Sermon: Job and Self-Evaluation (Part One): Job's Character
Blameless and Upright
#1639
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 19-Feb-22; 79 minutes
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transcript:
Lately, one thing about the Internet that has kind of made me bristle more frequently is the constant surveys that drop into my email. They come across online and they are always wanting us to evaluate them or whatever. If we buy something, it does not matter what it is, it could be the smallest little gadget or doo-dad or whatever, they want you to tell them and sometimes it is a lot of questions on even the silliest things.
So a survey invariably shows up, sometimes before you get the package, before you are even able to test it out and figure out whether you like the thing or not. They want to know how everything went. We are asked to rate every transaction, we are asked to evaluate their shipping process, whether you called in for support and how that interaction went. They want to know the amount and usefulness of the emails that they send you and on and on and on it goes. They have all kinds of questions and I know they are trying to make a better product or work out kinks in the system or what have you, but it can get a little bit tiring when you see those half a dozen times a day or more. I am not saying I buy a lot. That is not it at all. It just seems like everything I buy comes with a survey. They want us now to make evaluations, judgments, constantly about all these various products.
These surveys are so common, they have become so ubiquitous in the Internet world, that they have trained us to ignore them. They give us so many that they come up and we just delete them because we do not want to mess with it. We know what it is. We know it is a survey, we do not care what it is for, we just do not want to do it. So having trained us to ignore them, it has become a habit with us, and so the responses that they end up getting are either the truly spectacular job that they did or the totally horrid job that they did. There is very little in between. Very little, "Oh yes, great. That's fine. It works." It is always the, "Oh, this was the best thing ever!" and or "I'm never going to buy from you again. I think the service was horrible!" or what have you.
But such things like these surveys have also trained many people to become very picky and uncaring about how they address issues like this. If they do not like something, they just make a snap judgment and tell you, or tell the company or what have you. They are not understanding of anything outside of how it affected them. So they become quite judgmental and critical about things, not just the products they buy. We note the flaws in everything everywhere, wherever we go. We are always looking, "Well I hate this paint color. I wish they would have done it in a blue shade rather than the green." It does not matter what the situation is. We are just constantly looking for things to criticize.
Not that the surveys have made us that way. We are that way normally with our human nature. But these things have suddenly trained us to look for things we do not like and complain about it. Coming back to the surveys, have you ever read the comments section under products like on amazon.com or whatever? Some of them are really funny. With some of them it is like, "I can't believe this person said that," you know that kind of response there. Things like this: "My supposedly new iPhone arrived with a one millimeter scratch on the case. I want an exchange or a full refund." You cannot even see it. Most people put a cover over it and you would not ever see the little one millimeter scratch. Or the environmental ones: "Oh, your packaging is unsustainable. Don't you know how long those things stay in a landfill? They never rot. They never disintegrate." Or this is a pretty common one: "I will never use your tech support again. The tech had the gall to ask me if my device was plugged in." The way we murmur and complain about these things, we sound like Israelites and I guess it comes naturally.
Now we in God's church know that learning to make correct judgments and evaluations is vital. It is vital to our Christian growth. But instead of asking us to evaluate a product or even other people, God asks us to turn the glaring light of inspection on ourselves and answer truthfully and realistically about what we see. He wants us to seek out our flaws. He wants us to admit those flaws, at least to ourselves, and to repair them ourselves with His help, not making that same mistake again.
What He does is He asks us, as we go through this Christian life, to do the hard work of quality control over ourselves, to find the flaws, to inspect them, to admit them, and to correct them. That is what He wants us to do.
Now, if you would please turn to II Corinthians the 13th chapter, verse 5. Many of you probably know exactly where I am going here. You can call this a memory scripture. We need to remember this is written to the Corinthian church. The Corinthian church is a church that is renowned for its flaws. They had a lot of problems. Paul had to deal with them. So in this context of the Corinthian church, a church that had sins coming out the wazoo, you might say, of various kinds, he commands them to analyze themselves. So here we go.
II Corinthians 13:5 Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Prove yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you are disqualified.
Let us pick this verse apart just a little bit. Paul uses here two similar words for this self-evaluation process. They are the words in English "examine" and "prove" or in the King James, "test." But these are Greek words obviously, peirazo and dokimazo. Now, ironically, and I do not know how this happened, at least this is the way I read the definitions of these two Greek words, the English translation gets the words backwards. They are very similar. But one has a definition that means test or prove and the other one has a definition that means examine, but they flip them for some reason and I have not figured that out yet.
