Word & the Wild

INTRO

This is Word and the Wild...a one year Bible adventure with friends. My name is Owen. I'm your host and your guide, and together we are on a 12 month journey as a podcast plus community...where we read the Bible for ourselves, but not by ourselves.

This is WEEK FIVE, my friend. We are about to cross the 30 day mile marker on our little adventure...

This week... Job shows us something amazing about God no thanks to his friends... and God makes good on a promise that's a long time coming...

So... hello and welcome in. And, a special welcome to our Word and the Wild PLUS community members. Their support of this non-profit endeavor is making space for all of us on this Bible reading adventure... and their contributions inside our dedicated online community are making it fun! It was all about Job this week... and some folks even said it was the most helpful conversation they've ever had about his story...

If you'd like to jump into those conversations as well as enjoy other member benefits like our daily reading tracker, nerdy background articles, and other bonus content, then the Word and the Wild PLUS community might be your jam. Learn more in the show notes or over at wordandthewild.com

Speaking of Job... let's pick up his story and wrap it up....

JOB RESOLVE

When you're walking through a time of heartbreak and suffering, it can feel like a long, meandering path through the woods. The kind of path lined with thick trees and few landmarks that leaves you feeling confused and disoriented.

Am I making progress? Am I backtracking? Am I moving at all?

The middle part of the book of Job feels a lot like that.

Job and his friends banter back and forth with philosophical debates and theoretical ideas that make our head spin. Meanwhile, there are big questions on the table we are anxious to resolve. We don't have time for all this drama!

As a story, the book of Job is masterful. It manages to create some of the same feelings of frustration, confusion, and desperation in us, the viewer, as it does in Job himself.

Just like Job, we feel unsettled and ready for it all to be over.

In last week's episode, we walked through the three main characters in the Job story -- Job, of course... Satan, and the LORD.

This week, as your guide, I'm going to offer up some key plot points to keep in mind to help you navigate the dense woods that are Job.

One key is to keep in mind the Big Accusation and the three Big Questions that drive the story.

The Big Accusation comes from none other than the Accuser himself, Satan. At the beginning of the story, Satan throws out a brutal challenge that's aimed at the heart of God. He says, "God, you are only worth loving because of what you do for the people you love. If you stop spoiling your people, they will stop loving you."

That accusation forms one of the three big questions come up in the story. They go something like this:
1. If God is all-powerful and good, then why do good people suffer?
2. Where do we go for information about God? How do we explain his actions?
3. Is the Lord worth knowing for who he is...not just for what he gives.

As Job's life falls apart, his friends enter the conversation. And that's where things begin to unravel.

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When I think of Job's friends Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu... and their advice to Job... my memory drifts back to my grandpa's workshop.

As a kid, my grandpa's workshop was a magical place. He built race cars. The shop smelled like old grease and every piece of equipment in the place could burn you or cut off a finger. In other words, it was awesome.

One of the things I remember about grandpa's shop was a big sign on the wall. The sign originally came from his dad's shop. It was old school. It had a white background with red, hand-painted letters that read:

"God helps those who help themselves, but God pity you if you're caught helping yourself around here."

Makes me laugh every time. That saying.... "God helps those who help themselves"... That's what you call folk wisdom. Home-spun ideas about God that get passed around on Facebook, t-shirts, and Hobby Lobby art. It's sayings like, "When God closes a door, he opens a window." Or, "God doesn't give you more than you can handle." You won't find any of these gems of folks wisdom in the Bible. They just get passed around...and passed off as fact.

How does this tie in with Job's friends? Job's friends deal in folk wisdom. They take ideas about God that have been passed around accepted as truth, but have no bases in reality. It's one thing to hang a funny folk sign in your workshop. It's another think to try to use them to explain why God allows suffering in our world.

And that's exactly what Job's friends try to do. That's the key to understanding what they have to say. At times, it seems like they explain God well. But in the end, they are way off base. At the end of the story, God is very unhappy for the way these guys misrepresent him.

Here's a quick rundown of these friends and their folksy opinions on why Job suffers:

Eliphaz tells us that his source for wisdom about God comes from his own personal mystical experiences. In his version of how God works, "you reap what you sow."

Then there's Bildad. He looks to wisdom passed down from his ancestors for his opinions about God. It's an appeal to tradition. In his view, Job shouldn't worry too much about what he's going through. Because "it all works out in the end."

Then we have Zophar. Zophar draws on common sense and personal experience and sees God more like "Karma". "What goes around comes around."

Last comes Elihu. He gets his wisdom from his conscience and his general observations about God. In his view, Job suffers "for his own good" to keep him from living an immoral life.

Eiphaz, Bildad, Zophar, and Elihu. All folk wisdom. Sounds smart, but it doesn't match up with the truth.

And then, just when we can't take any more of these guys all giving Job a piece of their minds they can't afford to lose... at last...

God himself shows up. And the entire story pivots. And all that folk wisdom disappears from view.

In Job 38:1 it simply says, "Then the Lord answered Job...."

The LORD. This is a huge moment. Let me explain.

For the entire length of the really long conversations between Job and his friends, they give their opinions about God the why behind Job's suffering. Every time they mention God, they use the Hebrew word "Elohim." Elohim is nothing more or less than a generic term that means "deity" or "God." It's a term that can refer to the one true God... the Creator God... or to just a generic idea of God. Kind of like when we talk about "the man upstairs." It's a generic, faceless, and folksy way to talk about "the big guy in the sky."

