Audio Transcript

It’s Job week on the podcast. The book of Job is a source of a lot of APJ questions, and the source of a lot of answers too on all sorts of topics over the years. We have eighty episodes now mentioning Job — on every topic you can imagine. I’m surprised how often we return to this important book, which is not easy to interpret. We’re reading the book together in our Bible reading. Today we read Job 16 together.

The whole book is challenging to interpret because it’s littered with errors, Pastor John — errors about suffering, errors about providence, and even false statements about God himself, a distortion on full display for us here in our reading today, in the early verses of chapter 16. There we find a mix of things that are true and things certainly false, most starkly in Job 16:7–9. Verse 7 is sovereignly true. God brought the suffering into Job’s life by his plan and permission. Yes. But then verse 9 seems devilishly false. God did not bring the suffering because he hates Job. So, how do we parse fact from fiction as we read Job’s words, along with his wife and all of his friends, trying to interpret providence?

Well, that is the right question to ask, I think, because perhaps the most striking thing about the structure of the book of Job is that from chapters 3 to 31 you have 29 chapters of back-and-forth between Job and his three so-called comforters or friends, both of them speaking a mixture of truth and falsehood. It’s simply stunning to me that the author would devote 29 out of 42 chapters to a jumble of good and bad statements about human suffering and God’s sovereignty. The author seems to be especially exercised that there is so much bad theology about the sovereignty of God and human suffering. That, it seems, is why he gives 29 chapters to it.

The Errors of Job and His Friends

We can summarize the simplistic theology of suffering and sovereignty in the mouth of the three friends with Job 4:7–8. They say, “Who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same.” In other words, their answer to Job’s extended suffering is that it is owing to his iniquity. The righteous prosper; the wicked suffer. In chapter after chapter, they accuse Job of all kinds of sin, from bribery to deceit to neglect of the poor. And for Job’s part, he despairs of being treated justly by God and says repeatedly, at least three times, that God is treating him as an enemy (Job 13:24, for example) and that God, in fact, hates him (Job 16:9).

“We don’t know enough about God’s hidden ways and plans to pass any valid negative judgment about his ways.”

Now, what they all agree on is that God is absolutely sovereign. That’s amazing. They never question that. We moderns, we’re bold and brash enough to get in God’s face and say that he’s not sovereign. That’s never once questioned by anybody in the book of Job. What they are struggling with is why a person like Job is enduring such long and terrible suffering. The friends’ answer is, “His suffering correlates with his sin.” Job’s answer is, “I don’t understand what’s going on, but all I can tell is that God is treating me as though he hated me.”

A Grid for the Book of Job

I think the way the author intends for us to sort out what is true and what is false in what Job and his friends say in these 29 chapters is by letting the rest of the book — what came before in chapters 1–2, and what comes after in chapters 32–42 — let all of that provide the grid, the framework, the criteria for separating truth and error in Job 3–31.

So, let me try to sketch very briefly what that grid is.

1. Job’s Goodness

The point of chapters 1–2 is that Job was a good man, a God-fearing man: “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil” (Job 1:1). He proved that profoundly with his godly response, blessing God, worshiping God (Job 1:20–21). In the midst of the loss of his children, the loss of his health, he submitted to the sovereign wisdom, justice, and goodness of God, even though he couldn’t see it all. In Job 2:10, he says, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” And the inspired author puts his approval on those words: “In all this Job did not sin with his lips.”

The fact that we are given a glimpse into heaven as Satan and God interact about the life of Job, which Job could not see, is intended to show that on earth, we don’t know enough about God’s hidden ways, his hidden plans, to pass any valid negative judgment about his ways. So, we have a signal from the author from the beginning that Job’s three friends are not right. They are treating Job as if there’s sin everywhere in his life, which explains his suffering. And the point of chapters 1–2 is that that’s not true. There must be another explanation. But for Job, for 31 chapters, he can’t figure that out.

2. Elihu’s Explanation

So, the next big unit is Elihu, the young man who steps forward, who I believe is speaking the truth in order to correct both Job and his friends. Here’s Job 32:2–3: “Elihu . . . burned with anger at Job because he justified himself rather than God. He burned with anger also at Job’s three friends because they had found no answer, although they had declared Job to be in the wrong.”

“Suffering, in the case of God’s children, is a gracious means by which he exposes pride in our lives.”

What’s new about Elihu’s theology of suffering is that he does not correlate suffering merely with a punitive act of God against Job, but he introduces this new factor in Job 33:14–19 that suffering, in the case of God’s children, is a gracious means by which he exposes the sediment of pride at the bottom of our lives, lying there undetected, and then you get bumped by suffering, and the sediment stirs up. He exposes that and mercifully leads us to repentance and trust. That’s what’s going to happen to Job.

Now, I don’t think that contradicts the statement at the beginning of the book of Job — that Job was a good and God-fearing man. But it clarifies that in the best of men, whom God regards as good and God-fearing, there are remnants of indwelling sin. And one way that God in his mercy cleanses us and humbles us and brings us to fuller, deeper repentance and deeper trust is through suffering. He tests us to see if we will hold fast to him in love.

3. God’s Response

Then the next major unit in the book is the word of God himself in chapters 38–41. And the basic message there is, “Job, you just don’t know enough to pass judgment on me. You need to put away your accusations and trust me. You darken counsel without knowledge” (see Job 38:2).

4. Job’s Repentance

The final part of the book is Job’s confession of God’s sovereignty and his own repentance for having spoken so badly about God. Job 42:5–6: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” So, the Lord tests Job one last time now to see if he has the new, fresh grace to pray for the forgiveness of his three friends who wounded him so badly. Job 42:10: “And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends.”

So, I think the author intends for us to step back and see the God-fearing goodness of Job at the beginning, and the refining of Job’s holiness and faith through suffering, and his rejection of the simplistic view of the three friends, and his repentance for having found fault with God, and the beauty of his humility and love at the end. And the author expects us to take all of that as the grid through which we now will be able to sort out what is true and what is false in the mouth of Job and his friends in chapters 3–31.