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FEBRUARY 21 — Exodus 4; Luke 7; Job 21; 1 Corinthians 8

THE SECOND SPEECH OF ZOPHAR (JOB 20) brings to a conclusion the second round from the three “miserable comforters.” Job’s response (Job 21) brings the cycle to a close.

If they cannot give him any other consolation, Job says, the least they can do is listen while he replies (21:2). When he is finished, they can continue their mocking (21:3).

The heart of Job’s response is thought-provoking to anyone concerned with morality and justice: “Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?” (21:7). Not only is there no obvious pattern of temporal judgment on the transparently wicked, but all too frequently the reverse is the case: the wicked may be the most prosperous of the lot. “Their bulls never fail to breed; their cows calve and do not miscarry” (21:10). They have lots of healthy children, they sing and dance. While they display total disinterest in God (21:14), they enjoy prosperity (21:13). It is rare that they are snuffed out (21:17). As for popular proverbs such as “God stores up a man’s punishment for his sons” (21:19), Job is unimpressed; the truly wicked do not care if they leave their families behind in misery, provided they are comfortable themselves (21:21). That is why the wicked need to “drink of the wrath of the Almighty” (21:20) themselves—and that is not what usually happens. True, God knows everything; Job does not want to deny God’s knowledge and justice (21:22). But facts should not be suppressed. Once the rich and the poor have died, they face the same decomposition (21:23-26). Where is the justice in that?

Even allowing for Job’s exaggerations—after all, some wicked people do suf- fer temporal judgments—his point should not be dismissed. If the tallies of blessing and punishment are calculated solely on the basis of what takes place in this life, this is a grossly unfair world. Millions of relatively good people die in suffering, poverty, and degradation; millions of relatively evil people live full lives and die in their sleep. We can all tell the stories that demonstrate God’s justice in this life, but what about the rest of the stories?

The tit-for-tat morality system of Job’s three interlocutors cannot handle the millions of tough cases. Moreover, like them, Job does not want to impugn God’s justice, but facts are facts: it is not a virtue, even in the cause of defending God’s justice, to distort the truth and twist reality.

In the course of time it would become clearer that ultimate justice is meted out after death—and that the God of justice knows injustice himself, not only out of his omniscience, but out of his experience on a cross.

FEBRUARY 20 — Exodus 3; Luke 6; Job 20; 1 Corinthians 7

WHEN PAUL BEGINS TO RESPOND to the questions raised by the Corinthians (“Now for the matters you wrote about,” 1 Cor. 7:1), the first thing he treats is marriage, divorce, and related issues (1 Cor. 7). And the first part of his discussion deals with sex within Christian marriage (1 Cor. 7:1-7).

(1) Typical of many of his responses to this divided church, Paul here displays his “Yes . . . but” pastoral sensitivity. “It is good for a man not to marry. But . . . each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband” (7:1-2). “I wish that all men were as I am. But each man has his own gift from God” (7:7). In short, Paul must answer not only their questions but their extremes. Ideally he must do so by bringing the factions together, commending each for whatever light it brings to the subject, while nevertheless helping each side perceive that it does not have all the truth on the matter and is in fact distorting wisdom.

(2) The NIV reads, “It is good for a man not to marry” (7:1). The Greek literally reads: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman.” The NIV translators assume this is a euphemism for marriage. But more recently scholars have shown that this is not the case. Apparently there were Christians in Corinth who advanced an ascetic agenda. Paul is prepared to say there is merit in that perspective: after all, later in the chapter he points out the advantages of being single in gospel ministry. But asceticism is not the only value; indeed, it may become an idol, or a way of disparaging God’s good gifts, or of refusing to recognize the diversity of gifts God bestows on his people. After all, marriage relieves sexual pressure; to deny sexual pressure and cling desperately to celibate asceticism may lead to gross sexual sins (as it often has). The societal answer, biblically speak- ing, is not open sex or lasciviousness, but marriage. That is not the only value of marriage, of course, but it is a real one.

