Job Explained
The book of Job presents people with plenty of problematic passages. There have been different points of view about many of these passages for a very long time. Even today’s “faith teachers” and “grace teachers” offer many different and conflicting views about what the book of Job shows us. So we will look at the book of Job IN DEPTH and see what we can conclude from it.
As a young Christian, I got healed from allergies I’d had all my life after reading and believing the book of Job! The entire Bible is the “word of faith” (Romans 10:8), so it ALL must stir your FAITH if you divide it properly. God did not write 65 books of the Bible to build your faith and then write a 66th book (Job) to tear down your faith and get you into unbelief! Job settled some things for me about sickness and healing, and it should do the same for you.
The Most Important Thing About Job
Before we delve into some of the nitty-gritties about the book of Job, I will say up front that YOU CANNOT BE ANOTHER JOB under the New Covenant. In fact, there are statements within the book of Job itself that make this clear! So if you have any fear that what happened to Job could happen to you and that it could be God’s will for you to suffer like that, rest assured that it’s impossible!
Satan made Job sick. Under the New Covenant, we are redeemed from Satan’s kingdom (Colossians 1:13) and all the junk that it has to offer. You have authority over all of Satan’s works (Luke 10:19), including all the things that he did to Job. YOU can resist Satan, which will make him flee (James 4:7, 1 Peter 5:8-9). Jesus was manifested to DESTROY the works of the devil (1 John 3:8), including EVERYTHING that he did to Job. Healing is an essential part of the New Covenant (as shown throughout this book). Job did not have the New Covenant. You do. What happened to Job would never have happened to him if he were under the New Covenant, and those calamities do not have to happen to YOU.
Summary of the Book of Job
Job is a long book, but it can be broken down into some essential parts. Here are the key passages that we will deal with.
Job 1:1:
There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil.
So we see that Job was righteous as far as one could be before either the Old Covenant or the New Covenant. There is no indication of any OLD Covenant (the Law of Moses), let alone the New Covenant, in the entire book of Job, so we can safely assume that Job lived before the Law of Moses was given. There is a descendant of Issachar named Job in Genesis 46:13 (“And the sons of Issachar; Tola, and Phuvah, and Job, and Shimron.”) but that is too thin to use as evidence that Job lived at that time. After all, there are 3 different people named Ananias in the New Testament – a liar, a nasty high priest, and a godly disciple who laid hands on Saul who became Paul. Obviously, the high priest and the disciple couldn’t be the same person as the liar, because the liar dropped dead before the other passages! There was even a Jesus who was called Justus (Colossians 4:11) – this was not the same Jesus who died on the cross even though he had the same name. So we can’t date Job by his name, but I think it’s safe to date him by the absence of the Law of Moses. If that Law had been given, Job could have appealed to its healing provisions and received immediate healing from what Satan did to him.
We know that Job considering cursing God a horrible thing:
Job 1:5:
And it was so, when the days of their feasting were gone about, that Job sent and sanctified them, and rose up early in the morning, and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all: for Job said, It may be that my sons have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts. Thus did Job continually.
Job appeared to be a worry-wart about this issue, but it is never mentioned that his behavior was sinful. Otherwise, Job wouldn’t be the upright man that Scripture says that he was.
This passage is further confirmation that Job predated the Law of Moses, as he offered burnt offerings despite there being no indication that he was any kind of priest or that he went to any priest or tabernacle to present his burnt offerings.
Now comes an interesting conversation in heaven between God and Satan.
Job 1:6-12:
Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.
And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?
Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?
Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.
But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.
And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD.
We will return to this passage in more detail later.
Then follows a series of sudden calamities caused by Satan.
Here is God’s account of Job’s action after his loss of his children and livestock:
Job 1:20-22:
Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped,
And said, Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.
In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.
Satan was sure that his destructive actions would cause Job to curse God, but Job worshipped and blessed God instead. We will come back to the issue of whether what Job said was really true.
This leads to “round two” of the discussion in heaven:
Job 2:1-6:
Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the LORD.
And the LORD said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.
And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.
And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life.
But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face.
And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life.
At this point, Satan smites Job from foot to head with “sore boils.” But Satan could still not get Job to curse God. Even Job’s own wife incited him to do it, but he still would not:
Job 2:9-10:
Then said his wife unto him, Dost thou still retain thine integrity? curse God, and die.
But he said unto her, Thou speakest as one of the foolish women speaketh. What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil? In all this did not Job sin with his lips.
This was similar to his first response. Again, we will come back to the question about whether Job was right about receiving evil from the hand of God.
At this point, “Job’s Comforters” arrive on the scene – his friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar. At first, they don’t say anything, but eventually they begin to express their opinions about Job’s condition. In general, their opinions aren’t very nice. They pretty much boil down to saying that Job was not as righteous as he appeared (and actually WAS) and that God was punishing him for his sins. That was obviously NOT the case, but it didn’t stop his loquacious friends from filling up a lot of chapters with their haranguing. In between their rather discomforting discourses, Job defends himself with some chapters of his own opinions. Job obviously has no personal knowledge of Satan’s existence, so he blames everything that happens on God – like many people today, regrettably including many Christians! Job’s statements are fully of complaints about what “the Almighty” has done to him.
During this time, these statements can be considered:
Job 3:25-26:
For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.
I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.
Here it is obvious that Job was EXTREMELY worried that things like the ones that he was experiencing would happen to him. Even while he was still prosperous, he did not feel safe or at rest because of his fear.
Some translations make the second of the two verses above say something like the NKJV (“I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes”). In other words, they allude to a present condition. In fact, that is the rule more than the exception. Young’s Literal Translation agrees with the old King James Version (it’s interesting how often that is the case in such circumstances): “I was not safe – not was I quiet – Nor was I at rest – and trouble cometh!”
So a look at the Hebrew verbs is in order to see what tense they are. All 3 of the verbs having to do with being in safety, having rest and being quiet, are in the “perfect” tense. This means that they describe past completed action. So we’ll have to go with the KJV and Young’s on this one and conclude that the second verse complements and emphasizes the first verse about things that Job greatly feared. He was in fear when there was no natural reason for him to be in fear.
So while Job enjoyed great material prosperity, he lived as a prisoner of fear. Why would he be so afraid of losing everything? Part of the reason well could be that Job had no covenant with God that guaranteed that he did not HAVE to lose everything. Job knew it, and Satan seemed to know it too, because Satan had complained about the hedge that God had put around Job.
We get some idea of the duration of Job’s suffering below:
Job 7:3:
So am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are appointed to me.
So we see that Job’s trials appear to have happened over a number of months, not years.
Job then asserts that if there were only a daysman – a mediator – then his troubles would be over at once:
Job 9:32-35:
For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and we should come together in judgment.
Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his hand upon us both.
Let him take his rod away from me, and let not his fear terrify me:
Then would I speak, and not fear him; but it is not so with me.
In all this, Job actually seems to have a glimpse of Jesus who is to come – but He hasn’t come yet, so Job cannot call on Him. Consider the following amazing verse:
Job 19:25:
For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth:
As the book progresses, Job accuses God more and more of being unfair, but he never gives Satan the victory he wanted – he never curses God.
After much ranting from everyone involved, a new person named Elihu comes onto the scene in Chapter 32. He was also upset that Job did not justify God but he justified himself, and he was none too pleased with the “advice” given by Job’s three friends.
Job 32:2-5:
Then was kindled the wrath of Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the kindred of Ram: against Job was his wrath kindled, because he justified himself rather than God.
Also against his three friends was his wrath kindled, because they had found no answer, and yet had condemned Job.
Now Elihu had waited till Job had spoken, because they were elder than he.
When Elihu saw that there was no answer in the mouth of these three men, then his wrath was kindled.
The following passage may not seem relevant at first, but I’m including it because it does come into play in an important way later in this discussion:
Job 32:15-17:
They were amazed, they answered no more: they left off speaking.
When I had waited, (for they spake not, but stood still, and answered no more;)
I said, I will answer also my part, I also will shew mine opinion.
This next passage will become important to our discussion. It is still Elihu speaking.
Job 33:19-25:
He is chastened also with pain upon his bed, and the multitude of his bones with strong pain:
So that his life abhorreth bread, and his soul dainty meat.
His flesh is consumed away, that it cannot be seen; and his bones that were not seen stick out.
Yea, his soul draweth near unto the grave, and his life to the destroyers.
If there be a messenger with him, an interpreter, one among a thousand, to shew unto man his uprightness:
Then he is gracious unto him, and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom.
His flesh shall be fresher than a child’s: he shall return to the days of his youth:
In chapters 38 and 39, God answers Job out of a whirlwind. In this section, God basically tells Job that he is “in over his head” with his accusations. His basic challenge is, “Who are YOU to say such things about Me?” Then we read:
Job 40:1-4:
Moreover the LORD answered Job, and said,
Shall he that contendeth with the Almighty instruct him? he that reproveth God, let him answer it.
Then Job answered the LORD, and said,
Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.