Peirazo means to make a trial of and that is the first word that they have translated as examined. So that means to make a trial of, to test. While dokimazo, which is the word "prove" a little bit later in the verse, more correctly means "to examine" or "to scrutinize" or "to inspect," "to decide upon after examination," "to judge," "distinguish," or "discern." So they kind of got them flipped back and forth and like I said, I do not know why, although one of the reasons may be that dokimazo can also mean "to try" or "to test." So maybe they thought, "Well, one or the other. What what does it matter?" But I think they actually should go the other way around.
Either way Paul urges us to take on the mental and physical task of analysis of ourselves. Both examining ourselves to see what what are like, what our character is like, what our behavior is like, and putting ourselves to the test. Often we think of God putting us to the test or situations, experiences, putting us to the test. But here he says, put yourself to the test. The object, as he goes on to say in this verse, is determining whether Christ is in us. That is what we really have to figure out. Is Christ in you? "Do you not know yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you?" Are you aware, are you seeing proof? Are you convicted or assured that Jesus Christ is in you—unless you are disqualified, he goes on to say. And then at that point you would not have any idea because you would not have the Holy Spirit to teach you and inform you about these things.
So do we see the mind of Christ in our thinking? Would Christ think your thoughts? Do you see the words of Christ in your speech? Would Christ say the things that you do? Do we see Christ's behavior in our actions and activities? Would He do what we do? Do we see His character increasing in us? How much do others see Christ in our witness? Are we aware of Christ's presence in us and in our lives? Do we see Him working within us? Does it show—at all? Or do we just look like the world? That is something we have to determine. That is part of the analysis of the self.
These are some tough questions to ask ourselves. We probably fail on most of them because we are human. We are sinful. We still have human nature. We are trying, but we fail an awful lot. But we have an innate aversion to these questions, to this kind of self-criticism due to that human nature that we have. And human nature at its base always wants to cast itself in the very best light, even to ourselves. So this leads to a great deal of self-deception. Our human nature will see a flaw and immediately figure out some way to present it in a positive light to ourselves.
So, owing to our nature's incessant efforts at self-deception, we really cannot see ourselves as others see us, or really as we really are, we do not really know what we are like because our human nature is always shading things towards good, this self-deceptive way. So when we see flaws in ourselves, if we are not really thinking things through, we tend to give ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We tell ourselves, it is just a one time thing. This is not a character flaw. This is just a weakness. It is only temporary. I will get over this soon. It is really not that bad. I am not out of control. I can quit anytime I want. It is not something that is going to linger. It is just some way we justify ourselves or we diminish our responsibility for those flaws because we want to make ourselves look good.
We readily excuse our sinfulness. Judge ourselves as better than we actually are. Actually, we judge ourselves to be quite a bit better than we actually are because we want to see ourselves at the top of the pyramid, at least in our own mind. So we often come out of our self-evaluations smelling like the proverbial rose, not the trash that we actually do smell like in terms of our character. And that just comes from living in this world.
Obviously today we are going to consider self-evaluation because Passover is coming up and it is a necessary part of our pre-Passover preparations. However, I am going to take what may seem to be a little bit of a strange angle on this. We are going to look at self-evaluation through the lens of the patriarch Job and his struggles under God's test of his character.
Now obviously, I will admit this, I will stipulate it right here at the beginning, his experience was extreme. And despite that, his story stands as an illustration of what happens in the life of every called-out Christian, maybe more, maybe less, most likely less because Job was a very righteous and virtuous man. He could take more. God knows our abilities in terms of how we can resist temptation and whatnot. But we go through similar types of things on occasion in our lives. Because God is trying to mold our character into the image of Jesus Christ and sometimes He has to take these kind of measures to get us back on the right track.
What we are going to do here is I am going to introduce Job, give you a short introduction and summary of Job. I will not go through it in any depth, but I want to us to begin with a solid background of what is happening in the book of Job and then we can go from there. I will tell you right now, we will only get through the first two chapters today. I do not plan to go through this verse by verse, maybe not even passage by passage, just what applies. But we have got to get several things down firmly in our minds, at least in this first sermon, because they are very important for us to understand this topic in terms of Job and what it is teaching us. You might as well turn back to Job. We will be there for the the rest of the sermon except for maybe one or two verses elsewhere.
Job is a fascinating Old Testament book, both from a literary standpoint and from a spiritual standpoint. I kind of think of it, even though it has a very different genre, a very different way of getting across material, that it is very much like the book of Hebrews in the New Testament. And while they vary a great deal, these two books, Job and Hebrews, Job is like Hebrews in terms of its depth and complexity. To put it another way, scholars have the same kind of perspective on Job as they have on Hebrews, that it is full of a lot of deep things, the deep things of God. And they are still trying to figure things out about those two books because it is just fascinating the way the author of Job puts things.
