What is Job all about? Job-The Wisdom of the Cross [Job 1:1]

Today we’re starting a new series through the book of Job. In your bulletins you have the structure of the book of Job, use it to get familiar with Job and throughout our series. Today we will only be setting the stage before launching into Job, so whether you are very familiar with Job or have never even looked at it, we’ll get a feel of what it’s all about today. Stand for the reading of the word of God [Job 1:1]

Thomas Carlyle wrote Job is, “the grandest book ever written with pen.” While I’m not sure I completely agree with Carlyle’s assessment of Job I do agree it is a grand book for sure. I have been wrestling with the idea of tackling this book in a preaching series for some time now, partly because it is a very long book, 42 chapters to be exact [we just spent a year in 3 chapters of Matthew], and I want to do it justice and not skim over major content. So we are going to dive into it…we may take breaks throughout the series but I do believe we will greatly benefit from this remarkable book.

The more I have walked through the book of Job and around the book of Job, the more deeply convinced I have become that it makes no sense apart from the cross of Christ, our series on Job is called, “the wisdom of the cross”. That statement would be strictly true of the entire Old Testament, but somehow in Job it seems more sharply and urgently true, for without Jesus the book of Job will be just “the record of an unanswered agony.” It could almost be a commentary on Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1:18–25 where he talks of Christ the power and wisdom of God. The book of Job hinges around the contrast, conflict, and tension between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of the cross.

Perhaps this is why anyone who restricts themselves to interpreting the Old Testament in terms of the Old Testament alone find themselves heading up blind alleys. Scripture is to be interpreted by Scripture, and the book of Job can only be understood as a part of the whole Biblical canon as it is fulfilled in Christ.

Again and again as I have beaten my head against these puzzling and seemingly difficult texts, and it has always been the cross of Christ that has shone light on the page. This is not to say that the book is not about Job in his ancient context. Of course it is. But Job’s experiences, Job’s debates, Job’s struggles, Job’s sufferings, and Job’s final blessings all come to fruition in the perfect obedience of Jesus Christ in his life and death and then in his resurrection, ascension, and exaltation at God’s right hand. I hope I can persuade you of this as we walk through this book.

This series is not a treatment of a topic, whether the topic of suffering or anything else. It is a study of the Bible book of Job. I want you to venture into the book of Job, to read, meditate, explore, and pray this profound Bible book into your bloodstream. If you have never done so, my prayer is that this study will help you find a way in. If you have ventured in but got bogged down and confused, I hope this series will help you find your way.

Job is a neglected treasure of the Christian life. It has brought an enormous outpouring of scholarly work, and yet few Christians know quite where to start in appropriating its message for themselves. I hope this series will be clear, accurate, and faithful to help. So first what is Job all about? The book of Job raises three big questions: What kind of world do we live in? What kind of church should we want? And what kind of savior do we need? We’ll look at these questions before we dive into the book itself.

What kind of world do we live in?

On January 14, 2003, Detective Stephen Oake was stabbed and killed in Manchester, England. Why? He was an upright man, a faithful husband, a loving father. What is more, he was a Christian, a committed member of his church where he used sometimes to preach. The newspapers reported a moving statement by his father, Robin Oake, a former chairman of the Christian Police Association. He said through his tears that he was praying for the man who had killed his son. The newspaper articles told of the quiet dignity of Stephen’s widow Lesley. They showed happy family snapshots with his teenage son Christopher and daughters Rebecca and Corinne.

So why was he killed? Does this not make us angry? After all, if we’re going to be honest we will surely admit that there were others who deserved to die more than him. Perhaps there was a corrupt policeman somewhere who had unjustly put innocent people in prison or a crooked policeman who had taken bribes. Or perhaps another policeman was carrying on an affair with his neighbor’s wife. If one of those had been killed, we might have said that although we were sad, at least there would have appeared to be some moral logic to that death. But the Oake’s, dare we say it, are good people. Not sinless, of course, but believers living upright lives. So why is this pointless and terrible loss inflicted on them?

We need to be honest and face the kind of world in which we live. Why does God allow these things? Why does he do nothing to put these things right? And why, on the other hand, do people who couldn’t care less about God and justice thrive? Let me read to you a letter from the angry voice of an honest man from long ago who struggled with this same unfairness:

Why do the wicked have it so good,

live to a ripe old age and get rich?

They get to see their children succeed,

get to watch and enjoy their grandchildren.

Their homes are peaceful and free from fear;

they never experience God’s disciplining rod.

They make music with fiddles and flutes,

have good times singing and dancing.