(3) Notice how, in the arena of marriage, Paul insists that sexual privileges and responsibilities are reciprocal: e.g., “each man should have his own wife, and each woman her own husband”—which is a long way from treating the woman like chattel. How many reciprocal statements are found in this paragraph?

(4) Within marriage, neither partner is to deprive the other of normal sexual intercourse except under three conditions: (a) by mutual consent; (b) for the purpose of devoting themselves to prayer; (c) and even then only temporarily. Thus, according to Scripture, sex must never be used as a weapon, offered as a bribe, or withheld as a punishment.

 

This reading is from For the Love of God, vol 2 by D.A. Carson. You can download the entire book as a free PDF here: For the Love of God, Vol 2. Alternatively, you can pick up a hard copy at the church or at your favorite book retailer.

FEBRUARY 19 — Exodus 2; Luke 5; Job 19; 1 Corinthians 6 􏰀

OUR TWO PASSAGES ARE linked in a subtle way.

Job’s response to Bildad (Job 19) is striking in its intensity. It is almost as if he

is willing to spell out the tensions and paradoxes in his own position. There are four essential planks to it. First, Job continues to berate his miserable comforters for their utter lack of support. Even if he had “gone astray” (19:4), it is not their business to humiliate him. Second, Job puts into concrete form what he has been hinting at all along: if he is suffering unjustly, and if God is in charge, then God has wronged him (19:6). Once again, a string of verses colorfully describes the way God has torn him down, blocked his way, shrouded his paths in darkness. Third, Job provides some graphic descriptions of his suffering. His breath is offensive to his wife; he is loathsome to his own brothers (19:17). In a culture where youth should respect their seniors, he finds that even little boys scorn him. His health has vanished; his closest friends display no pity or compassion. But fourth, the most paradoxical component is that Job still trusts God. In a passage renowned for its exegetical difficulties (19:25-27), Job affirms that he knows his “kinsman-redeemer” lives: this is the word that is used of Boaz in the book of Ruth (Ruth 2:20), and probably here carries the overtone of “defender.” Despite the evidence of his current sufferings he affirms that God his defender lives, and “that in the end he will stand upon the earth” (in light of the next verse, this may be an eschatological reference, or it may refer to the end of Job’s suffering with God standing on Job’s grave). Job himself will see God with his own eyes, and for this his heart yearns within him.

The integrity and faithfulness of the man is astounding. He refuses to “confess” where there is nothing to confess, but he never stops acknowledging that God alone is God. Satan is losing his bet.

Interestingly, Paul, too, calls the Corinthian Christians to a certain kind of integrity (1 Cor. 6). The sad dimension of this chapter is that at least some of the Corinthians were compromising their integrity for no greater reason than the usual temptations plus a subliminal desire to act like the surrounding culture. They were not at all facing the kinds of pressures that confronted Job. They needed to learn that lawsuits between Christian brothers, trying to win against another, already signaled defeat (6:7); that Christian freedom is never an excuse for license, since believers pursue what is beneficial and they know that their bodies belong to another (6:12-20). These things Job already knew.

FEBRUARY 18 — Exodus 1; Luke 4; Job 18; 1 Corinthians 5

THE SECOND ROUND OF BILDAD the Shuhite (Job 18) has a note of desperation to it. When the argument is weak, some people just yell louder.

Bildad begins by telling Job, in effect, that there is no point talking with him until he adopts a sensible stance (18:2). Job is worse than wrong: he is perverse or insane. In Bildad’s view, Job is willing to overturn the very fabric of the universe to justify himself: “You who tear yourself to pieces in your anger, is the earth to be abandoned for your sake? Or must the rocks be moved from their place?” (18:4).

The rest of the chapter is given over to a horrific description of what happens to the wicked person—destroyed, despised, trapped, subject to calamity and disaster, terrified, burned up, cut off from the community. “The memory of him perishes from the earth; he has no name in the land” (18:17). People from the east and from the west alike are “appalled at his fate” (18:20)—and of course this means he serves as an admirable moral lesson for those with eyes to see.

