Job's Family & Friends Responses - Job 2:9 - 37:24

Teacher: Rusty Kennedy
​Series: Bbile Stories

Rusty's Notes

God Allows

• I cannot understand the sovereignty of God.
• “The Chosen” clip

 
JOB 2
9 His wife said to him, “Are you still holding on to your integrity? Curse God and die!”

• This is a lady who lost all her children.
• Now, she is watching her husband suffer.

10 “You speak as a foolish woman speaks,” he told her.

• He did not call her “foolish”.
• Foolish means to be spiritually ignorant or without discernment.
• You can be knowledgeable but not have wisdom.
• Her advice was out of character.
• She knew better than to speak as she did.

Job's response to his wife shows his admirable respect for her and his self-control.
“Should we accept only good from God and not adversity?” Throughout all this Job did not sin in what he said.

• “God is good”.
• In times of severe testing, our first question must not be, “How can I get out of this?” but “What can I get out of this?”
• Though many people today conclude, as Job's wife did, that the reason for suffering is that God is unjust, this is never the reason good people suffer.
• The basis for the relationship between God and man is not retribution, with good deeds resulting in prosperity and evil deeds yielding punishment in this life.
• These two tests of Job reveal much about Satan:
• 1 ) He is accountable to God.
• 2) God knows Satan's thoughts.
• 3) Satan is an accuser of the righteous.
• 4) He knows what is going on in the world and in the lives of individuals, though there is no evidence in Scripture that he can read people's minds.
• 5) He has great power over individuals and nature, but his power is subject to the sovereign authority of God.
• 6) He is not omnipresent, nor omniscient, nor omnipotent.
• 7) He can do nothing without God's permission, and God's permission involves limitations on him.
• 8) God remains aware of what His people are experiencing in connection with Satan's activity.

 
JOB’S THREE FRIENDS
11 Now when Job’s three friends—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite—heard about all this adversity that had happened to him, each of them came from his home. They met together to go and sympathize with him and comfort him.

• Actually, four men came to visit Job, though the writer did not mention Elihu's presence until chapter 32.
• Sufferers attract fixers the way roadkills attract vultures.
• Empathy and sympathy, while related, have distinct meanings.
• Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, while sympathy is feeling sorry for someone's misfortune.
• In essence, empathy involves "feeling with" someone, while sympathy involves "feeling for" them

12 When they looked from a distance, they could barely recognize him.

• They knew he was diseased, so they kept their distance.

They wept aloud, and each man tore his robe and threw dust into the air and on his head.

• Throwing dust over one's head signified identifying with the dead.

13 Then they sat on the ground with him seven days and nights, but no one spoke a word to him because they saw that his suffering was very intense.[1]

• A week was the usual time of mourning for the dead.
• Their commitment to him, as seen in their patient waiting to address him, shows their genuine friendship.
• How many friends do you have that would travel a long distance to visit you in an illness and sit with you silently for seven days out of respect for your pain?
• Wes: Can I get your input this evening or tomorrow on sitting with someone in their grief? A client of mine's wife just died suddenly — him, his family, and the business will need someone to be present with them in their grief.
• Wes: I listen well, and know I offer a caring presence… what to say or what else should I know?
• Rusty: You pretty much know. Number one, be present; number two, shut up; and number three, listen to the Holy Spirit
• Rusty: There is not much you can say to bring comfort at that moment other than just to be there.

 

• Don't try to explain everything; explanations never heal a broken heart.
• If his friends had listened to him, accepted his feelings, and not argued with him, they would have helped him greatly, but they chose to be prosecuting attorneys instead of witnesses.

 

• The prologue of the book (chs. 1—2) sets the stage for what follows by informing us, the readers, that Job's suffering was not due to his sins.
• None of the characters in the story knew this fact except God and Satan.
• The next major part of the book begins with a personal lament in which Job expressed his agony (ch. 3).
• Three cycles of speeches follow in which Job's friends dialogued with him about his condition (chs. 4—27).
• Job then voiced his despair in two soliloquies (chs. 28—31).
• Next, Job's fourth friend, Elihu, offered his solution to Job's suffering (chs. 32—37)

 
JOB 3
The wish that he had not been born (1-10).
The wish that he had died at birth (11-19).
The wish that he could die then (20-26).
24 I sigh when food is put before me,
and my groans pour out like water.
25 For the thing I feared has overtaken me,
and what I dreaded has happened to me.
26 I cannot relax or be calm;
I have no rest, for turmoil has come.[2]

• Have a headache or pain so bad that you can’t concentrate on what needs to be done.
• Pain humbles the proud.
• It softens the stubborn.
• It melts the hard.
• Silently and relentlessly, it wins battles deep within the lonely soul.