But, then the LORD shows up. The term LORD is not a generic term for God. It's the Creator God's personal name: YHWH. He is the Person who is the main character of our story. He loves, feels, creates, promises, and pursues.

He is the One Satan accused of not being worth living for who he is and not just for what he gives. And he arrives to set the record straight. No more hearsay and opinions. YHWH himself speaks for himself.

That's the source for truth.

And, Job's response to what the Lord has to say.... Well, it says it all.

And the end of the book, Job makes this simple, amazing statement to summarize all he has been through. He says to the Lord in Job 42:5:

“I had only heard about you before, but now I have seen you with my own eyes”

Thanks to his long walk through intense suffering, Job no longer relies on second-hand accounts of God. He has experienced YHWH for himself. He has seen the LORD with his own eyes.

Is the Lord worth knowing for who he is and not just for what he gives? Job would answer yes.

And through it all, we discover something fascinating about God and what he considers to be the highest good. While folk wisdom makes God out to be a cosmic umpire calling balls and strikes. Or some kind of distant enforcer of karma... That's not God's priority.

It turns out that God's highest good is for Job...and you and me... for us to not merely hear about them second-hand. It's for you to know him... to experience him for yourself.

So, if God truly is good, then God will do whatever he can to persuade you that a personal relationship with Him is your top priority.

Even if he must allow you to walk a winding path of suffering to get there. Suffering presents an opportunity for clarity about God and closeness with God in ways that nothing else can.

That's the story of Job.

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The God who wants to be known... YHWH doesn't leave us to the home-spun folk wisdom of mystical experience and tradition... or the unreliable impressions of common sense.

God moves show up and show himself to the ones he loves. And, often, it's seasons of suffering that provide God the dark and disillusioning

God may be silent. But he isn't still. He's there.... Waiting for the perfect moment to break the silence and move the story forward... toward clarity about who he is, confidence in his plan, and closeness with his heart.

EXODUS

Joseph and Job. These two guys understand what it's like to wait for God's heart to become clear inside of a story filled with pain and suffering.

You know who else has a thing or two to say about waiting out tough times? The children of Israel.

Our walk through the side story of Job filled in some time for us between the end of Genesis and the beginning of Exodus. But, for the generations between Joseph and his brothers, the silent gap between Genesis and Exodus stretched on for years. Centuries, in fact.

That is more than enough time for ignorance and despair to set in.

The ignorance is on the part of the Egyptians

When we ended Genesis, Joseph was a national hero to the Egyptians. But, that was long ago. Joseph's loyalty and the wisdom he displayed from his God have been forgotten.

A new regime has come to power in Egypt. And, with it, comes a new and cynical view of Israel's large and powerful family.

Exodus 1:8 picks up the story....

“a new king came to power in Egypt who knew nothing about Joseph or what he had done. He said to his people, “Look, the people of Israel now outnumber us and are stronger than we are. We must make a plan to keep them from growing even more. If we don’t, and if war breaks out, they will join our enemies and fight against us. Then they will escape from the country.”

So the Egyptians made the Israelites their slaves. They appointed brutal slave drivers over them, hoping to wear them down with crushing labor.”
Exodus 1:8–11

The despair is on the part of the people of Israel. Exodus tells us that...

“the more the Egyptians oppressed them, the more the Israelites multiplied and spread, and the more alarmed the Egyptians became. So the Egyptians worked the people of Israel without mercy. They made their lives bitter, forcing them to mix mortar and make bricks and do all the work in the fields. They were ruthless in all their demands." (1:12-14)

And, if that isn't bad enough, as God continues to grow this chosen people, it paints a dark, deadly target on their back.

The next verse reveals a twisted plot...

"Then Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, gave this order to the Hebrew midwives, Shiphrah and Puah: “When you help the Hebrew women as they give birth, watch as they deliver. If the baby is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.” But because the midwives feared God, they refused to obey the king’s orders. They allowed the boys to live, too.” (Exodus 1:12–17)

In a devilish outburst, Pharaoh resorts to vigilante violence to solve the "Hebrew Problem"... 1:22 says,

"Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: "Throw every newborn Hebrew boy into the Nile River. But you may let the girls live."

This dark turn in the story of God's people isn't a total surprise. After all, God did predict to Abraham that...

But, no one could have predicted just how prejudiced and cruel that 400 years would become. When Pharaoh uses that term "Hebrew" to describe the descendants of Israel, as we have noted before, it's not exactly a compliment. It's a term that highlights "you aren't one of us" "you're not from around here" you're immigrants, strangers, foreigners. You don't belong here.

In this case, their status as outsiders becomes a threat to an insecure Pharaoh. In the political landscape of the time, he needed to crackdown on anyone who might threaten national sovereignty.

And, the people God had chosen to be a blessing to all the nations of the world, now find themselves viewed as a curse in the mind of a powerful, oppressive king.

In the middle of this tense and tragic time. The God who has been silent and still for so long arrives back in the story.

God makes his move. He sends... a baby. And, through that baby, reveals himself in response to the suffering and misery of his people.

We have seen God the Creator. We have seen God the Arbiter of right and wrong. We have seen God, the loyal friend of Joseph and Job.

We are about to meet God, the Rescuer and Defender of the Oppressed. By the time this episode ends, we will never forget our encounter with God the Deliverer.

WRAP & OUTRO

Word and the Wild is a one year Bible adventure with friends.

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And with that, we're out. I'm Owen, I'm your host and your guide. Until next time, I'll see you out there on the trail in the Word and the Wild.