It is a very simple story, the story we all know, we could probably all, if I quizzed you, you could tell me how the story of Job goes. And it has some very easily-grasped principles. They are right there, they are lying on the surface, and we can pick them out and quote the verses. Yet it simultaneously touches on things that are way, way beyond what we normally consider Old Testament theology. Like I said, the deep things of God.
I was talking about this to Beth after I told her a few of the things I was finding out here, and she said, "Yeah, it's like Ezekiel wading out into the river. And, you know, it only comes to his ankles and then it comes to his knees and then it covers his thighs and he takes another step and suddenly he's flailing in the water because it's completely over his head." And that is kind of how Job is too. You can approach it in very simple ways and get a lot out of it. But there is so much more that is under the surface and you can drown (not literally), under the amount of really deep stuff that is in the book of Job. Sometimes it seems like it just touches on them and goes, but it is setting you up for things that happen later in the book. And it is just fascinating.
Another thing that is fascinating about it is that it speaks of ancient events, uses archaic language, yet it is up to date, it is very eternal. (That just does not work.) But it is eternal in the way that approaches things. And you can tell after reading it that this is instruction not to the world, this is instruction to the elect. It is a book that is very much focused on those people who have faith in God, who believe in God. You could even call them the culled-out ones, ones that have already had a relationship with God and are at a place where they need to take the next step. They have been around for a while. They have shown that they believe, that they are righteous, they are trying to do what God wants them to do, but there is more.
It is that like they have hit a wall and they cannot get through, and God opens the door to this explosion of understanding that you see at the end of Job. Job does not tell you what he understands, but he says, "Ah, now I get it." and he steps through the wall and his spiritual state then climbs more towards perfection what he realizes at the end of the book.
The book of Job has so many layers and holds so many mysteries that scholars have a difficult time deciding what it means. And part of the problem there is lack of the Holy Spirit, but it is just a fuller book than we normally tend to look at it as. Now, among these mysteries that I mentioned is that no one knows who wrote it. No one knows when it was written. I mean, if one knew who or when it is likely we would have a pretty good guess about the other question. If we knew one of the answers to those things, we could probably figure out the other.
If we knew that it was written when Israel came out of Egypt, then we would have a pretty good idea that Moses wrote it. And that is the traditional way of approaching this question—that Moses wrote this during either his 40 years in Midian or in his 40 years out in the wilderness with the Israelites. The reason why Midian is part of the thinking there is that, well, he had 40 years. You could compose something like this in that time, but this might be a story that he had heard in Media because the story of Job takes place in a fairly nearby area. But there is no proof. That is just the traditional understanding that it was Moses that wrote it.
Modern conservative scholars tend to place the writing, because of certain things they think they see in the text, down sometime during the Davidic dynasty. So this would place it another four, five, six hundred years down the line. And some suppose that because Solomon was such a wise man, he wrote things like Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs and obviously Proverbs, that he had the literary chops to do something like this. So they say, Solomon wrote it. Again, no proof whatsoever. These are just guesses from various little bits of evidence they find in the book.
Critical scholars, these are usually progressive, more liberal scholars like to say it was written by successive authors or editors, who compiled all these things and edited and wrote over and did all kinds of stuff and it did not reach its final stage until after the Jews were in Babylon. So that would put in the time frame of the later prophets like Malachi, Zechariah, and those sorts. But all of them are guesses. We have to come out of it saying we do not know who wrote it or when.
Now, internally, if you read the book and see the facts there, it reflects a time when Israel had very little influence over Canaan—the Promised Land—or Transjordan, over the Jordan, the area of Gilead, Amon, Moab, Edom. Because if you look in the book of Job, you do not see Israelites. I do not know if you ever realized that, but that is the fact of it. Commentators often place it vaguely in the time of the Patriarchs. They do not give you a time, they say it is probably sometime between Abraham and Moses. But who knows? But they will say it seems like it comes after Jacob and Esau, because obviously, there are plenty of Edomites that are specifically mentioned in the book. So that would have to be after Esau. But because there are no Israelites in the book, it was probably written sometime before the Israelites left Egypt and really came on the scene. So that would put it, let us say, between 1600 and 1400 BC. Somewhere in there.
Like I said, it does not mention Israel at all. It does not mention Israel's history, it does not mention Israel's culture, it does not mention any Israelite people or places or things. Israel is not in the book. Israel's God is the main part of the book, but Israel itself is not. So we have God in the book a lot, it His name that is probably close to, I am going to say, 200 times in the book, just a little bit below that. And He is talking with Job, talking with the three friends, Elihu and all those. God is very much involved in this book, but He is never identified as Israel's God. He is either just Elohim, which is 118 times in the book. Yahweh 33 times. Shaddai, the Almighty, He is mentioned in that way 31 times. And probably one you do not know, a name that you do know what it stands for in English, but you do not, maybe, know the Hebrew word. It is Ose, which is maker, pronounced Ah-sa. That is four times.