God then speaks again out of the whirlwind for the rest of chapter 40 and all of chapter 41.
Job finally realizes that he was speaking wrong things about God, and he repents:
Job 42:3:
Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? therefore have I uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not.
Job 42:6:
Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.
Here is the result, which will be the subject of considerable commentary later:
Job 42:7-11:
And it was so, that after the LORD had spoken these words unto Job, the LORD said to Eliphaz the Temanite, My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.
Therefore take unto you now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering; and my servant Job shall pray for you: for him will I accept: lest I deal with you after your folly, in that ye have not spoken of me the thing which is right, like my servant Job.
So Eliphaz the Temanite and Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite went, and did according as the LORD commanded them: the LORD also accepted Job.
And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends: also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before.
Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold.
The last verse above is among most difficult verses in the Old Testament. We already read that Satan was the one who afflicted Job, yet this verse appears to state categorially that the LORD had brought the evil upon Job. This verse is the cause of much theological hand-wringing, and we will look at it from a number of angles to try to determine the best way to interpret that verse, which may or may not mean just taking it at face value. We’ll deal with a lot of other questions first before we tackle the question about this verse, which is the hardest of them all.
Job then lived another 140 years with double what he lost (as we saw above):
Job 42:16:
After this lived Job an hundred and forty years, and saw his sons, and his sons’ sons, even four generations.
The fact that Job lived 140 additional years is an additional hint that Job lived well before the Law of Moses, when lifespans tended to be much shorter. The fact that Job’s friends came with burnt offerings without anything to do with any priesthood, tabernacle or altar would be additional proof that this account predates the Law of Moses.
The book of Job leaves us with some important but difficult questions to answer. But first, let’s look at how YOU can use the book of Job to encourage yourself if you are sick!
Important Information from Job for the New Testament Believer
The first truth we learn is that Satan was the sickener and God was the Healer. Satan made Job sick (though apparently after God allowed it – we’ll get to that later!), and God undid everything that Satan did.
The second thing we must consider is that under the New Covenant, we have authority over Satan and his works, so we CANNOT be in Job’s situation today.
Third, Job realized that if there were only a mediator between himself and God, he knew that his sicknesses would have to be taken away immediately. Under the New Covenant, 1 Timothy 2:5 tells us that we DO have such a mediator today – the Man Jesus Christ! Thus, any sickness YOU have should be gone immediately because you have the Mediator that Job could only wish that he had.
Fourth, Job knew that his Redeemer already lived, and that He would stand in the latter day on the earth. Job seemed to have had a divine glimpse of Jesus who was to come – someone who was alive when Job was alive, but who would still be alive during the latter days on the earth! Today we know that this Redeemer is the Lord Jesus Christ. Job could not call on Him because he did not live in the latter days on the earth. However, we who DO live in the days after the Redeemer came can enjoy redemption! After all, that’s what a Redeemer does – he redeems people. Christ has REDEEMED us from the curse of the Law (Galatians 3:13), which included the troubles Job had, so He clearly fits the part of the Redeemer that Job somehow saw afar off.
Fifth, Elihu also seemed to have a glimpse of this Redeemer. He knew that if someone would be a ransom, others would be delivered from going to the pit (hell), and would be physically healed as well! We know that Jesus was our ransom for sin. Isn’t it interesting that even some guy in the book of Job, before the Law and before the New Covenant, had more insight into the fact that redemption would bring physical healing than most Christians have today?
It was based on this knowledge that I was emboldened to “believe and receive” my healing from what had been lifelong allergies. I realized that I HAD a Mediator who HAD redeemed me from going down to the pit, so I had the right to have MY flesh healed! Those allergies left and never came back! Faith came to me by hearing the Word of God – the book of Job!
I encourage you to reflect on these same themes so that you can enjoy the same results that I did, and still do!
The Tough Questions Presented by the Book of Job
Now we will get into the thorny issues involved in the book of Job! You’ve probably considered some of the obvious questions already, probably before you started reading this book. Some of these questions affect each other. Let’s list all the questions first, and then we’ll tackle them one by one! We’ll allow for the possibility that there may be MORE THAN ONE correct answer in certain cases! Also, some apparently correct answers might have to get changed in the light of a later question, and we may have to add a new answer that we didn’t consider before, as you’ll see!
Question 1: Which parts of the book of Job contain authoritative DOCTRINE?
1A) The entire book
1B) Only the parts told by the narrator and the speech attributed to God Himself.
1C) The narrator’s parts, God’s words and Elihu’s words.
1D) The narrator’s parts, God’s words, and only CERTAIN parts of what everyone else said.
1E) The narrator’s parts, God’s words, Elihu’s words and only CERTAIN parts of what everyone else said.
Question 2: What does the phrase “Hast thou considered my servant Job” mean?
2A) Knowing that you like stealing, killing and destroying, I’m pointing out Job to you as your next target.
2B) Have you noticed what a godly man Job is?
2C) Have you set your heart on targeting Job with calamities?
Question 3: Why did God tell Satan that he could afflict Job?
3A) It was God’s will to put Job through a trial and He used His created being Satan to do it.
3B) Job had torn down the hedge of protection that God had put around him through his great fear.
3C) Satan already had the right to afflict Job, but Satan didn’t realize it until God told him that he had it.
3D) God was “showing off” Job to Satan and Satan wanted to “make a wager” that he could make Job curse God, which God went along with.
3E) Job had no healing covenant, so God had no choice but to give in to Satan’s wishes for a season.
3F) It was God’s way of tempting Job to sin to see if Job would give in to sin or “pass” the test.
Question 4: Did Satan actually win an argument with God?
4A) Yes, he persuaded God to go along with the idea of afflicting Job when God would have blessed him.
4B) No, because Satan told GOD to afflict him and God wouldn’t do it, though he allowed Satan to do it.
4C) No, because Satan’s argument was that Job would curse God, but he never did.
Question 5: What do the words “although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause” mean?
5A) You successfully persuaded me to destroy Job even though there was no cause for it.
5B) You tried to persuade Me to destroy Job, but you tried in vain.
5C) You tried to get ME to do your dirty work and act like you, but your efforts were in vain.
5D) You got my permission to afflict Job, but you still couldn’t get Job to allow his own destruction by cursing Me.
5E) I took down part of the hedge around Job in response to your challenge because Job has no covenant to be exempt from your actions, but he still wouldn’t give up his integrity by cursing Me. Therefore, your challenge to Me was in vain.
Question 6: What happened to Job’s hedge of protection that God had put around him?
6A) There never was one – Satan was either misinformed or lying, which would be nothing new.
6B) Job tore it down himself through his great fear (3B above).
6C) God took it down Himself, which allowed Satan to attack Job.
6D) God had already taken it down but Satan didn’t realize it yet.
6E) Because there were no sacrifices that covered or washed away sin back then, the fact that Job had ANY sin in his life meant that Satan could demand that God withdraw the hedge on demand.
Question 7: Why does the Bible say that Job was not sinning when Job said that God had done the bad things to him?
7A) Job had no way of knowing that there was a personal devil, so God gave him a pass on that matter even though Job was wrong.
7B) God really WAS the one responsible for it all, so Job was completely right.
7C) Though Satan was responsible, God DID have some responsibility because He let Satan do those things.
Question 8: Job had to repent of his words, so how could God say in Job 42:7 that Job had spoken what was RIGHT?
8A) Job was wrong, but he was LESS WRONG than his three friends.
8B) Job did say SOME things that were right along with all the false accusations against God.
8C) Job was right that he needed to repent in dust and ashes, realizing that he had spoken things that were “above his pay grade.”
Question 9: Why does Job 42:11 say that the Lord had brought all the evil upon Job?
9A) It was a bad translation in the King James Version that was fixed by other translations.
9B) The Hebrew only indicates that the Lord ALLOWED it, but not that He actually BROUGHT IT.
9C) By giving Satan permission to afflict Job, God actively DID cause Job’s woes, though indirectly.
9D) The narrator is simply expressing the view that Job’s friends had without agreeing with it.
Job Through a New Testament Lens
Before we start answering these difficult questions, I will make a general observation about “faith preachers” and “grace preachers” (I’d include myself in those descriptions) when we try to resolve the inherent difficulties in the book of Job. I think that most of the time we try to read the book of Job through a New Testament lens. In others words, if Job were around today, what would things be like? But you can’t rightly divide Job that way. Job did not live under the New Covenant, and he didn’t even live under the Law of Moses. (In Job 42:8, God commanded Job’s “comforters” to offer up their own sacrifices, not take sacrifices to the priests to be offered up as would have been the case under the Law.) Job did not have the protections and promises that we enjoy today.
