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The Questions in Job

3/29/2020

 
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The book of Job has such a powerful and memorable storyline that it is possible to focus on the story and miss its point.  At its heart, Job is a book of questions, but sometimes we do not see the questions for the story.

When we think of the book of Job we usually think of the narrative stream of events:  righteous Job; God giving Satan permission to afflict him; Job’s troubles; his discussions with his friends; God speaking to Job; and finally, Job’s restoration.  We see this story-stream, but we don’t always focus on the questions in the stream.  Yet when we look closely at the questions in Job, we can see the underlying lesson of the book much better because the questions in Job actually provide the structural “skeleton” of the story – they are the “bones” which support the body of the narrative, rather than the other way around.

Once the stage is set, the book of Job begins with questions: “Where have you come from?” (1:7), “Have you considered my servant Job?” (1:8), “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (1:9), ““Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has?” (1:10). These questions quickly propel us into the story proper, and it is here that Job begins to ask an ongoing string of questions that form the heart of the story.  Notice just some of these questions:

-  “Why did I not perish at birth, and die as I came from the womb?” (3:11)
- “Why is light given to those in misery, and life to the bitter of soul?” (3:20)
- “Why do you hide your face and consider me an enemy?” (13:24)
- “Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?” (21:7)

When we put Job’s questions together in this way, we immediately see a clear pattern: Job asks “Why?”  over and over again.  In the course of the book Job asks this same question many times as he grapples with his situation. At the heart of Job’s many “Why?s” is the central issue of why God allows him to suffer undeservedly –  a question explicitly stated in his words: “I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me” (Job 10:2 ESV).   

Throughout the central part of the book, Job’s friends also ask questions –  all of which are aimed at Job himself.  But, one after another, Job – rightly - discounts the speeches of the three friends and returns to his unanswered questions of “Why?”

Finally, at the climax of the story, God himself steps into the scene with questions of his own –  introduced with the words “Brace yourself like a man and I will question you and you shall answer me” (38:3, 40:7).

Throughout four full chapters God then pummels Job with some seventy questions of his own, (Job 38-41).  When we look carefully at God’s questions, we see a pattern, also. God does not ask “Why?” Instead, God proceeds to ask Job  “Where?” “When” “What?” “How?” “Which?” and “Who?” along with questions such as “Can you…?” “Have you?” “Did you?” and so on.

But God is not really asking Job for answers to all these questions – he does not give him the opportunity to try to answer them. They are rhetorical questions God knows Job cannot answer.  But God’s questions make it clear that Job doesn’t know the answers to the when, where, what, how, and other aspects of God’s works.  The clear point of God asking Job every type of question other than “Why?” is that of a rebuke to Job: why does he question why God does what he does and allows what he allows, when he clearly does not understand any of the aspects of God’s works regarding the inanimate and animate elements of creation.  In other words, God asks Job:  Why question the “why?” of my will when you cannot comprehend the “How” and any of the other aspects of what I choose to do?  That is why, when God has finished questioning Job, the patriarch exclaims:

“You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’ Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know” (Job 42:3).

Job came to realize that if he is not qualified in any way to comprehend the basic aspects of God’s creation and sustaining of all there is, then he certainly was not qualified to pass judgment on how God directs the events of human lives or allows what he does allow.
  
This was Job’s epiphany, his moment of understanding at the conclusion of the book’s dialog when he says to God: “You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak; I will question you, and you shall answer me.’ My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:4-6). Job realized that although he had not done wrong, he still had no reason to question God’s wisdom and judgment in allowing his suffering.
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The questions found throughout the book of Job reveal the true nature of Job’s situation and God’s purposes.  It is in the questions in Job that we find the answers to the underlying message of the book.

Another New (Free!) E-Book for You

3/15/2020

 
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SCRIPTURES IN QUESTION:                                             
ANSWERS TO APPARENT BIBLICAL CONTRADICTIONS    
​By R. Herbert             
 


Every year new and even well-established believers are unsettled and in some cases turned from the Christian faith by claims that the Bible contradicts itself and so it cannot be the inspired word of God.  Our latest free e-book gives multiple examples of seven basic principles that can be easily applied to explain supposed inconsistencies in the Bible. Scriptures in Question is an important tool for answering your own questions and those others might ask you. 

