must have abandoned him.

In verses 13–26, we learn a few important things about ancient Hebrew poetry. It doesn’t rhyme, for starters, finding its beauty instead in its rhythm and its symmetry. This second stanza of Job’s lament begins and ends therefore with a pair of bookends that seek relief from all his suffering. The stanza begins with a wish to find rest in death (verse 13) and it ends with a lament that there is no rest for the living (verse 26). The verses in between describe a man who feels anguished and suicidal.⁵ “What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me” (verse 25). Job’s worst fears have been realized. He has lost all that he holds dear. All he has left is a nagging wife and three false friends.⁶

So what are we to make of this? How can the man who trusted God so totally in chapters 1 and 2 have plummeted so quickly into such terrible despair? If you are asking such questions, then praise God. It means that you have not yet experienced first-hand real grief and tragedy. Anyone who has can testify that the human heart acts like a yo-yo, one day feeling full of faith and the next day unable to get out of bed for a debilitating sense of bleak despair. The writer of Job records this honest lament to help us trust that God is able to sustain our hearts on both the good days and the bad. Last year, I buried the child of a lady at the church I lead in London. When I saw her one Sunday recently, she confessed that she was having one of her bad days but she assured me through her tears that she knew one thing for sure: What is true in the light is still true in the dark.

That’s what the writer wants to teach us through these verses. Job is truly in the dark. He knows nothing of the exchanges at God’s heavenly council, that shed such light on these events for us, in chapters 1 and 2. The writer reminds us of those conversations by using the Hebrew verb sūk or sākak to record Job’s complaint in verse 23 – “Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in?” – since this is the same phrase that Satan used in his own complaint to the Lord in 1:10, “Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has?” From the bottom of his whirlpool of depression, Job imagines that the Lord has surrounded him with barbed wire and with misery. From the perspective of the angels in heaven, however, the Lord has surrounded Job with his love and protection.⁷ Even in his sickness and pain, the Lord has forbidden Satan from laying a finger on the man’s life. Job will not find his final respite in death, but in glorious resurrection when God vindicates him!

One day Jesus would hang from a cruel cross in deep darkness. He would cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”⁸ He would walk in Job’s footsteps to deliver him and you and me. He would plumb the depths of human sorrow so that, even when our days feel darkest, he is able to lead us out into the light of day. If you feel hedged in by tragedy, then God calls you to look up to the Righteous One who died and rose again. He reassures us that, even on dark days, he is hedging us in with his protection.

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¹ Ezekiel 14:14 and 14:20, and James 5:11.

² This may seem strange to our ears, but it wasn’t strange for poetry in Job’s day. David curses Mount Gilboa with no longer receiving rain because Saul was killed there (2 Samuel 1:21) and Jeremiah not only curses the day he was born but also the man who informed his father that he had a son (Jeremiah 20:14–18)!

³ What on earth does Job mean by those who curse days?! Well, in the same way that our culture sees Friday 13th as an unlucky day in the calendar, ancient Eastern religions earmarked many other days as evil.

⁴ We will see later, in Job 41, that Leviathan was an ancient name for the Devil and his demons, the “monster” that sought to keep the world in chaos before the Lord spoke, “Let there be light!” at the start of Genesis.

⁵ Job doesn’t merely wish he had been stillborn In the Hebrew text of 3:16. He wishes he had been aborted. He uses shocking language to plumb the depths of human suffering and sorrow.

⁶ Bankrupted, Job comforts himself in 3:13–19 that at least the rich and the poor are both equal in death.

⁷ Feelings are a terrible barometer for reality. We must only place our trust in God’s unchanging Word.

⁸ Matthew 27:45–46, Mark 15:33–34 and Luke 23:44–45.

The Best Answers in the World (Job 4:1–11)

Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied…

(Job 4:1)

I know that it’s a bit of an unusual pastime, but I love reading newspapers from six weeks ago or, even better, from six months ago. I enjoy reading their confident predictions about election results and parliamentary votes and stock prices and sports matches – so many of which have been proven to be utterly false by the time I read them. They teach me not to be swayed too much by people’s oh-so confident assertions today.

The speeches of Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar are like very old newspapers. Although it’s hard to imagine it now, there once was a time when their answers to the problem of suffering were regarded as the best answers in the world. One day, no doubt, people will look back on the writings of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and the other great thinkers of our generation and find it equally hard to believe that anybody ever swallowed half of what they say. It is easy for us, with the benefit of many centuries of hindsight, to look back on the speeches of Job’s three friends and to see that their bold claims are riddled with flaws but, at the time, it wasn’t easy. They represent the greatest thinking of the wise men of the East. They give Job the very best answers that the pagan world can offer him. They are meant to make us cry out for better answers from the Lord.

Act One of the book of Job (chapters 3–27) consists of three cycles of speeches:

Introduction:	Job’s lament (3)
The first cycle of speeches:	Eliphaz (4–5) Job’s reply to Eliphaz (6–7) Bildad (8) Job’s reply to Bildad (9–10) Zophar (11) Job’s reply to Zophar (12–14)
The second cycle of speeches:	Eliphaz (15) Job’s reply to Eliphaz (16–17) Bildad (18) Job’s reply to Bildad (19) Zophar (20) Job’s reply to Zophar (21)
The third cycle of speeches:	Eliphaz (22) Job’s reply to Eliphaz (23–24) Bildad (25) Job’s reply to Bildad (26–27)

Eliphaz is the oldest of Job’s three friends, so he tends to speak as the voice of experience.¹ Bildad is no spring chicken himself, so he tends to speak as the voice of ancient tradition. Zophar likes to think of himself as a bit more open-minded, basing his own arguments on logical reasoning. Although these three friends take three different approaches, what strikes us most during their three cycles of speeches is how little they actually have to say. They each keep on trotting out the same old answers, offering very little in the way of real comfort to Job. Their empty and repetitive speeches are meant to make us long for the Lord to silence them with better speeches of his own. As they summarize the best answers that our world has to offer to the question, Why does God allow suffering?, we are meant ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Straight to the Heart Series
• Introduction: Why Does God Allow Suffering?
• Prologue: Job’s Suffering
• Act One: The Same Old Answers
• Act Two: Some New Answers
• Act Three: God’s Own Answers
• Epilogue: Job’s Comfort
• Conclusion: Why Does God Allow Suffering?
• Acknowledgments