Of course, the BIG sticking point for any “faith preacher” or “grace preacher” is that we want to make God look as good as possible (so that we can still say that He is good all the time) and pin everything on Satan. After all, if God were complicit with all this, that would tend to make us think that maybe God isn’t so good some of the time! So we shudder at the notion that God would even passively go along with anything that would steal, kill or destroy. We know from the New Testament that Satan is the one who steals, kills and destroys (John 10:10), and we have nothing in the book of Job to contradict that. But imagine the howls if someone in our church got seriously ill and we announced that “the Lord” had “allowed” Satan to do it, and you asked the congregation to console the person for “all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him.” You wouldn’t be pastoring that “faith church” or “grace church” for long! Should we just keep preaching faith and grace, cross our fingers and hope that nobody ever asks us what Job 42:11 means because we have no answer ourselves?
Keep reading – this is going to be interesting! Let’s start tackling these questions!
Question 1: Which parts of the book of Job contain authoritative DOCTRINE?
1A) The entire book
This is the “easy” answer. “The entire book of Job is inspired Scripture, so EVERYTHING in it is doctrinally right because it’s all God-breathed!” But that statement is simply not true! No, I’m not a Bible-inerrancy-denying heretic! You may be confusing the following 2 statements:
1A1) Everything in the Bible is true.
1A2) Everything anyone said in the Bible is true.
The truth is that 1A1 is true, but 1A2 is false! The Bible has plenty of passages where it says truthfully that someone stated something, but the words in the person’s statement were false. For example:
Matthew 16:21-22:
From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.
Then Peter took him, and began to rebuke him, saying, Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee.
The Bible is TRUE because it records that Peter made the FALSE statement that he did. He truly made it, and it was truly recorded, but certainly wasn’t true that these things would never happen to Jesus, because they all DID happen to him.
1 Samuel 17:44:
And the Philistine said to David, Come to me, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field.
It is TRULY RECORDED that Goliath said this to David, but Goliath’s actual words were not true – Goliath was the one that ended up dead, not David.
It is TRULY recorded that Jesus was called the son of Joseph (John 1:45), but we know that He was the child of God and Mary, not the child of Mary and Joseph.
Thus, when we see that one of Job’s statements is truly recorded, that does NOT necessarily mean that we can treat it as DOCTRINAL TRUTH. We can only know that it is the absolute truth that Job said those words. Job also said that he would return naked to his mother’s womb, and there is certainly no indication that he ever did! (That would be a real miracle!) His words are recorded, but they are not true. So when we read Job’s other statements, we have to be careful. We will assume (for now at least) that we should follow these guidelines for Bible interpretation (I’ll refer to this as the Narrator Rule):
1. If the narrator of the book declares something himself rather than quoting someone else, that statement can be taken as absolute truth.
2. If the narrator of the book quotes someone’s words, those words MAY OR MAY NOT be true, but it is definitely true that the person said those words.
If Job’s three friends had spoken TRUTH, God and Elihu would not have gotten mad at them. If Job had always spoken truth, he would not have had to repent in dust and ashes in the last chapter!
Therefore, answer (1A) is a bust – we cannot take everything in the book of Job to be doctrinal truth.
1B) Only the parts told by the narrator and the speech attributed to God Himself.
Because God cannot lie (Numbers 23:19 and elsewhere), any statement God makes should be considered truth. Even then, what He says may be the truth UNLESS someone changes. For example, He had Isaiah prophesy that Hezekiah would die, but after Hezekiah’s repentance, God withdrew that prophecy, which was through the mouth of Isaiah (2 Kings 20:1-7). He replaced it with a promise of 15 more years (2 Kings 20:8).
A similar thing happened at Nineveh where God predicted its destruction within 40 days:
Jonah 3:4:
And Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
But when the people of Nineveh changed, God changed the outcome:
Jonah 3:10:
And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.
God never puts out DOCTRINE and then retracts it or replaces it under the same covenant. But a prophecy may be retracted in some cases. There’s a difference.
God wasn’t prophesying things in Job chapters 38 through 41, so all statements that He made in those chapters can be taken as absolute doctrinal truth.
So this answer SO FAR seems like a good answer. The question is, are there OTHER parts of the book of Job that could be considered doctrinal truth as well? If not, we might have to void some of the Messianic foreshadowings, and we don’t want to do that if we don’t have to.
1C) The narrator’s parts, God’s words and Elihu’s words.
Because God rebuked the original Three Comforters, we can safely assume that they did not speak pure truth.
This could get disappointing for faith preachers, who would like to be able to quote the following as a favorite have-what-you-say doctrinal passage. You may have come across this in a faith book at some point, where the “payoff verse” is the last one:
Job 22:21-28:
Acquaint now thyself with him, and be at peace: thereby good shall come unto thee.
Receive, I pray thee, the law from his mouth, and lay up his words in thine heart.
If thou return to the Almighty, thou shalt be built up, thou shalt put away iniquity far from thy tabernacles.
Then shalt thou lay up gold as dust, and the gold of Ophir as the stones of the brooks.
Yea, the Almighty shall be thy defence, and thou shalt have plenty of silver.
For then shalt thou have thy delight in the Almighty, and shalt lift up thy face unto God.
Thou shalt make thy prayer unto him, and he shall hear thee, and thou shalt pay thy vows.
Thou shalt also decree a thing, and it shall be established unto thee: and the light shall shine upon thy ways.
Now the fact that they were rebuked doesn’t mean that EVERYTHING they said was wrong, but it’s dangerous to make ANY doctrinal statement using a quote from one of Job’s rebuked 3 comforters. That’s why I didn’t include the passage above in the Say What article about speaking things.
However, God never rebuked Elihu for saying anything wrong. It was Elihu who spoke the beautiful “deliver from going down to the pit; I have found a ransom” prophecy mentioned earlier. He also said, “If they obey and serve him, they shall spend their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasures” (Job 36:11). Obviously, as faith preachers, we should like Elihu! He had more of a handle on the idea of godly prosperity than the vast majority of preachers today!
Looking at ALL of Elihu’s discourse from chapter 32 through chapter 37, nothing stands out as contradictory to the facts or to anything God said. In fact, toward the end, Elihu, who says that he is speaking for God, uses some of the same kinds of statements that God makes when He finally talks.
However, we must be careful about the fact that Elihu said that he was speaking for God. There were (and are) some false prophets claiming to speak for God. An enemy of Israel in Hezekiah’s day came with this announcement:
2 Kings 18:25:
Am I now come up without the LORD against this place to destroy it? The LORD said to me, Go up against this land, and destroy it.
But this man was a total liar! Claiming divine backing is not the same thing as having it.
If we assume that the narrator is always right in the Bible, we should ask this: Does the narrator of the book AGREE that Elihu was speaking for God? There is no indication that a narrator is approving or denying anything Elihu says, unless Elihu IS the narrator. But how are we going to figure out who the narrator is? How can we determine whether Elihu wrote the book of Job? First, we look within the book for any explicit authorship. Unfortunately, we end up with the same situation that we have with the book of Hebrews where the author never states his name. Elihu seems to have been there for the duration of things, so it would at least make sense that he was the author, but one could say the same thing even more forcefully about Job himself!
A POSSIBLE clue comes in that mysterious passage Job 32:15-17 above. For a brief moment, it appears that Elihu has dropped back into the mode of the narrator when he says that the other three have stopped talking and then refers to himself. I don’t know that I’d consider that ABSOLUTE proof, but given the beginning of the passage, it doesn’t seem like it could fit unless Elihu, the speaker, was also the narrator. If he WAS the narrator, we could take his statements as well as God’s as doctrinal certainties.
Given that there is no OTHER indication of authorship, it seems that God might have tucked that in there so that those who really want to “mine” truths from the Bible instead of just skim the surface could find it. I checked many other Bible translations that agreed as far as the meaning of the first verse goes. If Elihu were only speaking and not narrating, it would seem that he might just address them as opposed to referring to them as “they.”
Maybe. The debate over the authorship of Job is not new! Elihu has been proposed as the author, but so has Job and so have a few others. Some even purport that different authors wrote different sections. If the passage in question were a slam dunk, we could just point it out to the world and all scholars at all seminaries around the world would have to say, “Wow! I never saw that, but now that you pointed it out, that IS incontrovertible evidence that Elihu wrote Job!” So it seems that there must be some reason to go the other way with the argument.
And there is.
Job 32:4-6:
Now Elihu had waited till Job had spoken, because they were elder than he.
When Elihu saw that there was no answer in the mouth of these three men, then his wrath was kindled.
And Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite answered and said, I am young, and ye are very old; wherefore I was afraid, and durst not shew you mine opinion.
Personally, I think there is at least as good of an argument in the other direction that if Elihu had written the book of Job, he would not have referred to himself in the third person and only switched to the first person in one passage. In other words, I expect that he would have said, “Now I had waited until Job had spoken…When I saw that there was no answer…And I, Elihu, the son of Barachel the Buzite answered and said…”
So it appears that Elihu is referred to by a narrator other than himself.
But what about the fact that Moses is considered the author of the books that tell the story of Moses? The idea of a Bible author referring to himself in the third person has a precedent.