So there is nothing to connect Him with Israel in this book, which is a mystery. Is not the Bible, the Old Testament, all about Israel and Israelites and Jews and free Israelites of the line of Shem? Well, yeah, but not Job. Job is different. So what we can take from that is that Job is so different in this area that it indicates a more universal application of divine theology, if you will (that is kind of a redundancy), of what God is trying to teach. It is more universal and maybe even pushes up against some pretty deep New Covenant theology. That is why a lot of commentators will say, "Well, this concept appears in the New Testament. Here it is, found in Job, but it is almost out of place here. It should be in the New Testament." And I think they are right in that sense, that they are looking at New Covenant theology rather than simple Old Covenant theology. Now we know they have the same basis, but the New Covenant is so much superior to the Old. But these ideas and themes that are in Job seem to fit more the New Covenant than the Old. So it makes Job special because of some of these concepts.
Now, geographically, the book's events seem to take place somewhere east of the Jordan and that is about as good as we can do in trying to pinpoint where it belongs. It is somewhere in Moab, Edom, maybe Midian or in northwestern Arabia somewhere, but we just do not know. At least a couple of Job's friends are designated as Edomites and Edom was a place that was renowned for its wise men. You would not have gotten that from Esau, you know, giving away things for pots of stew and such. But evidently some of his children were quite wise, considered very wise in the East.
Job himself cannot be placed except for the fact that he is from the land of Uz and that might be in northern Arabia. Perhaps somewhere along the middle of the curve of the Fertile Crescent, as you get up towards the north from Babylon, you go up toward Haran and then you come back down into Canaan. And as you get up towards the north on the Canaanite side, that seems to be about where it is supposed to take place, somewhere where the Aramean culture and the Edomite culture met. Somewhere in there, but not so far north as Damascus. I mean, it is really hard to place where this might have taken place. So generally it was east of Israel, somewhere in modern Jordan.
I do want to mention something on this fact that it was east. It is always thought of as east of Canaan, or east of Jerusalem, east of where the Israelites were. Remember the principle that when you go east, you are going away from God. Let me give you a couple of scriptures on that: Genesis 3:24 when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden, they went to the east, the cherubim was placed in the east so that they could not get back. And when Cain killed his brother, God sent him away and he went east into the land of Nod.
That idea that we are away from Jerusalem, away from where God has placed His name, shows that these people—Job and his three friends—were living out in the world. They believed a lot of the right stuff. Job, of course, was a converted man. I am not sure about the three friends but they were people, Gentiles, as we would call them, who believed in the God of Israel and they had some very deep theology and were believers. So it adds another layer here, that this book kind of belongs in the New Testament, not the Old, but it is about believing Gentiles. So we will leave that there for now.
Here is another good one. The name Job is Iyyob in Hebrew. It is a Semitic name. So he was obviously a Semite, not an Israelite. And the best modern guess as to its meaning is, now listen to this, "where is my father?" or you can add the word divine in there, "where is my divine father?" Because most people think it is a theistic name, that it refers to God. They used a lot of those way back then putting a "yah" at the end or baal or something, and those words added to a name, put God in the middle of it, or a Lord, that is what baal means. And so it was the parents trying to say something about the child, giving him a name that has God in it. And many people think that Iyyob, meaning "where is my divine father" is a plea for God for help, for God to help or to God for help. That it would be like a blessing, if you will, that the parents would put on the child to direct the child and to ask God to give him help. Where is my divine father? Well, obviously, you want the answer to be "right here helping."
So knowing this as you do now as a reader of the book of Job, you should know instantly and be able to connect it that this story about this Iyyob, "where is my father?" is about a man who turns to God for aid and answers. It is part of his name, that is what he does. He looks for God. Or turn it around, if you are of a cynical nature, you could say perhaps it is about one who questions God and complains to Him because He is not helping him. You can go both ways. Now, the most righteous Man who ever lived had basically Job's name as one of His final words. "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" "Where is My divine Father" when He was full of mankind's sin as He hung there suffering crucifixion. I think that is a neat connection and put it in the back of your mind because I see a lot of types of Christ in Job and here is one in his name—where is my divine father and My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Because that is kind of how Job felt when he was going through all that excruciating pain and humiliation.
Now there is another idea about what Iyyob means and this comes because it is very similar to a Hebrew word, ayyob, and ayyob and Iyyob sound very much alike. That word ayyob means "to hate." So they think Iyyob means hated or persecuted. That is another one that fits. I do not think it fits quite as well spiritually as the other one because certainly Satan hated and persecuted Job. He was a hated and persecuted one and some, like Job's so-called friends, may have thought his wretched condition suggested that God hated and persecuted him because of his sins. So both work. I just happen to prefer the one where it means "where is my divine Father?"