They have a long life on easy street,

and die painlessly in their sleep.

That was the voice of Job, in a paraphrase from chapter 21. “Let’s be honest,” he says. “Let’s have no more of this pious make-believe that it goes well for good people and badly for bad people. It’s not true; look around the world—it’s simply not true. By and large people who could not care about God seem to live happier, longer lives with less suffering than do believers. Why? What kind of God runs a world like this?”

Armchair questions and wheelchair questions

It is hard questions like this that face us in the book of Job. But there are two ways of asking them. We may ask them as armchair questions or we may ask them as wheelchair questions. We ask them as armchair questions if we ourselves are remote from suffering. We grapple with God with wheelchair questions when we do not take this terror lightly when we ourselves, or those we love, are suffering. Job asks wheelchair questions.

Every pastor knows that behind most front doors there lies pain, often hidden, sometimes long and drawn out, sometimes very deep. In a book I was reading about Job, the author, a pastor, was discussing how to preach a passage from Job with four fellow ministers when he looked around at the others.

For a moment he lost his concentration on the text as he realized that one of them, some years ago, had lost his wife in a car accident in their first year of marriage. The second was bringing up a seriously handicapped daughter. The third had broken his neck and had come within 2 millimeters of total paralysis or death six years previously. The fourth had undergone repeated radical surgeries that had changed his life. As his concentration returned to the text of Job, he thought, This book is not merely academic. It is both about people and for people who know suffering.

Robert Gordis writes, “The ubiquity of evil and its apparent triumph everywhere give particular urgency to the most agonizing riddle of human existence, the problem of evil, which is the crucial issue in biblical faith.” He calls the book of Job “the most profound and the most beautiful discussion of the theme,” more relevant than ever, “in this, the most brutal of centuries.”

Job is a fireball book. It is a staggeringly honest book. It is a book that knows what people actually say and think—not just what they say publicly in church. It knows what people say behind closed doors and in whispers, and it knows what we say in our tears. It is not merely an academic book. If we listen to it carefully, it will touch us, trouble us, and unsettle us at a deep level.

What kind of church should we want?

But as well as asking what kind of world we live in, the book of Job will force us to ask what kind of church we belong to. What is the greatest threat to Christian churches today? It is a good question, although answers are bound to vary and be impressionistic. Here’s a suggestion: in most of the world churches are liable to be swamped by the so-called prosperity gospel, and in the richer parts of the world churches struggle to guard the gospel against metamorphosing into what we might call the therapeutic gospel. These two closely-related pseudo-gospels [false-gospels] threaten to displace the authentic Christian and Biblical gospel.

The prosperity gospel, in its crudest form, is the message that God wants you to be rich, and if you trust him and ask him, he will make you rich. There are many large gatherings around the world where these false preachers tell the congregation how God wants them to be rich and then richer and richer. The American preacher T. D. Jakes has an estimated personal fortune of one hundred million dollars. Such fortunes are regarded as evidence of God’s favor.

If you talk to missionaries they’ll tell you of there are many little independent churches in third-world countries that seem to teach the prosperity gospel, with slogans such as “Excellence and Power”, or how to speak a word that gets you power and influence. Come to Jesus and become a winner in life—that seems to be the message. I saw the same type of thing when we were in Mexico, televangelists preach wealth and health, in a third world country that’s a marketing dream.

Here are some book titles by author’s who teach the prosperity gospel, I’m not making these up they are real titles of books, one is...

Cultivating a Winning Habit (with the subtitle “Sure Guarantee for a Top Life”),

Created for the Top,

Don’t Die at the Bottom,

and Power Pillars for Uncommon Success. You see the idea.

Did you know that in some countries they have replace the traditional wording of the wedding vows, “for richer, for poor, in sickness and in health” with “For better, for best, for richer, for richest” because they cannot fathom the possibility that for a Christian couple it may be worse or poorer.

So that is the prosperity gospel. If I am poor (financially and materially poor) and I come to Jesus, Jesus will make me rich. If I am sick, and I pray to Jesus, Jesus will make me well. If I want a wife or a husband, and I ask Jesus for one, he will give me a wife or husband. If a couple wants children and call out to Jesus, Jesus will give them children. And so on. This, according to the prosperity gospel, is what he has promised.

But what if, as in some parts of the world, I already am rich? I may not think of myself as particularly rich, but I have running water, I do not worry about having enough food, I have a roof over my head and adequate clothing. I may well have much more than these, but these alone suffice to make me very rich in world terms.