However, what would be unprecedented is the author switching between the first person and the third person in the same book, let alone the same chapter. Moses never switches and calls himself “I” in any of his narratives about himself.
So I don’t think that we can give Elihu a “free pass” as the narrator so that everything he said must be true for that reason. But I think the fact that God never rebuked him is strong evidence that Elihu DID speak what was right and therefore, we should take the few doctrinal points in his discourse as God-inspired writings. That would include the important Messianic prophecy – one that I leaned on myself for a drastic healing from a fall off a seaside ledge that I describe elsewhere in this book.
So who DID write Job? I don’t know. The authorship isn’t stated. The only thing we know is that God inspired the entire book. God wanted us to read all the quotes from Job and his friends even though some of them were uninspired and demonstrably wrong.
1D) The narrator’s parts, God’s words, and only CERTAIN parts of what everyone else said.
Can we keep our “decree a thing” passage even though it came from one of Job’s friends who was rebuked? If so, we are establishing a “cafeteria” precedent used by inferior seminaries: “The parts we like are the Word of God, and the parts we don’t like are just incorrect opinions.” We would have to establish ourselves as “higher critics” to determine which parts are of God and which are not. That treads on some dangerous ground.
But what about Job’s comments about a daysman (mediator) and a Redeemer who would stand on the earth in the latter day? Do we have to throw out these beautiful prophecies? No, because they actually came to pass! Therefore, we can consider those statements to be God-breathed, unlike many of the poetic ramblings that were fairly obviously only Job-breathed.
1E) The narrator’s parts, God’s words, Elihu’s words and only CERTAIN parts of what everyone else said.
It seems that the proper conclusion, therefore, is answer (1E), with the restriction that the fulfilled Messianic prophecies were God-breathed, but the rest are suspect. However, this conclusion forces another conclusion that the narrator was right in Job 42:11. This means that God was responsible for bringing on the evil that Satan did to Job. That is unsettling and leaves us with the impression that we might be missing something somewhere, because the first 2 chapters are clear that SATAN brought the evil upon Job, albeit after God “allowed” it. This matter will come up again in the subsequent questions, and it is probably the key issue in the book of Job!
Question 2: What does the phrase “Hast thou considered my servant Job” mean?
2A) Knowing that you like stealing, killing and destroying, I’m pointing out Job to you as your next target.
The first issue we have to deal with is whether GOD instigated Job’s torments for some kind of greater good.
Nothing in Job states that God gave Satan the idea of afflicting Job. Satan is the one who brought it up and instigated the whole thing. That is clear from both heavenly conversations.
While we might consider the idea that Satan got God’s permission to afflict Job because Job didn’t have a covenant that precluded it (this will come up again later), there is no indication that God said, “I have an idea. Try to beat up Job and we’ll see if he curses Me or not.” So we have to throw out (2A).
2B) Have you noticed what a godly man Job is?
This seems on the surface to be the “obvious” thing that God told Satan. The potential “rub” with this is that by deliberately pointing out Job to a malevolent being whose destructive ways were obvious, AND knowing that Job had no covenant that would preclude that being from ruining his life (even temporarily), it might seem that God was “baiting” Satan and setting up the whole thing. If this explanation is right, one could picture Job, if he ever caught a glimpse of the heavenly dialogue, saying, “Thanks for nothing, God! Why couldn’t You have just kept Your mouth shut? Maybe then none of this would have happened to me!”
So we should consider whether there might be a better explanation.
2C) Have you set your heart on targeting Job with calamities?
As a first impression, this seems to be a completely unreasonable way to “twist” the statement in question. But it’s not as unreasonable as it seems when we look at the Hebrew in this phrase. The Hebrew word leb that was translated considered appears many times in the book of Job, and with one exception other than the “Hast thou considered” verses, it was translated heart. So the word considered could well mean “set your heart on” or something to that effect. Thus, we can “consider” that maybe God was saying, “Have you set your heart on Job – with the purpose of making him your target? I can understand that, because there’s no one like him – he’s the best of the bunch! If you could take him down, you could take anyone else down too.”
This explanation provides a way around the difficulties of (2B). God could not be said to be inciting anything, directly or indirectly. Job wouldn’t have the right to get upset with God if this were the explanation.
Do any translators agree with this idea? Almost everyone agrees with the King James Version translation considered. One translation says noticed (which is pretty much the same thing), but Young’s Literal Translation bucks the norm and renders the two verses very differently:
Job 1:8 (Young’s Literal Translation):
And Jehovah saith unto the Adversary, ‘Hast thou set thy heart against My servant Job because there is none like him in the land, a man perfect and upright, fearing God, and turning aside from evil?’
Job 2:3 (Young’s Literal Translation):
And Jehovah saith unto the Adversary, 'Hast thou set thy heart unto My servant Job because there is none like him in the land, a man perfect and upright, fearing God and turning aside from evil? and still he is keeping hold on his integrity, and thou dost move Me against him to swallow him up for nought!'
A footnote in the New American Standard Bible for the word “considered” says “Literally: set your heart to” – the same conclusion that Young reached.
However, if you substitute only the “set your heart against” thought into the King James text, it makes no grammatical sense. “Have you set your heart against Job, that there is none like him in the earth…” We would have to be sure that the word “that” isn’t explicit in the Hebrew to justify Young’s conclusion. (I refer to the older Young, not to myself.) So it’s time for a quick trip to a Hebrew interlinear text. And we find out some very interesting things:
1. We see the word suwm, which does mean “put”, “set”, and similar things.
2. The word that immediately follows is leb, which means heart almost everywhere else.
3. The word that follows the Hebrew name for Job is ‘erets, which means earth. The entire phrase “that there is none like him on the earth” is translated from that single Hebrew word! That is part of what makes Hebrew so difficult – there are many general-purpose root words and many cases where a slew of English words is indicated by a single Hebrew word!
So “set your heart against” actually DOES work here as a valid translation. The word against has no Hebrew counterpart either, but it is inferred from the Hebrew, which simply says, “Have you set heart my servant Job earth.” (Don’t envy anyone who translates Hebrew for a living!)
Now we can check a few other Bible translations. Some use the word “that” and some don’t. This was a very tough verse to translate, so I can see how people would get different opinions.
However, to the probable dismay of the “King James Only” crowd, I would have to say that the literal inclusion of the Hebrew word for heart here throws this match over to Young’s Literal Translation.
Question 2 Conclusion
While a decent argument can be made for the more traditional (2B) interpretation, the idea that a good God was instigating Satan to do evil to Job when Satan hadn’t even noticed Job or intended to do anything to him would seem to be out of line with God’s character shown in the rest of the Bible. For now, we will award (2C) the win as being the most faithful to the underlying Hebrew. However, we have the thorny matter that Job 42:11 says that the LORD brought evil upon Job. This will still have to be dealt with in question 9. If that verse means what it certainly appears to mean, we may have to revert to (2B) for consistency’s sake, as (2C) indicates that Satan, not God, was the originator of the idea of doing evil to Job.
Question 3: Why did God tell Satan that he could afflict Job?
3A) It was God’s will to put Job through a trial and He used His created being Satan to do it.
This is another “God Uses Satan” spin that doesn’t make sense. If it were God’s perfect will to afflict Job, He could have just done it Himself long before Satan ever showed up. God does NOT use Satan if He makes someone sick – for example, in the book of Revelation, God is going to make a LOT of mankind sick, and those plagues are coming from heaven, not from hell or from Satan. (For those who have been trained that God and Jesus would never make ANYONE sick, please read Sickness as Chastening and Judgment in the Old Testament and Sickness as Chastening and Judgment in the New Testament for some eye-openers!) You will even find people today who believe that “God’s Satan” afflicted Job in obedience. (I shudder even writing the term “God’s Satan” but I got it from an unbelief website that promoted this answer to Question 3.)
Now assuming (FALSELY) that if God wanted something bad to happen, He would have had to subcontract that work to Satan so that He could still be “good all the time” and Satan could take the rap for it, the way things played out still doesn’t make sense. GOD would have been the one promoting the idea to Satan to get Satan to go along with it instead of the other way around.
The whole idea that God “uses” Satan is debunked elsewhere:
Objection: God Has Satan on a Leash and Only Permits Him to Do Certain Things to You
It was quite obviously Satan’s plan to try to get Job to curse God and die. Thus, Satan would have succeeded in completely destroying Job if he had gotten his real desire.
So this explanation just doesn’t hold up. We’ll move on.
3B) Job had torn down the hedge of protection that God had put around him through his great fear.
Job 3:25-26 PROVES that Job lived in GREAT FEAR despite his many blessings. When things finally crumbled around him, he said that what happened is what he had greatly feared.
This “Fear Theory” is a popular explanation in certain “faith” circles to explain the “hedge” issue and “get God off the hook” for what Satan did to Job. After all, if Job didn’t break down the hedge himself, the only viable alternative is that God undid most of the hedge, which would seem to make Him a guilty party in the proceedings.