The book itself separates into three major parts. There is a short prologue which is as far as we will get today. That is only two chapters. There is a long dialogue after that that runs 39 chapters. Most of the book is in the dialogue. There are about 30 speeches in that section, whether it is Job, one of his three friends, whether it is Elihu, whether it is God. They are all in that section and they are making speeches, some answering what has just come before, some bringing up new things to consider. And finally, the third one is another short epilogue. We had the short prologue, now we have a short epilogue at the end. It is only one chapter long, chapter 42.
Now in terms of the Hebrew in the book of Job, it is quite difficult. Again, like Hebrews has this difficult Greek, Job has difficult Hebrew. And the reason it is difficult is because Job contains more of what are called hapax legomenon. It is a scholarly word, and it is just a fancy word that means the word appears only once. So there is a lot of Hebrew words that are only in Job—and only once in Job—and so trying to understand what they mean by comparing them is a difficult thing to do.
So, translators, when they come upon a word that is only once in the Old Testament and they do not have any idea within Hebrew of how it should translated, they have to go to a cognate language like Arabic or one of the other Semitic languages to try to figure it out. And that is a dicey proposition sometimes because words drift over time so what they might mean now or what they might mean in another culture might not be the exact thing that the author was trying to get across and it just might not work. So there are a lot of times if you look in the margin, they will be telling you it could be this, it could be that, we are not sure here, the Septuagint says this, and so we have to be a little bit careful about some of the translations because they might have picked the wrong meaning among several.
Even though it has this problem, we might say, its inclusion into the Old Testament canon was never a problem at all, had never been questioned. It was there, it was always there, and everybody accepted it without thinking that there was anything wrong even though it did have these problems. It has always been considered a book of wisdom. It has always been placed in what is called The Writings, part of the Old Testament that in the New Testament Jesus called it the psalms. There are several books that are like psalms: Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Ruth, Esther. Those were all part of The Writings and this fits right at the top of those. It has always been within the top three of The Writings, along with Psalms and Proverbs. So in our Bibles, it is Job, Psalms, Proverbs. It has gone up to first place as we move from the historical books into The Writings as our Bibles are constructed.
People from way, way back have understood that this is an important book. It needs to be among the first ones that we read in this section because it lays down some important principles. As for the New Testament quoting Job, strangely it is not quoted all that much, which I find to be a little bit surprising because of its content. But Paul directly quotes Job only twice, and no one else does. He quotes it in Romans 11:35 and in I Corinthians 3:19. James is the only one who mentions Job by name in James 5:11. He uses him as an example of hupomone, or patience, perseverance, or endurance. Obviously that is what he was, to go hear, to go listen to all those speeches while he was in severe pain and all that, he was a man with a great deal of perseverance.
So from a New Testament point of view, from the first century church point of view, the church did not have any problem with the book of Job either. They did not consider it an aberration. I do not know how much they understood some of these mysteries and problems. I am sure they did understand them. I am sure Paul did. He was a very intellectual and wise man and he would have understood some of these things. But he accepted it and quoted it so I have no problem with the book of Job either.
Let us read the first verse of the book of Job. This gives you almost everything you need to know.
Job 1:1 There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil.
Boy, would you not like to have that said about you? Not that you came from the land of Uz, but all those other nice things that are said there about Job. "Blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil." Right away we get an idea that this man was something special. Have you ever heard a teacher, maybe in those dark ages of your past, saying, "Never skip the prologue. The prologue always contains necessary things for your understanding of the book." Well, that advice applies in spades to Job. If you do not read any other part of the prologue, the first verse is enough, I think. But there are other things there that we should also get.
Knowing that Job is talked about in these terms should set you up for everything else in the book because the prologue here is the necessary background and set up to the meat of the book. And you know, throughout the lengthy dialogue and all that occurs there, the rest of the book does not dispute, change, anything that it says about Job in this first verse. From the beginning of the book to the end, Job is blameless and upright, and fears God and shuns evil. His character does not change in this book. It actually gets better by the time you get to the end. This is something you really need to know. This is a character sketch of the man Job and God puts His stamp on it—that he was blameless and upright, and he feared God and he shunned or rejected evil. So, this is Job. This is what we are working with. A man of sterling character.
Let us go to Ezekiel 14, just for a moment. We are going to read verse 14 and then verse go down to verse 20 This is a section where God promises to judge Israel and He says in verse 13, He stretched out His hand against it and cut off its supply of bread. He will send famine. Then He says in verse 14,
Ezekiel 14:14 "Even if these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they would only deliver themselves by their righteousness," says the Lord God.