Perhaps I am also healthy, happily married, and have children. What happens to the prosperity gospel when I already enjoy prosperity? It metamorphoses into the therapeutic gospel. In its simplest form, this false gospel says that if I feel empty and I come to Jesus, Jesus will fill me. The promise of objective goods (money, wife, husband, children) metamorphoses into the claiming of subjective benefits. I feel depressed, and Jesus promises to lift my spirits. I feel aimless, and Jesus commits himself to giving me purpose in life. I feel empty inside, and Jesus will fill me.

This fits perfectly with the prosperous 21st century society we live in. Have you ever filled out one of those surveys from companies that you’ve purchased things from? You notice most of the surveys don’t even ask you about the product that you purchased but they want to know how we left you feeling…did we help you feel good? Our society is consumed with feeling good.

The therapeutic gospel is the gospel of self-fulfillment. It makes me, already healthy and wealthy, feel good. The book of Job addresses in a deep and unsettling way both the pseudo-gospel of prosperity and the pseudo-gospel of feeling good.

What kind of savior do we need?

The most significant question, however, is the third one: what kind of Savior do we need? Or to put it another way, what kind of man does the universe need? The more I have looked at the book of Job, the more deeply convinced that the book ultimately makes no sense without the obedience of Jesus Christ, his obedience to death on a cross.

Job is not every man; he is not even every believer. There is something desperately extreme about Job. He foreshadows one man whose greatness exceeded even Job’s, whose sufferings took him deeper than Job, and whose perfect obedience to his Father was only anticipated in faint outline by Job. The universe needed one man who would lovingly and perfectly obey his heavenly Father in the entirety of his life and death, by whose obedience the many would be made righteous (Romans 5:19).

We are probably right to view Job as a prophet. James says to suffering Christians, “As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets.… You have heard of the steadfastness of Job” (James 5:10, 11). If Job is a prophet, then at the heart of his life was “the Spirit of Christ” indicating within him something about “the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories” (1 Peter 1:11). Sometimes for the prophets this meant living out in anticipation something of the sufferings of Christ, as it did for Hosea when he was called to marry the immoral woman Gomer. For Job, perhaps supremely among the prophets, the call of God on his life was to anticipate the perfect obedience of Christ.

We need to get two introductory points before we launch into the book. They’re obvious but important.

First, Job is a very long book, 42 chapters long. That may be an obvious observation but the point is this: in his wisdom God has given us a very long book, and he has done so for a reason. In Job, It is easy just to read or preach the beginning and the end and to skip rather quickly over the endless arguments in between as if it wouldn’t much matter if they weren’t there. Too many preachers, if or when they tackle Job, do so in a very short series of sermons—perhaps one on the first two chapters, one for the end of the book, and one (sometimes assigned to a junior member of the preaching staff) to cover chapters 3–37. But God has given us forty-two chapters!

Why? Well, maybe because when the suffering question and the “where is God?” question and the “what kind of God …?” question are asked from the wheelchair, they cannot be answered on a postcard. If we ask, “What kind of God allows this kind of world?” With suffering and loss and pain, God gives us a forty-two-chapter book to answer that.

Far from saying, “The message of Job can be summarized on a postcard, in a Tweet, or through a text, and here it is,” God says, “Come with me on a journey, a journey that will take time. There is no instant answer—there is not just take a spoonful of Job, just add boiling water, and you’ll know the answer.” Job cannot be distilled. It is a narrative with a very slow pace (after a fast beginning) and long delays. Why? Because there is no instant working through grief, no quick fix to pain, there is no message of Job in a nutshell. God has given us a forty-two-chapter journey with no satisfactory bypass.

Writing about therapy, one writer says, “Many will wonder why therapy can take so long. Why can’t pain, once understood and engaged with, allow for a speedy rewrite of a physical or mental template and thus bring quick relief? It is frustrating.” She goes on to say that it takes two to four years for a language to become personal and a part of oneself, and therapy is like absorbing a new language. “In therapy the patient has to unlearn one way of being and develop another, more sustainable one”; so it’s not surprising that it takes a long time. For a similar reason the book of Job is long. We need to read it, read it all, and read it slowly.

Second observation, most of Job is poetry.

About 95 percent of the book of Job is poetry. Chapters 1, 2 and part of chapter 42 are prose or ordinary speech. Almost all the rest is poetry. But so what? Well, poetry does not speak to us in the same way as prose. Poems “are always a personal ‘take’ on something, communicating not just from head to head but from heart to heart” (J. I. Packer).