It is easy to look back through a “New Testament lens” and say, “Jesus came to destroy the works of the devil. Therefore, if anything bad happened to Job, it must have been Job’s fault – he must have left a door open to Satan somewhere. It can’t possibly be God’s fault because God would never allow something like that to happen if there were no justification for it. He’s good all the time! So it must be an open door, and we’ve just identified it. There’s no other obvious sin recorded in Job’s life, so Job must have opened the door though fear!”
However, the Fear Theory has some serious issues once you start to really think about the whole story of Job.
If Job had already torn down the hedge through fear, Satan could have just afflicted Job without having to have two conversations with God about it!
Satan said that God had put a hedge around Job. Now Satan is not necessarily a credible source of information, but it seems reasonable that there was a hedge there. God did not correct Satan when Satan said that God had put a hedge around Job. So where had Satan been? He was walking to and fro on the earth. Why do you suppose he was doing that? Probably for the same reason that he does it today – he’s seeking whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8). If Satan could just have devoured Job, he would have done it already. Something had to be stopping him. Because Job had no personal authority over Satan, it had to be up to God to protect Job. So I think we’re on safe ground assuming that there was a hedge that God put up until the events unfolded when Satan approached God.
Actually, that could be the main reason that Satan tempted GOD to ruin Job – Satan knew that there was a hedge that prevented him from ruining Job himself, so he figured that God would have to ruin Job if it was going to happen.
Job had engaged in his worry-wart behavior “continually” when it came to his sacrifices for his sons, and his worrying about calamity gave him no rest. Worrying appeared to be his habit. So if fear breaks down hedges, Job’s hedge would have been “broken down” a long time before Satan showed up because he had been fearing for a long time. He didn’t just suddenly get into a “fear fit” around the time that Satan showed up so that his hedge suddenly fell down. So Satan would not have been able to complain to God about a hedge that wasn’t still up.
Also, Job 1:1 says that Job was perfect and upright. That doesn’t mean that he was the only person other than Jesus to walk in moral perfection up until that time, but if Job’s fear was what removed his protection hedge, one wonders how he could be described as perfect and upright. Looking from a New Testament angle, we would say that his fear was sinful because it negated God’s promises, but in Job’s case, God had not made any covenant with him for his protection or healing.
The next problem is that Satan’s ability to “get to” Job was granted in two stages. In the first, Satan could not touch Job’s body, but in the second stage, he could. It just stretches things too far to theorize that Job’s fear took down the part of the hedge that stopped Satan from stealing his goods and his family, but not the part that protected his body, and then additional fear must have taken down the part of the hedge that pertained to his body shortly after that, but no additional fear ever took down the part of the hedge that prevented Job’s life from being taken.
So it appears that a hedge was up when Satan approached God, but FEAR was not the cause of the hedge being removed. We’ll have to look for another reason when we get to Question 4.
3C) Satan already had the right to afflict Job, but Satan didn’t realize it until God told him that he had it.
Satan isn’t the brightest bulb on the tree – he decided to rebel against an almighty God who had created him in the first place. So we can’t assume that Satan knows everything that God knows. The Bible says that God’s wisdom is made known to principalities and powers through the church.
Ephesians 3:10:
To the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God,
So evil beings don’t know God’s wisdom. Could it be that Job’s hedge was down – if he ever had one – but Satan just didn’t know it? After all, God said that Job “was” in Satan’s hand – He didn’t say, “I GIVE all that Job has into your hand.” So we have to investigate this “Satan’s Epiphany Theory” (my name for it – it’s not official, though maybe it will catch on). Maybe Job was fair game all along because he didn’t have the healing and protection promises from either the Old Covenant or the New Covenant, and Satan just didn’t realize what he could do to someone on the earth because things were fairly new at that point back in the days of Genesis.
The Satan’s Epiphany Theory has a strong appeal to those of us in faith and grace circles because it gives us a way to excuse God and keep Him out of the line of responsibility for what happened to Job. We really don’t want to leave Him on the hook for all the bad stuff that Job suffered. It would seem to be more consistent with God as He has revealed Himself in the New Testament, though I’ve warned about that already.
But the Satan’s Epiphany Theory has a major problem. If Satan suddenly realized that he had the right to sock it to Job and that Job had no healing or protection covenant with God, then as soon as God started to double back all of Job’s blessings, Satan could have come along again and stolen all of them again! He could have just done that for the rest of Job’s life so that all of his blessings would keep getting swallowed up for the next 140 years! If you don’t believe that, you would have to prove that something was different the time Satan showed up as opposed to the next 140 years when Job was back in uninterrupted blessing mode.
Another problem with the Satan’s Epiphany Theory is that Satan goes around looking for whom he may devour (1 Peter 5:8). How does he find out whom he may devour? He tries to devour people! So you can be pretty sure that Satan had at least tried to munch Job’s lunch. He must have found that there was some reason why he couldn’t do it, that is, a hedge! That could well be the reason that Satan tempted GOD Himself to afflict Job – because Satan realized that up until that point, he could not afflict Job himself because of the hedge around Job.
Yet another problem with the Satan’s Epiphany Theory is that during Round 1 of the heavenly discussion, God limited Satan by not allowing Satan to touch Job’s body. That would be a kind of hedge, wouldn’t it? So Satan did what God said that he could do without touching Job’s body. After Round 2, God said that Satan could touch Job’s body but not kill him. So the hedge got moved back, though not completely removed. Satan is out to steal, kill and destroy. He would have wanted to take Job out completely, but he wasn’t allowed to. He would have wanted to hurt Job physically during Round 1, but he couldn’t do it. Once he got the chance to do it in Round 2, he immediately took advantage of the opportunity. It would not seem that you could chalk this up to Satan “learning” in Round 1 that he could afflict Job in non-bodily ways, but waiting until Round 2 to “learn” that he could afflict Job in bodily ways also. And of course, for 140 years after Job’s trials, Satan couldn’t get at him EITHER way. So it does seem that God was in charge of that hedge. This also puts down the Fear Theory even more. If Job’s fear tore down the hedge (which was never completely down, as we’ve just seen), do we really assume that Job’s fear tore down the hedge for non-bodily trouble, but then Job had “additional” fear that then tore down the bodily part of the hedge? And if fear really tears down a hedge completely, Satan would have been able to move “unhedged” against Job and just kill him.
Also, if the Satan’s Epiphany Theory were true, Satan – in his constant bid to steal, kill and destroy – could have then gone and made all of Job’s friends just as sick as Job! Then, realizing that he had that ability, he could have gone and made everyone in the WORLD just as sick as Job!
Finally, it hardly seems that the Satan’s Epiphany Theory makes any sense when Satan had already made a career of doing terrible things to people on the earth, making things so bad that at one point, God wiped out all but eight people! Surely Satan had already figured out that he had the right to mess people up on this fallen earth.
So the Satan’s Epiphany Theory looks doomed, but when we look at the other possible answers to Question 3, we have to wonder if maybe this is like what Winston Churchill once said about democracy – the Satan’s Epiphany Theory is the worst answer, except for all the other ones that have been tried from time to time! Let’s keep going.
3D) God was “showing off” Job to Satan and Satan wanted to “make a wager” that he could make Job curse God, which God went along with.
As odious as this theory sounds, it is also the most “obvious” when you read Job for the first time if you have never read any commentaries on Job and have no prior opinion about the book. It is dangerous to dismiss what seems to be an obvious meaning.
Seen through a New Testament lens, this theory is completely preposterous. We know that God would never do such a thing today – He’d continue to UNDO the works of the devil. But Job didn’t live today.
It doesn’t seem like something God would do – allowing a clean-living man to suffer for months to win a bet with Satan that he still wouldn’t curse God no matter how badly Satan whacked him. In effect, this theory seems to indicate that God was showing off Job as a trophy to Satan. Therefore, I’ll refer to this as the Trophy Theory.
The Trophy Theory’s first problem is the fact that what happened to Job was stated to be “without cause” (though we’ll pick this up again later in Question 5). If the purpose was to win a bet, you MIGHT say that there WAS a cause. Then again, you can say that “without cause” only meant that Satan was to be able to attack Job without any just cause such as sin on Job’s part. We’ll probably have to put some of this on hold until we can answer Question 5 properly.
The biggest stumbling block to the Trophy Theory is that it WOULD give God some rather clear responsibility for Job’s woes. We naturally shudder at that possibility. Shouldn’t Satan or Job take all the blame while God’s name is cleared? Could God really go along with hurting a righteous person who clearly didn’t deserve it?
It seems based on the King James Version accounts of the heavenly conversation that He did, so this choice certainly looks consistent with what we read, though not consistent with what we’d LIKE to read.
However, when we return to the preferred Young’s Literal Translation where God asks Satan if he has set his heart against Job (see Question 2 above), that no longer appears to be consistent with the Trophy Theory, as God is not really baiting Satan by saying, “Have you considered Job, the most righteous man around?” Rather than pointing out Job as a target or bragging on him as a trophy, God is simply noting that Satan “has it out” for Job. So it seems that we should look for a better explanation that is more consistent with the Hebrew text.