Up to this point, the three “miserable comforters” have united in agreeing that Job is wicked. Unless the last verse of the chapter is mere parallelism, the charge now seems to be ratcheted up a notch: “Surely such is the dwelling of an evil man; such is the place of one who knows not God” (18:21). Job, in short, is not only wicked, but utterly ignorant of God.

It is time to reflect a little on this sort of charge. At one level, what Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar keep saying is entirely in line with a repeated theme of the Scriptures: God is just, and justice will be done and will be seen to be done. Everyone will one day acknowledge that God is right—whether in the reverent submission of faith, or in the terror that cries for the rocks and the mountains to hide them from the wrath of the Lamb (Rev. 6). The theme recurs in virtually every major corpus of the Bible. The alternative to judgment is appalling: there is no final and perfect judgment, and therefore no justice, and therefore no meaningful distinction between right and wrong, between good and evil. Not to have judgment would be to deny the significance of evil.

But to apply this perspective too quickly, too mechanically, or as if we have access to all the facts, is to destroy the significance of evil from another angle. Innocent suffering (as we have seen) is ruled out. To call a good man evil in order to preserve the system is not only personally heartless, but relativizes good and evil; it impugns God as surely as saying there is no difference between good and evil. Sometimes we must simply appeal to the mystery of wickedness.

 

This reading is from For the Love of God, vol 2 by D.A. Carson. You can download the entire book as a free PDF here: For the Love of God, Vol 2. Alternatively, you can pick up a hard copy at the church or at your favorite book retailer.

FEBRUARY 9 — Genesis 42; Mark 12; Job 8; Romans 12

BILDAD THE SHUHITE IS SCANDALIZED BY Job’s response to Eliphaz and offers his own searing rebuttal (Job 8).

“How long will you say such things?” Bildad asks. “Your words are a blustering wind” (8:2). We would say they are nothing but hot air. From Bildad’s perspective, Job is charging God with perverting justice. “Does the Almighty pervert what is right?” (8:3). But Bildad cannot let the point linger as a merely theoreti- cal point to be debated by theologians. The implications of his rhetorical question Bildad now drives home in a shaft that must have pierced Job to the quick: “When your children sinned against him, he gave them over to the penalty of their sin” (8:4). In other words, the proper explanation of the storm that killed all ten of Job’s children (1:18-19) is that they deserved it. To say anything else would surely mean, according to Bildad, that God is unjust, that he perverts justice. So the way forward for Job is “to look to God and plead with the Almighty” (8:5). If Job humbles himself and is truly pure and upright, God will restore him to his “rightful place.” Indeed, all the fabulous wealth Job formerly enjoyed will seem like a mere piffle compared with the rewards that will come to him (8:6-7).

For his authority Bildad appeals to longstanding tradition, to “the former generations.” The opinions he and his friends express are not newfangled ideas but received tradition. Bildad and his friends, regardless of how old they are, can only have learned by experience what can be tasted in one lifetime. What they are appealing to, however, is not the experience of one lifetime, but accumulated tradition. That tradition says that the godless and those who forget God perish like reeds without water; they enjoy all the support of those who lean on spiders’ webs (8:11-19). Conversely, “Surely God does not reject a blameless man or strengthen the hands of evildoers” (8:20).

Of course, this is roughly the argument of Eliphaz, perhaps somewhat more bluntly expressed; and while Eliphaz appealed to visions of the night, Bildad appealed to received tradition. Once again, parts of the argument are not wrong. At one level, on an eternal scale, it is right to conclude that God vindicates righteousness and condemns wickedness. But as Bildad expresses the case, he claims to know more about God’s doings than he really does (neither he nor Job knows the behind-the-scenes setup in chapter 1). Worse, he applies his doctrine mechan- ically and shortsightedly, and ends up condemning a righteous man.

Can you think of instances where premature or unbalanced application of biblical truth has turned out to be fundamentally mistaken?

 

This reading is from For the Love of God, vol 2 by D.A. Carson. You can download the entire book as a free PDF here: For the Love of God, Vol 2. Alternatively, you can pick up a hard copy at the church or at your favorite book retailer.