Notice who is saying this? The Lord God is saying that the three righteous men that came to My mind were Noah, Daniel, and Job. That is a pretty good triumvirate there. Then He says in verse 20, saying that He would send pestilence on the land.
Ezekiel 14:20 "even though Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, as I live," says the Lord God, "they would deliver neither son nor daughter, they would only deliver themselves by their righteousness."
So Job is in good company here of the righteous of the Old Testament. We have to keep this in mind. Not only does God here in the book of Job consider him blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil, but afterward, in the time of Ezekiel, which was somewhere in the 1,000 years later category, He has the same judgment. He is a righteous man, among the three most righteous that came to mind when He was giving that prophecy to Ezekiel. We are dealing with a man of high, high integrity, high character.
I have said it 15 times already. Notice how the author puts these words. He was blameless and upright. Now in Hebrew, this is literally complete and straight. Job was complete and straight. That is high praise! Do you feel complete in your righteousness? If the plumb line were put next to you, would you be straight? We all probably consider ourselves incomplete and crooked. Unlike Job, where the author and later God Himself lets us know that he was complete. He had come to a certain point where he had done pretty much all he could to grow in righteousness. I mean, this is where we want to be when we die, complete and upright, and here Job about halfway through his life was already to this point.
This phrase, complete and straight or blameless and upright, describes absolute integrity. He was completely honest and he did what he knew to be right in every instance. He never wavered. He did not give in to weakness. He did not play the situation ethics game. He knew what was right, he had been taught by God, and if God says this certain thing was right, he did it. If He said that it was wrong, he did not do it.
Next, it says he feared God and he shunned evil. This describes his goodness. He was devout and he worshipped God with his whole heart. And he was moral. He always rejected, I think the word shun is a little bit too weak here, he rejected outright what was wrong. So a paragon of virtue here. As I said, it was absolute integrity in this man. Turn Job 28. These ideas come out here.
Job 28:28 "And to man He [God] said, 'Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding.'"
Now, with this verse added, he is not only blameless and upright, fears God and shuns evil, but now we get the bigger terms "wise" and he was "understanding" because of these qualities. He had a two-pronged approach to life, do what God says and wholly reject what God says is sinful, and this was a wise and understanding way to conduct life, and Job did that. The bottom line, what we have here about Job in the very first verse, is that Job was truly above approach. You could not nail him for sin. Boy, would you not like to be in that position?
This has repercussions in the nearly 30 speeches that come in the dialogue later on. And this idea in the very first verse, it preempts the three friends' argument. They had one basic argument throughout the whole dialogue in that they kept telling Job, "You must have sinned. If you're sitting in an ash heap with boils all over you, you must have done something wrong." And Job keeps saying, "I haven't." And he goes through this litany of things that he has done or not done, and he keeps upholding his own integrity because they were telling him to lie. They were saying, "There must be some evil in you." He was saying, "No, I haven't done it." So, right here in the first verse, we are getting this idea that there was nothing to curse Job for. He was morally upright. He was a very good man, not being punished for sin because he did not sin in the normal sense.
So his righteousness was genuine. And it is essential to understanding the book to acknowledge this fact that Job was righteous. Job was complete and straight, or upright.
I do want to make a bit of a warning here. This does not mean that Job was sinless or that he was perfect. It does not mean that he could do no wrong. It means that he was just about as righteous as a mortal man can be. He had very little more to go to be perfectly righteous, if I can put it in that way. He had flaws but he was working on them. If we would go down and read we would see that he gave sacrifices for sin, for his sons and his daughters just in case. And you can assume that he was doing the same thing for himself. That he was sacrificing, he was coming before God and admitting his flaws, working them out. He was repenting of those things that he saw in himself that was not good. But he was getting ever more perfect day in and day out.
He was, as it said in the first verse, complete. So he sought God continually for forgiveness, correction. And as I mentioned, he gave the sacrifices. This shows that he was already acting as a priest for his family. There is another type of Christ, just to throw that out at you. But, bottom line, he was about as good and innocent as a man can be in this life.
Let us read Job 1. We are going to go down to verse 6, we will read down through verse 12, and then we will pick it up again in verse 20.
Job 1:6-12 Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord. and Satan [the Adversary] also came among them. And the Lord said to Satan, "From where do you come?" So Satan answered the Lord and said, "From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it." [Kind of flippant, is it not?] Then the Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?" [Here is the first time where God verifies that what was said in the first verse is correct.] Satan answered the Lord and said, "Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not made a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But now, stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face!" And the Lord said to Satan, "Behold, all that he has is in your power; only do not lay a hand on his person." So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord.