3E) Job had no healing covenant, so God had no choice but to give in to Satan’s wishes for a season.
Job did not enjoy the protection and healing promises that Old and New Covenant people got to enjoy. Because there is no record that God had EVER made a promise to Job to heal or protect him, God was really under no technical obligation to do either. Satan surely knew that. Based on this answer, when Satan showed up, God’s statement that all Job had was in Satan’s hand could well have referred to a condition that already existed, not one that God created especially for Satan.
As faith and grace people, we should really, really root for this answer. It gets God off the hook, explains Satan’s ability to afflict Job, and seems to make logical sense.
Until you really think about it.
There actually WAS a TEMPORARY physical protection plan for Job even though it wasn’t a covenant made with him. Right in Job Chapter 1, God forbade Satan to touch Job’s body! For that period, Satan was UNABLE to afflict Job’s body. Then in Chapter 2, God undid that prohibition, and Satan was ABLE to afflict Job’s body. So it’s obvious that God DID have the say over whether or not Satan could afflict Job’s body.
The next place we run aground is the same shoal where the Satan’s Epiphany Theory ran aground. If God had no choice but to yield to Satan’s wishes due to the lack of a covenant, and given that God made no new covenant with Job during the book of Job, Satan would have been able to keep making God give in to his wishes by attacking Job without God’s opposition for the next 140 years! What would have changed? Nothing! That’s the problem.
And then Satan could have made Job’s friends just as sick as Job. Then, given his goal of making everyone as miserable as he can, he could have “made God give in” for everyone else in the world, and the whole world would be as sick as Job! Other people were without the Old and New Covenants just as much as Job was, after all!
Then the waves that seem to splinter our run-aground ship are the heavenly conversations between God and Satan in the first two chapters. If Satan really had carte blanche to just maul Job, he could have just gone and done it without ever having any conversations with God about it. Otherwise, we’re back to the Satan’s Epiphany Theory.
This answer doesn’t look like it’s going to work out either.
3F) It was God’s way of tempting Job to sin to see if Job would give in to sin or “pass” the test.
James 1:13 seems to just plain kill this option: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:”
So based on this verse, (1) Satan cannot successfully tempt God to do evil and (2) God cannot tempt any man to do evil – for example, to curse God!
However, this theory has at least a last gasp in Matthew 4:1, where the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. While God was not doing the tempting, He obviously did lead Jesus to a place where the devil would tempt Him. God wasn’t doing evil or tempting anyone to do evil. So based on that, just maybe God could have Job go through trials to be tempted by the devil.
One major difference, though, is that Jesus was not beaten up by the devil to be tempted. Job was beaten up by the devil.
Another difference is that Jesus was full of the Word. Job didn’t have any Word to read at all because it appears that his story occurred before the first 5 books of the Bible were written (though obviously not before all the events written about in those 5 books, such as creation!). We can see that Jesus knew better than to fall into the devil’s temptations because He could quote what was written, but Job would just have been a sitting duck because he could not say “It is written” when he was tempted.
To Job’s credit, the devil’s only stated temptation was to try to get Job to curse God. Job passed that test with flying colors despite his lack of knowledge of what was really going on.
The answer as stated – that God was tempting Job – is clearly wrong based on the verse in James. We could rephrase it to say that God was allowing Job to be tempted to see whether or not he would give in. Being omniscient, it doesn’t seem very logical for God to have to do something to “prove” Job when He already knew that Job’s heart was “perfect.” God surely knew that if Job were tempted, he would not give in and curse Him.
Conclusion – Or Lack Thereof
Answers 3C and 3E seem the most appealing, but they have some serious issues when you think about them. Answer 3D is unappealing because it fingers God, but it seems like we might be stuck with it because it has the fewest logical issues. It seems that none of the six possibilities is very satisfying! We can put this question on hold for now until we have answered the other questions, at which point things might become more obvious. At least we hope they do!
Question 4: Did Satan actually win an argument with God?
4A) Yes, he persuaded God to go along with the idea of afflicting Job when God would have blessed him.
The whole idea that any created being could “win” an argument with an almighty, omniscient Creator seems rather ridiculous. But is it?
Moses got God to back off from consuming Israel in a moment (Numbers 16:21, Numbers 16:45).
Abraham argued with God and whittled Him down from 50 to 10 righteous in Sodom to avoid its destruction (Genesis 18:23-32).
Jacob WRESTLED with God – and WON (Genesis 32:24-28).
Hezekiah got God to change His mind about what would have been his immediate demise (2 Kings 20:1-7).
It certainly DOES appear that if it weren’t for Satan’s intervention, Job would have just continued to be blessed. So to that extent, it seems that Satan DID win the argument in the same sense that Moses, Abraham, Jacob and Hezekiah “won” their arguments with God.
But Satan is the biggest loser in the history of losing, so claiming that he won an argument with God would seem suspect. If God “allowed” Satan to do more than He had previously allowed, it seems suspicious that an evil fallen angel “talked him into” letting bad things happen to Job. So let’s consider the other answers.
4B) No, because Satan told GOD to afflict him and God wouldn’t do it, though he allowed Satan to do it.
If we look closely at Round 1 and Round 2 in heaven, we notice that Satan was NOT asking for God’s permission to afflict Job. Satan instead challenged God Himself to strike Job with calamities. However, God Himself did not strike Job. That is not His nature. In this sense, Satan tempted God Himself to become an evildoer like Satan who would strike Job for no reason. God did NOT give in to that temptation although Satan tried it twice. It would have reduced God to Satan’s level and given Satan the right to accuse God in front of the whole universe.
It is evident that Satan did the bad things to Job, but it also seems evident that God gave him at least tacit permission to do those things, as otherwise Satan could not have done them.
We don’t like the idea of “God allowed Satan to do it,” but we have to admit that God in the most general sense “allows” Satan to do everything that he’s doing today as well. Man runs the planet (see the answer to the false statement that God Is in Control), so God does not have the right to “control” everything that goes on. It was MAN who gave Satan the right to be here. We wouldn’t even be talking about Satan (literally, the Adversary) if Adam didn’t allow Satan to be who he is today on the earth.
God’s will for the earth does not include sickness and calamity, but God’s will for the earth never included the fall, either, which opened the earth up to both of these things because of sin.
4C) No, because Satan’s argument was that Job would curse God, but he never did.
Given that Satan’s goal was to destroy job by getting Job to curse God, it is obvious that Satan was the loser of both Round 1 and Round 2. He was sure that Job would curse God, but he was wrong. (Satan does not know everything, much as he’d like you to think that he does!)
Satan DID get to attack Job, but that was not what Satan really wanted. He wanted to DESTROY Job completely, and he NEVER got what he wanted. He wanted Job to curse God, and he NEVER got what he wanted. So it would be impossible to paint Satan as the winner of the heavenly debates in any meaningful sense.
Perhaps instead of “winning,” it was just a case of Satan asserting his rights over a fallen man on a fallen planet. It would seem unfair to Satan for God to “hedge Job in” in a way that He doesn’t even do today under the New Covenant – for Job’s whole life – when God had made no promise to Job to stop Satan’s actions in Job’s day.
Question 4 Conclusion
It seems to me that we could award both (4B) and (4C) the ribbon here.
At the end of the book, God healed Job and basically undid everything that Satan did – and gave Job twice what he had before. So it is clear that Satan could not be the real “winner” of anything in the book of Job. Still, this question is open for later clarifications, too.
Question 5: What do the words “although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause” mean?
5A) You successfully persuaded Me to destroy Job even though there was no cause for it.
We’re going to have to go back to doing a little Hebrew digging to answer this question.
We find that the Hebrew word used here for without cause is actually translated both without cause and for nought (meaning in vain) in many places in the Old Testament, so EITHER could be a legitimate translation.
We next check various other translations to see which way the majority of translators believed that the word should be translated. We make the interesting discovery that just about all translations use “without cause” here, a notable exception being Young’s Literal Translation, which ends the verse in question with this phrase: “and still he is keeping hold on his integrity, and thou dost move Me against him to swallow him up for nought!”
It looks like you could answer Question 5 different ways depending upon which translation you like, especially given that the Hebrew word for “without cause” is translated “for nought” in many places in the King James Version.
While Job was not completely destroyed, the series of events certainly would qualify as “destruction” for just about any reader. If you lost all your children and possessions, wouldn’t you consider that destruction?
We can next consider the Hebrew word translated movedst. Does it really mean “persuaded” as the verse seems to say? Looking up all the other places where the word (cuwth) appears, it seems that it could mean merely to incite, but there are plenty of places where persuaded fits and is actually used. So there is no secret technicality involving this word.
The big issue with answer (5A) is that it seems to imply that GOD destroyed Job. He certainly didn’t do that directly (Satan did). Can we take that to mean that God destroyed Job by allowing it? Maybe. This is going to become a major issue when we get to Question 9, so we may want to put a final decision on hold until we can answer that question.