 

• Throughout the three cycles of speeches, Job's friends did not change their position.
• They believed that God rewards the righteous and punishes sinners in this life, which is the theory of retribution.
• They reasoned that all suffering is punishment for sin, and since Job was suffering greatly, he was a great sinner.
• They believed that what people experience depends on what they have done (cf. John 9:2).
• While this is true often, it is not the fundamental reason that we experience what we do in life, as the Book of Job proceeds to reveal.
• At the heart of the debate between Job and his three friends is a question, Who is wise?
• Who has the correct insight into Job's suffering?
• Both Job and the friends set themselves up as sources of wisdom and ridicule the wisdom of the other (11:12; 12:1-3, 12; 13:12; 15:1-13).
• As we will see, this question, 'Who is wise?' dominates the whole book."

JOB 4 (Eliphaz the Temanite)
7 Consider: Who has perished when he was innocent?
Where have the honest been destroyed?
8 In my experience, those who plow injustice
and those who sow trouble reap the same.[3]
 
JOB 8 (Bildad the Shuhite)
4 Since your children sinned against him,
he gave them over to their rebellion.
5 But if you earnestly seek God
and ask the Almighty for mercy,
6 if you are pure and upright,
then he will move even now on your behalf
and restore the home where your righteousness dwells.[4]
 
JOB 11 (Zophar the Naamathite)
13 As for you, if you redirect your heart
and spread out your hands to him in prayer--
14 if there is iniquity in your hand, remove it,
and don’t allow injustice to dwell in your tents--
15 then you will hold your head high, free from fault.
You will be firmly established and unafraid.[5]

• As the speeches unfolded, Job's friends became increasingly critical, vicious, and specific in their comments about Job.
• However, they started most pleasantly.
• Let me summarize chapters 4-37 for you:
• Job's friends each emphasized a different aspect of God's character, though they all saw Him as a judge.
• Eliphaz pointed out the distance between God and man, His transcendence (4:17-19; 15:14-16), and stressed God's punishment of the wicked (5:12-14).
• Bildad said that God is just (8:3), great (25:2-3), and that He punishes only the wicked (18:5-21).
• God's inscrutability (His being impossible to understand) impressed Zophar (11:7), who also stated that God punishes the wicked quickly (20:23).
• Eliphaz spoke to Job with the most respect and restraint, Bildad was more direct and less courteous, and Zophar was the most blunt and brutal.
• Eliphaz based his arguments on experience (4:8; 5:3; 15:17), Bildad on tradition (8:8-10), and Zophar on mere assumption or intuition (20:1-5).
• Eliphaz viewed life as a mystic, Bildad as an attorney, and Zophar as a dogmatist.
• Bildad and Zophar picked up themes from Eliphaz's speeches and echoed them with slightly variant emphases (cf. 5:9 and 22:12 with 8:3, 5; 22:2a with 11:7, 11; 15:32-34 with 18:16 and 20:21-22; and 5:14 with 18:5, 6, 18 and 20:26).

 
God gets the last word on Job’s story in chapters 38-42.
 
JOHN 9
1 As he was passing by, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”
3 “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” Jesus answered. “This came about so that God’s works might be displayed in him. 4 We must do the works of him who sent me while it is day. Night is coming when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”[6]

• The disciples did not look at the man as an object of mercy but rather as a subject for a theological discussion.
• It is much easier to discuss an abstract subject like 'sin' than it is to minister to a concrete need in the life of a person.

[1] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Job 2:9–13.
[2] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Job 3:24–26.
[3] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Job 4:7–8.
[4] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Job 8:4–6.
[5] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Job 11:13–15.
[6] Christian Standard Bible (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2020), Jn 9:1–5.