And he did all the terrible things that are written there from verse 13-19, where his children were killed and all his possessions were taken away.
Think about what your reaction would be if suddenly all your children died in a moment and all your property was gone and you did not have a penny to your name. What would you think?
Job 1:20-22 Then Job arose [after he had been told these things], and tore his robe, and shaved his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped. [The first part was understandable, that he went into immediate deep mourning, but not the worship part.] And he said, "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." In all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong.
Amazing reaction.
This passage highlights God's perspective of Job. He pleased with the man! He calls him His servant, very much loved servant. He was delighted in Job and his character and He was willing to bet on him against Satan. Talk about complete and straight. "I'll put Job up against the Adversary and Job is going to come out winning," is what God said. Even against the worst that Satan could do. I mean, we have got to think forward here. He not only bet on him when Satan took away his children and his possessions, but also when he touched his person in the next bit in chapter 2, God was still willing to say, "My bet's on Job." So He was very confident in the man's character. He knew it would hold.
I am getting even more Christ type vibes here thinking of Matthew 4 and Luke 4, the temptation of Christ by Satan. Again, a godly man was put up against Satan and who lost? Not the godly Man. Satan slunk away. Jesus in that situation said, "Get behind Me! Get out of here." And Satan obeyed. Christ did not buckle, Satan buckled. Give you some more things to think about as we go through this.
Job is a paragon of virtue. His family and property are lost and he falls to his knees and worships God and blesses His name. It is hard to fathom being able to do that, not bringing God into account even inside your head personally, privately. Could we have done what Job did? Could you have said, "Blessed be the name of the Lord for all this terrible stuff that's just happened to me." And it is very plain in verse 22 that there was no sin on his part, his integrity was maintained through the whole process.
Let us read verse 21 again.
Job 1:21 And he said, "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."
This is another key to understanding the whole book. What we see here is that Job has a good understanding of God's sovereignty, that His will reigns supreme. He can do whatever He wants with His creatures. That God's purpose will stand and Job understands that he is a creature and God is the Creator. So he must accept what God has done to him. He is lowly, God is infinitely good and knows a lot more than he does. He cannot dispute God's providence. He can take away his life at any time. He can take away any life at any time as Creator and Provider. He knows that he does everything to bring glory to His name. And it is a man's duty to bless and praise God even in situations that bring us to our knees, make us mourn, or what have you. However we judge it to be. So, Job knows all this and believes it. It is part of his complete spirituality that was mentioned there in Job 1:1.
So it is not simple to figure out what Job's problem was. When we finally get to chapter 42, we see something there that gives us an inkling of what Job learned. But it is not an easy thing because it is one of those deep things of God. Just remember, Job was complete and upright.
But I want to say that maybe the best way we can understand where Job was at this time in terms of his understanding of sovereignty, is that right now, at this point, right after this tragedy happened, his understanding of God's sovereignty is mostly intellectual, if I can put it that way. He knows what he should do, he knows what is right. But there are things that he does not grasp quite yet about God's sovereignty and how much control God has and how much He is working out something so much vaster than any human mind can understand. And so he reacts in a very good way but it is not the bone deep way quite yet. It is very hard to understand because these are very high principles that we need to really think through.
Here in chapter 1, his intellectual understanding of God's sovereignty has been tested at a slight remove, meaning that it had not come to his person, but it was one remove away. It was his property, it was his children. A little bit easier to take when it is just a little bit further away and not affecting one's person completely. I know it is very slight remove there because we would be devastated if our children were killed like this, where all our property was taken away. But Satan understood and that is why he comes back to God again in the next chapter that there was more that could be done to see if Job was going to crack.
So, this tragedy has happened at a slight remove and his belief is still staunch, still solid, and God verifies this as chapter 2 opens because He uses the very same wording about Job's righteousness in the second instance. It says in chapter 3, verse 3, that despite what Satan had done to him at this point, Job still holds fast to his integrity. So he passed this first test with flying colors.
Chapter 2, we are going to go all the way down to verse 9 and 10. So Satan comes back to God and says, "Skin for skin," a man will give all he has if you touch his life, touch his very person. God says, "Okay, do what you can, just don't kill him." And so Satan "struck Job with painful boils," it says there in verse 7, "from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head." Then he leaves the house, goes to the ash heap, and begins scraping himself.
Job 2:9-10 Then his wife said to him, "Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!" But he said to her, "You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?" In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
What we have here, he started there in verse 9 with Job's wife's words, and they inform us as we get into the dialogues, that at this point, Job is truly alone in his faith. Everybody has deserted him. He no longer has children and even his wife is telling him to curse God and die. What she says is, "Enough is enough! What good has your integrity done for you? Just put an end to this humiliation." Obviously, to her, I am sure she had some selfish motivation for saying this. She sees death as the only good outcome for Job. And so she is saying, "Tit for tat. If God has cursed you like this Job, well, you go ahead and curse Him and die. He will surely strike you down."