At the least, (5A) is not very appealing because it makes it seem that Satan twisted God’s arm so that God allowed something unfair (“without cause”) to happen to Job. Given God’s fairness, this seems suspect.
Unfortunately, (5A) also seems like the natural meaning of the phrase for someone reading Job for the first time without a prior bias, at least until the reader realizes that it was Satan doing the destroying, not God.
5B) You tried to persuade Me to destroy Job, but you tried in vain.
This would follow Young’s Literal Translation and the alternate meaning in the main translation, namely, “thou dost move Me against him to swallow him up for nought!” You could take this to mean, “Satan, you tried to move Me to destroy Job, but you failed. I didn’t do it.”
This seems to be a legitimate explanation of what happened.
However, we get into the “indirect blame” issue. If God gave Satan permission to afflict Job, God didn’t do anything himself, but it seems like we’re letting Him off on a technicality. If He ALLOWED Satan to do something that Satan had not been ALLOWED to do before, it would seem reasonable that God would have to bear at least some responsibility for the results. This begs Question 9 again.
However, Jesus was sent to destroy the works of the devil (1 John 3:8). In the loosest sense, these were all things that the devil did that God “allowed” – and HAD to allow because sin was in the earth. So the fact that God “allows” something on a fallen earth is NOT proof that He approves or is complicit in anything that the devil does. We have to be careful.
We also have to be careful when we’re bucking almost every translation out there. It would seem that a LOT of professional Hebrew translators might know something that we don’t. Still, this has a certain appeal that (5A) does not have when it comes to what we want to believe about God’s character.
5C) You tried to get ME to do your dirty work and act like you, but your efforts were in vain.
This takes Young’s Literal Translation (“thou dost move Me against him to swallow him up for nought!”) to mean that Satan tried to get GOD to do bad things to Job, but Satan was unsuccessful at trying to turn God into a more powerful version of Satan.
This seems reasonable at first, but when we look back at the context that Job still held his integrity even though Satan “moved God against him,” this conclusion seems misplaced. “Job is still holding his integrity by not cursing Me, and you tried to make Me another version of you, Satan, in vain” doesn’t make much sense. What would this really be saying? It would sound like God was saying that Satan didn’t get God to do anything bad to Job, but based on what had already happened in Round 1, it seems that Satan somehow DID get permission or argued God into letting Job get trashed. The fact is that Job DID get trashed already (except for his body) before this exchange, and the natural reading of the phrase would seem to implicate God in Job’s trials. Let’s move on to the next option and see if it’s any better.
5D) You got My permission to afflict Job, but you still couldn’t get Job to allow his own destruction by cursing Me.
At least this answer pins the blame on Satan instead of God for what happened to Job, and we know that Satan is the one who killed Job’s family. Like the prior 2 answers, this one assumes the alternate meaning and Young’s Literal Translation’s rendering of “without cause” to mean “in vain” (“for nought”). The idea is, “I let you do horrible things to Job, and you said that he would curse you. But you did everything in vain.”
This explanation fits our modern concept of God under the New Covenant, except for that permission thing! The idea that Satan went to God and got His permission to whack Job still seems out of character based on how God relates to us today. Still, we realize that Job was in a very different situation due to his lack of any protective covenant.
However, if God lowered Job’s hedge of protection in two steps, that seems like granting permission.
Then again, when you read the conversation between God and Satan, Satan actually never asked for permission to afflict Job. Instead, He tempted God to afflict Job Himself, which He would not do. So saying, “You have my permission” when Satan never asked for permission seems at best dubious.
5E) I took down part of the hedge around Job in response to your challenge because Job has no covenant to be exempt from your actions, but he still wouldn’t give up his integrity by cursing Me. Therefore, your challenge to Me was in vain.
This explanation avoids making it sound like Satan asked for permission to afflict Job. Actually, Satan didn’t ask for permission. He did a couple things. First, he tempted God twice to bring calamity on Job Himself. But God is good, so He could not act contrary to His nature by afflicting a righteous man. Second, he complained that God had given Job “Access Denied” status by putting a Satan-proof hedge around him. Satan considered this unjust. According to this explanation, God was willing to concede that point to Satan.
This leads to the question of why God would remove the Satan-proof hedge in response to Satan’s challenge. At first it sounds like Satan struck up an argument with Almighty God and WON! But it’s easy to miss the point that Job had no covenant with God for healing or protection, so if God never allowed Satan access to a sinner without a covenant, God’s actions would have been unfair – to Satan! God would have been extending covenant rights that did not exist at the time. Satan had the legal right to do things to Job because Job was a fallen man on a fallen earth. In fact, God’s mercy stands out here because God allowed Satan to do so little to Job in the big picture (less than 1% of Job’s life, from all appearances) even though Job had no covenant with God for healing and protection! No wonder Satan was upset!
Now we have to look for possible problems with this answer. Doesn’t this fall into the same trap as the Satan’s Epiphany Theory? Once Satan realized that he could challenge God for access to Job because Job had no covenant, what would stop Satan from successfully demanding additional whacks at Job for the next 140 years?
The only plausible answer would seem to be that if it was fair for God to hedge Job up until this point, it was fair for him to hedge Job again later. The issue with God denying access to Job would have been satisfied, as God DID allow Satan limited access for a limited time. Satan could not accuse God of being unfair in that matter anymore. Satan took his best shots and went 0-for-2. He did just about everything imaginable to Job without killing him. At that point, there apparently wasn’t anything left to do to Job where Satan could go for Round 3 by saying, “Wait a minute, let me do something else (other than kill him) that You haven’t let me do so far, and THEN he’ll finally curse You to Your face.” Satan was allowed to take shots at Job until he had emptied his clip. God apparently considered it fair that Satan not be allowed to take any of those shots again, as they were all tried and found unsuccessful. Job had passed every test by maintaining his integrity. There was no point in allowing Job to have to keep retaking these severe tests that he had already passed.
Still, does this really fit the phrase “thou movedst me against him?” I think it does, actually. It certainly seems that Satan did “persuade” (in a manner of speaking) God to allow Satan previously unauthorized access to Job’s life. When you speak to God about a matter of covenant, God will always confirm His covenant. In this case, Satan complained about being iced out of the action, and from what I can see, God had no choice but to nullify Satan’s complaint by letting him try to tempt Job to curse God.
While this looks like a good explanation, it certainly isn’t the way that most people read Job. We would have to claim that we have learned some things that hardly anyone else around has learned about the book of Job. While that doesn’t rule out the answer, it always seems a little unsafe if you’re the only one skating at a certain end of a pond. What might all the others who came before you know that you don’t?
Conclusion for Question 5
All the possible answers could raise issues. (5A) is the most “obvious” conclusion to a first-time reader, but it implies that God destroyed Job. If it turns out when we answer Question 9 that God bore active responsibility for the evil than came upon Job, (5A) will be the clear winner. Most readers of Job would conclude that God WAS responsible, albeit in a slightly indirect manner, so (5A) would seem to be the favorite. If we reach the opposite conclusion (though it’s not immediately obvious how we possibly could) and conclude that God was cleared of all active responsibility in the matter, (5E) would seem to be the best answer out of the remaining ones.
So we could consider another pivotal question at this point:
5.1) What did God mean when He said to Satan, “All that he has is in your power?”
5.1A) I am pulling back the hedge so that all Job has is in your power.
5.1B) All that Job has is, and was, in your power already, and I had nothing to do with making it so.
(5.1A) is again the “obvious” reading unless we can prove otherwise, while (5.1B) is what we would like to believe so that we can clear God’s name and assert that He really is good all the time and that He was good all the time to Job.
(5.1B)’s appeal to us as New Covenant believers is what has led to looking for any possible explanations that could support it. The only options that seem possible are the Fear Theory, the Satan’s Epiphany Theory, and one other “shot” which we’ll call the Liar Theory. If we agree that the Fear Theory and the Satan’s Epiphany Theory are untenable, there seems to be only one other possible explanation to support (5.1B), and that is that there was no hedge. Satan was either misinformed or he was lying to God. Because this is answer (6A) below, we can put the Liar Theory on hold until we get to Question 6.
If the Liar Theory in right, we can uphold (5.1B). Otherwise, we will be forced to conclude that (5.1A) is right. In other words, God did something Himself that allowed Satan to access Job’s relatives, his possessions, and later his body. The “progressive” easing of the restrictions in two steps seem to make it doubly clear that this was something that God did explicitly.