A poet can often touch us, move us, and unsettle us in ways that prose cannot. Job is a blend of the affective (touching our feelings) and the cognitive (addressing our minds). And poetry is particularly suited to address the whole person. But poetry does not lend itself to summing up in tidy propositions, bullet points, neat systems, and well-swept answers. Poetry grapples with our emotions, our wills, and our sensitivities. We cannot just sum up a poem in a bald statement; we need to let a poem get to work on us—we must immerse ourselves in it. poetry helps illuminate that which is surrounded by shadows.

It is just so with Job. We shall be immersed in the poetry of Job. As we enter it we must not expect tidy systematic points to jot down and then think we’ve “done” Job, Job is to be lived in and not just studied. So during this study let us read the book of Job itself, read it out loud, mull it over, absorb it, wonder, be unsettled, and meditate. And may we let God work on us through this great Bible book. We shall find our faith deepened and our emotional palettes enriched.

So why did I choose Job? Belief me I’ve asked myself that many times. TOO OFTEN WE COME TO the book of Job (as to other parts of the Bible) expecting answers to all our questions, and especially to questions about suffering. The main human character certainly suffers, but the book of Job is not fundamentally about suffering.

Job suffers because he is a believer, and he suffers as a believer. And because he is a suffering believer the central character and subject of the book of Job is not Job who suffers but about the God with whom he has to deal. The book of Job is about God. That shouldn’t surprise us, but it is easy to forget. If we take our eye off the central focus and focus instead on suffering, we will be disappointed, for we do not find in Job the answers to the questions why do we suffer.

Instead we find what Job found when he ultimately had to listen to God: God asks him questions more than Job presents puzzling questions to God. And this turns the tables, as they must be turned. The book of Job is not about Job but about God—his character, sovereignty, justice, goodness and, yes, even his love. Above all it is about God the Creator of everything, the One who is God, who made everything, even the wildest corners of the created order. He is the God who made and who entirely controls the Leviathan, Satan, and all who seeks to destroy Job.

Job is also about true worship, about our bowing down in the darkness and in the midst of suffering to the One who is God, leaving even our most agonized unanswered questions at his feet, for we are creatures, and he alone is the Creator.

Because Job is about God and the worship of God, it is also about humility—the humility to admit (as Job 28 shows) that there is so much about this world that we do not understand. It is presumptuous of us to act as if we had made the world, which is what we do the moment we suggest that we could run this world better than God. Humility means to do precisely what Job was doing at the beginning and what Job 28:28 affirms: to bow before God in loving fear and to “turn away from evil.” In New Testament terms it is to repent and believe, to hear and to heed the gospel. Here is the gospel in Job—repentance and faith practiced at the start and repentance and faith affirmed at the end.

But of course Job is also about Job. He is the central human character in the drama, introduced at the start and blessed at the end. He is addressed personally by the Lord, whereas the other human characters are either ignored or rebuked. So Job points us to the mystery at the heart of the universe: a blameless believer who walks in fellowship with his Creator may suffer terrible and undeserved pain, may go through deep darkness and then at the end be vindicated. There is such a thing in the universe as suffering that is not a punishment for the sin of the sufferer.

And therefore Job is passionately and profoundly about Jesus, whom Job foreshadows both in his blamelessness and in his perseverance through undeserved suffering, Jesus fulfills Job. As a priestly figure who offers sacrifices for his children at the start and his friends at the end, Job foreshadows Jesus the great High Priest.

The drama, the pain, and the perplexity of Job reach their climax at the cross of Jesus Christ. In the darkness and God-forsakenness of those terrible hours of lonely agony, the sufferings of Job are transcended and fulfilled. And being blameless and accused and despised by men but finally vindicated by God in the resurrection, Jesus fulfills the drama and longings of Job for justification.

And because Job is about Jesus, it is also, indirectly, about every man and woman in Christ. Every disciple, called to take up the cross and walk in the footsteps of Christ, must expect in some measure to walk also in the footsteps of Job. So we may conclude that Job is in some measure about us. Not primarily about us, for it is above all about God. Not centrally about us, for its central human character is Job who foreshadows Jesus Christ.

But for each of us as a believer walking through this world in union with Christ, Job is an unavoidable part of the pathway of faith. Our final justification will come through present suffering. Those who today are not recognized as children of God will one day publicly be acknowledged as his (see Romans 8:19). So as we return again and again to this book of Job and meditate on its depths, let us pray to be given grace to bow down, especially in the darkness, especially in the midst of suffering and pain to the God who is God. It is this God, who is God even of the wild, evil, and seemingly random unfair fringes of life, whom we are called to love and to trust. In the footsteps of the Lord Jesus we too may entrust ourselves.