Now this attitude about good and evil and reward and punishment—that you are rewarded for good and you are punished for evil—is another foreshadowing of Job's friends' argument in the dialogue. They are going to come at him and say, "First, obviously look at those painful boils all over your body from tip to toe, and God obviously has cursed you for some sort of sin." Well, this is a common belief among a lot of religions, most of humanity believes this, that if you are good, you are going to be blessed, if you are bad of some kind, you are going to be cursed, you are going to have misfortune of some sort.
But this does not apply to God's elect. This good, blessing; bad, cursing thing, it does not apply to God's elect because God's elect have God. They have the Holy Spirit and things are happening in their lives beyond any kind of natural consequence of things. God is intervening in their lives and giving them blessing or cursing for different reasons. He has got a different goal in mind. So you might be blessed or whatever it is that God wants to help you to understand or grow in character towards. So you are blessed, but He could also curse for the same reason, to try to get you to understand the same principle. He will do whatever He needs to do to bring you to the character image of Jesus Christ.
And so the elect are pulled out of the world and they are pulled out of these natural consequences to a certain degree because God is working in their lives. This is something that the three friends, the wife, just about everybody in the world did not understand about Job's situation. This was not something occurring just because he had been sinful or evil. It occurred because God did it! You know that Job was complete and straight, he was upright. He was a man of sterling character. He had his integrity, it was excellent, sterling character. So one of the big principles that comes into play here is that God, in the lives of the elect, has reached down and entered into their lives and all bets are off. He can do what He will with us to bring us to the point He wants us, that is, as His sons and daughters in His Kingdom.
We cannot come at this from the perspective of worldly wisdom or worldly understanding. This is off-the-charts divine wisdom that we are talking about in the life Job. The important thing the reader is told as the prologue ends here at the end of chapter 2, is that Job rejects her advice. I am not going to go into the three friends here right at the end, but we need to understand this. This is very important to our understanding of the book that she says, "Curse God and die." He says, "No, you're a fool if you think that." He says it a lot nicer, "You're like one of the foolish women who speak." He is saying, to take it out of the literary way it is said here, he says, "Woman, you lack discernment on this. I'm not going to listen to you because you do not understand what's going on here." And then he essentially repeats at the end of verse 10 what he said in chapter 1, verse 21, that God is sovereign. "Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?"
We are God's creatures and as the elect we are even more God's creatures, if you will, and He can do what He wants with us to bring us to the point that He wants us to get to—the Kingdom of God. So He allows us to go through both good and bad times and we have to accept them, whichever one they are, and He wants us to learn from them. What Job says is not wrong, it is not sin, it is the truth.
So, we have come to the end of the prologue. The dialogue is just about to begin, the first speech, and what we have seen here at this point, Job is sitting in an ash heap, that is, that he is in the city dump, scraping himself all over because he hurts. It helps him to scrape himself with a potsherd, gives him some bit of relief. But even at this stage, Job's integrity and righteousness are intact. So he has passed the second test, but his actual real test is just beginning with all the arguments that come flying in at him and he gets more and more and more depressed, confused, uncertain because in these dialogues, he and the others are trying to think things through. They are rationalizing all the time. And I will not go any further than that.
But trying to put what he is going through into words is where the dialogues come into play and we see them hashing this out. But Job has maintained his integrity.
Let us conclude. What have we learned? Overall, we learned that Job does not have an integrity problem. He is still righteous. God is pleased with him. He points out his perseverance in faith in chapter 42, verses seven and eight. But God says twice there that Job spoke what is right about Him, about God. So, Job's problem is not sin, per se. It is not about commandment breaking. Job did not have a problem with that. He was not sinning by breaking the Ten Commandments, but he is missing the mark in some way, which is what the rest of the book goes into. How was Job missing the mark? What did Job not quite understand yet?
Remember, I said this was all in terms of self-evaluation. That is the title of my sermon, "Job and Self-Evaluation, Part One." We learned then in terms of self-evaluation, the issue is not always about our sin. That is, whether we are breaking a certain commandment or not. Hopefully we are all beyond that, that we have got a pretty good grasp of the Big Ten. Hopefully we are there. We are not lying, we are not stealing, we are not hating and killing, committing adultery, we are giving God His due, those sorts of things. You probably have trouble with some of them.
But at this point in our spiritual lives we should be over those more blatant sins. But sometimes in our self-evaluation, we find out that it is our attitude, our perspective, or our approach to something that stinks to high heaven because we fail to see something spiritually vital in a proper way.
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