THIS WEEK’S READINGS

Jan 4: Job 1-5
Jan 5: Job 6-9
Jan 6: Job 10-13
Jan 7: Job 14-16
Jan 8: Job 17-20
Jan 9: Job 21-23
Jan 10: Job 24-28
Jan 11: Job 29-31

NOTES ON JOB 1-28

• Join me Wednesday, January 6, at 5:15 PM in the Althouse Room when I will overview the whole Bible’s story in about 30 minutes.  This will help prepare you for your Bible reading.
• Weeks 2 and 3 are going to test your resolve to read through the Bible.  Not all the parts of the Bible are equally interesting to a modern reader.  Sometimes you read and think, “Now why did the Holy Spirit think all this was so important?’
• Reading Job (rhymes with “globe,” not with “knob”) is like that – at least for me.  The first couple of chapters and the last few chapters tell a great story.  In between are long speeches in the form of poems.
• The reason Job comes so early in our chronological reading is that its setting is very early in the Bible – about the same time as Abraham. 
• The story of Job is timeless and wrestles with the same question we ask now – why do bad things happen to good people?  Job is an extraordinarily good person, we learn in chapters 1-2.  But what happens to him is worse than terrible.  Why?
• The way to read the long poems is to feel them.  Picture Job sitting on his heap of ashes, scraping away at his painful, itching sores, and grieving the loss of his children and possessions.  His friends are trying to convince him he must have done something terrible to deserve all this, but he knows (and we know, because of the introduction) that isn’t true.
• Pay attention to who’s speaking in each chapter – Job or his friends.  Feel the accusation, defensiveness, sadness, superiority, sarcasm, grief, resignation, and anger (on both sides). 
• What I like to do is write down (maybe you’d rather highlight or underline) memorable one-liners, like these…

o    2:10, Job:  “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”

o    11:6, Zophar:  “Know this: God has even forgotten some of your sin.”

o    16:3, Job:  “What ails you that you keep on arguing?”

·         With well over 200 readers among Corinth members and friends, I’m not going to be able to answer everyone’s questions individually.  Try looking up your questions in a study Bible or posting them on my blog or the Facebook discussion group, talking it out with family, or doing a Google search.  If you can’t find a satisfactory answer elsewhere – let me know.

DEVOTIONAL THOUGHTS

The book of Job unravels prevailing wisdom.  Everyone for generations in Job’s time had agreed that God is just.  He rewards good people and punishes the wicked – in this life.  Nobody sat around and debated whether that was true.  You learned that fact on your Daddy’s knee.  Your Mom reinforced it as she baked the bread.  If you want life to treat you well, do right. If things fall apart, then try to figure out why God is punishing you.  He always has a reason, and the sooner you admit your fault, the quicker things will start to turn around.

Four millennia after Job’s story unfolded, there is a frightening number of believers who still think that’s true.  They may not be as bold and persistent as Job’s in-your-face friends, but they still hold on to the mistaken idea that if God is who I think he is, and I behave like I should, life will keep getting better.

It’s a theory that works really well until it doesn’t.

We certainly see lots of good people who prosper, and we see lots of bad people who go down.  Even when bad people prosper, we figure eventually they will get their due.

But we hardly ever see or talk about the good people who have cancer, are broke, or can’t get a break.  We don’t know what to do with them. 

Four thousand years ago, Job’s story should once and for all have exploded the myth that there are visible, immediate consequences for being good or being bad.

But back to my starting point.  What intrigues me is that EVERYBODY in Job’s time accepted that faulty spiritual logic.  Just like EVERYBODY in twelfth-century western Europe thought it was a good idea to rush Christian armies to the Holy Land and kill Muslims to retake Jerusalem.  And EVERYBODY in the American South in the 1950s thought the right to own slaves was worth fighting for.  OK, not EVERYBODY in any of those cases – but almost.

I actually get more suspicious when a particular way of thinking is uncritically accepted as common wisdom.  “Don’t mess with success.”  “I just want you to be happy – that’s all that matters.”  “What we need is more tolerance.”  “Might makes right.” 

Be careful when no one questions the prevailing wisdom.  It’s a clue that the wisdom might not prevail.