As with all our free e-books, Scriptures in Question is available in multiple formats to read on almost any electronic device and there is no need to register or give an email address to get a copy - just click on the download link and enjoy.  You can download your free copy here. 
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Does the New Testament Quote the Old Testament Accurately?

3/8/2020

 
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​In studying the Bible, you may have noticed that when New Testament authors quote scriptures from the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), their quotations are often somewhat different from the wording of the verses they appear to be quoting.  This has led to skeptics claiming that the New Testament Christians misquoted or even “changed” the Bible in order to try to make their case and to show what they wanted the Scriptures to show. However, there are a number of simple answers to this question of why the wording of quotations in the New Testament often appears to be different from the quoted Old Testament verses themselves. 

First, we must realize that our modern Bibles differ in many small details from the Scriptures that were available to the earliest Christians.  The earliest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible on which most of our modern Old Testaments are based date to about AD 900, but before that time many copies of the Hebrew Bible had slight differences.   The New Testament writers had access to these earlier versions of the biblical books, and it is those versions that they quote – meaning that their quotations often have slightly different wording from the same verses in our modern Bibles. 

Next, we should be aware that not all the New Testament writers knew Hebrew. For example, Luke, the author of the third Gospel and the book of Acts – and evidently a speaker of Greek –  may not have known the Hebrew language.  He seems to frequently quote from the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek that was made in the third and second centuries BC. The author of the book of Hebrews certainly was also more comfortable using Greek and never quotes directly from the Hebrew Bible – only from the Septuagint and other versions.  And even the apostle Paul, though he clearly knew Hebrew, also used the Septuagint at times. In fact, of the approximately 300 Old Testament quotes in the New Testament, approximately two-thirds of them came from that Greek translation, and these quotes often differ very slightly from the wording of the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament writers evidently had no difficulty in regarding such translations as the Word of God.

Also, we don’t think it strange today when Christian teachers or preachers quote a specific translation in order to best make the point they are trying to get across.  Sometimes a given translation uses the exact word that is being discussed –  for example, confidence instead of faith –  so a particular modern-day translation of the Bible may work best in a given message or under particular circumstances.  The New Testament writers were no different and seem to have sometimes chosen a version of the Bible that provided wording that best fit their message. 

Another thing to keep in mind is that today we can easily access a Bible in order to quote a particular verse, but few early Christians owned complete copies or even parts of the Scriptures.  The New Testament writers often had to rely on memory in order to include the gist of a biblical verse or passage in their own writing.  Writers like the apostle Paul (who quotes the Old Testament some 183 times in his epistles) knew the Scriptures well enough to be able to quote them exactly or close to exactly from memory.

Finally,  the writers of the New Testament sometimes combined two or more verses from the Hebrew Bible in order to make their point.  This is no different from today when we quote from several pages of a book or even from several sources in our own writing.  But first century writers did not utilize footnotes or other forms of citation (which appeared much later in history) to note exactly where each quotation came from. For example, in his epistles, Paul sometimes introduced quotations from the  Old Testament by saying something like “it is written in the law” (1 Corinthians 9:9; etc.).  But at other times he simply made the quotation without even mentioning where it is from when he was confident that his readers would recognize the verse (Romans 2:24; etc.) Even if verses from different areas of the Scriptures were quoted together, when the New Testament writers knew they were writing to individuals who knew the Scriptures well, they simply quoted the verses without mentioning where they were from. 
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An aspect of this topic that can be helpful in our own study of the Bible is that it often pays to compare a New Testament quotation with its original verse in the Old Testament (which is usually cited in the footnotes of modern translations). This is not because we need worry about minor differences in wording, but because looking at the context in which the Old Testament verse appears can often help us more fully understand the New Testament reference. The New Testament writers knew that many of their readers would not only recognize the verses they quoted, but also would know the setting in which they appeared.  

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    Unless otherwise stated, blog posts are written by R. Herbert, Ph.D.,  who writes for a number of Christian venues – including our sister site: TacticalChristianity.org
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