Listen here: “Who Am I?“
Job 38:1-11; 2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Job is one of the most interesting and most difficult books to read and understand.
- And the crux of the difficulty is understanding the relationship between faithfulness and the difficulties of life—suffering.
- We want to believe that our faithfulness will protect us from life’s difficulties.
- But that is not Job’s story, and Job’s friends were intent on maintaing that story, which suggested that Job had lost faith.
- Job was insistent that he had not lost faith. But his friends didn’t believe it.
- They were convinced that God would protect faithful people from difficulties, and the only rational conclusion, therefore, was that Job had been unfaithful.
- Job’s friends thought that they understood how God “worked,” that God rewarded righteousness and punished faithlessness.
- And there is much to commend this argument. In fact, this argument is biblical
- Our thinking, our experience of this world, our skills and abilities, our education apart from God’s Word is inadequate to rightly understand the world in which we live.
- We contemporary people have not learned that yet.
- Our world has made such advances in learning, science, technology, and medicine. And we have! We are way more advanced that any previous generation in history. All of this is true!
- But it’s not the whole truth.
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