But doesn’t (5.1A) force us to tell the world that God is really NOT good all the time? I don’t think so. The fact that God is good is why God would not cave in to Satan’s temptation to Him to afflict Job directly. That isn’t God’s nature. However, we have to remember that Satan does have the right even today to at least try to steal, kill and destroy in a fallen world with fallen people. God “allows” it in the sense that God upholds His own Word and cannot change it once He utters it. He had already given man dominion over the earth, and He wouldn’t take it back just because man sinned. That is why Satan had to get man to sin to get entrance into the earth. Unfortunately, man’s sin allowed Satan access to the earth that should never have been his. But given that he legally had it, he had the right to assert his rights before God and complain if God were denying him access to anyone on the earth. God had blessed Job and put a hedge around him, but surely God knew already that Satan had the legal right to challenge that hedge, and that He would have to give Satan at least some access to Job to be fair in the world that He set up that was now in fallen man’s control.
Does the fact that Satan is bad all the time TODAY, doing bad things to as many people as he can TODAY, negate the fact that God is good all the time TODAY? NO! If anything, it reinforces God’s goodness, because it is not God, but Satan, doing all the dirty deeds on the earth today. God allows Satan to do things only because Satan has rights that were inevitably his after Adam allowed him access to the earth through sin. If Adam had never sinned, no one would ever have physically died on the earth, and Satan would never have been able to kill anyone! This was Adam’s fault, not God’s. God simply gave Adam a choice, and Adam blew it. God then had to honor his gifting of the earth to “the children of men” (Psalm 115:16) even though it meant havoc and it meant that Satan could assert certain rights to steal, kill and destroy.
Well, at least we can still declare God’s goodness, unless Question 9 undermines this whole thing when we get to it. That last question has a lot riding on it!
Question 6: What happened to Job’s hedge of protection that God had put around him?
6A) There never was one – Satan was either misinformed or lying, which would be nothing new.
We know that Satan doesn’t know everything. If he did, he would have tried to stop Jesus’ crucifixion with any power that he could muster. He didn’t know that it would be Jesus’ death on the cross that would utterly destroy him forever. We also know that Satan is a notorious liar. He told Eve that if she ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she would become like God (Genesis 3:5: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”). The truth was that Eve WAS like God, and after she ate, she died spiritually and became UNLIKE God.
So relying on Satan for information is dubious. Satan said that there was a hedge, but when a known liar says that there is a hedge, you would just about automatically assume the opposite. If Satan appeared to you and said, “You should invest all your money into the new Devil’s Deal Hedge Fund,” would you invest in it?
As our Narrator Rule shows, the fact that Satan is quoted as saying something doesn’t make it so. (This was obvious in the case of what he said to Eve.) So now we can examine the Liar Theory as an explanation for the hedge – there never was one and Satan lied. Then God told the truth when He implied that there was no hedge.
But you can refer back to (3B) for some good reasons to believe that there was a hedge – Satan could have been trying to destroy Job and he could have noticed a hedge that stopped him. God did not argue with Satan about there being a hedge. If there were no hedge, it seems that Satan would have already beaten up Job without having to say anything to God about the matter.
Some people have taken the fact that what Job had “was” in Satan’s power to mean that it WAS already in his power without God having to change anything. (This usually goes along with the Fear Theory mentioned above.) But the restrictions God put on the damage Satan could do on two occasions would seem to indicate that God had to change something. In other words, Job’s assets and family, and then his body, were not just “there for the picking” the whole time.
So the Liar Theory that drives this answer has some serious issues, to say the least.
6B) Job tore it down himself through his great fear (3B above).
We’ve already considered the Fear Theory. At least if Job realized the error of his fear, he could have kept up a new hedge after his trial. (This avoids the issues with some other answers to Question 3, which logically leave Satan able to beat up Job forever.) However, Job never repented for his fear as far as we can tell – the matter is never mentioned again. Arguments from silence are always weak.
There is a good indication that there was a hedge. See the answer to (3B), which was rejected above, for more about the Fear Theory. This answer doesn’t look like it will work.
6C) God took it down Himself, which allowed Satan to attack Job.
This is the most obvious answer to a first-time, unbiased Job reader.
This also fits the idea that Satan could only attack Job as much as God permitted. After Round 1, one could say that PART of the hedge was removed, but a hedge still stood regarding Job’s body, which Satan was not allowed to touch until Round 2.
The lack of appeal of this answer is that it seems to imply that God explicitly gave Satan permission to attack Job even though Job didn’t deserve it. This is disturbing. Was God as unfair as Satan? If God gave Satan permission, wasn’t this tantamount to the Lord trashing Job?
Then again, if God never let Satan do anything to Job even though he was a fallen man in a fallen world, Satan could have justly accused God of being unfair about the matter.
As bad as this seems, it also seems better than the previous two answers. Let’s keep looking.
6D) God had already taken it down but Satan didn’t realize it yet.
This answer is a cousin to the Satan’s Epiphany Theory.
It begs the question of why God would have taken down the hedge before Satan ever made his appeal in heaven to have Job be ruined. Was this some arbitrary thing that He did? That doesn’t seem to fit God’s character. Did God take it down because of Job’s fear? We dealt with the idea that Job tore the hedge down himself. It doesn’t make any more sense to say that God tore down the hedge when he saw that Job was in fear. Job had been in fear for a long time – wouldn’t the hedge have been gone much sooner? If it were, how could Satan complain about it when he talked to God?
The appeal of this answer is that it tries to clear God of any immediate blame. When God said twice that Job was in Satan’s power, according to this, He meant that Job was already in Satan’s power, not that God did something to put Job under Satan’s power, which is the most obvious initial conclusion one would reach when reading those passages, and the one that almost everyone seems to reach. This puts the blame on Job for doing something that caused God to remove the hedge.
But what can we blame Job for when the very first verse in the book of Job declares that he was perfect and upright? The idea doesn’t seem to gybe with Job 1:1.
Besides, isn’t taking down the hedge around Job tantamount to agreeing to let Satan ruin him? No, not necessarily – we dealt with Satan’s rights in a fallen world back when we were trying to answer Question 5.
But this answer still doesn’t seem to make sense when you consider the two stages of interaction between God and Satan. To say, “Job is already in your hand, except for his body,” and also, “You didn’t realize it, but everything other than Job’s body is already in your hand”, then later to say, “Job’s body is in your hand too” and also “You didn’t realize it, but Job’s body is already in your hand” just plain doesn’t make sense.
So this answer is no good. (6C) still seems like the only answer with any chance of being the winner.
6E) Because there were no sacrifices that covered or washed away sin back then, the fact that Job had ANY sin in his life meant that Satan could demand that God withdraw the hedge on demand.
Satan did not present a case that God had to withdraw the hedge due to sin in Job’s life, so at best this would be a very thin argument.
Once you consider it some more, you run into the same shoal that wrecked the Satan’s Epiphany Theory. If Job was the best of anyone around, it meant that Satan could then demand that God withdraw the hedge from everyone else for their sin, so Satan could have afflicted the entire world, including Job’s friends, and Job himself for the next 140 years.
Besides, Satan would not have made an issue about the hedge if ANY sin in Job’s life could tear it down. Satan only would have had to wait for Job to sin once before he would have had the right to DEMAND that God take down the hedge again. He certainly wouldn’t complain about it to God the way that he did.
This answer is a dead end.
Conclusion for Question 6
Whether we like it or not, answer (6C) seems to the only answer where we don’t have to resort to some convoluted contortions to choose the conclusion we want.
Question 7: Why does the Bible say that Job was not sinning when Job said that God had done the bad things to him?
7A) Job had no way of knowing that there was a personal devil, so God gave him a pass on that matter even though Job was wrong.
This seems fair. Given that Job took place during Genesis before the Law of Moses, Job would have had NO SCRIPTURE WHATSOEVER to read. God had not revealed Himself much back in those days. How would anyone know that there was a devil unless God revealed it? Job couldn’t read the book of Job and find that out for himself!
There is a difference between being wrong and sinning. You could have invested all your money into a Ponzi scheme and lost it. That would mean that you were wrong, but you would not have committed any particular named sin in the Bible. (Even some Christian organizations have lost all their invested money that way. It pays to check things with the Holy Spirit before you do them!)
So we would seem to be on safe ground saying that Job was wrong, but he didn’t sin. He didn’t curse God or do anything overtly sinful. So based on our Narrator Rule, we can allow that what Job said was truly recorded but not true.
The only problem would be if it turned out that God really was responsible, and that’s what we’ll look into next.
7B) God really WAS the one responsible for it all, so Job was completely right.
We can pitch this one into the dumpster immediately because it is clear from the text that SATAN, not GOD, killed Job’s family and animals and made him sick. If you protest that God was indirectly responsible based on what is becoming our most troublesome verse (Job 42:11), you’ve reached the next answer below.
7C) Though Satan was responsible, God DID have some responsibility because He let Satan do those things.
Did God “allow” Satan to have access to Job? We’re seeing that more and more of this is going to come down to Question 9. We don’t want to put God into the position of authorizing the destruction of a good man unless there is no other choice. We know from other discussions that God HAS BEEN responsible for doing bad things to bad people, and He WILL BE responsible for doing bad things to bad people in the book of Revelation. But being involved with doing bad things to a GOOD person seems like a different story.
If God explicitly allowed Satan to afflict Job, we could argue that Job was right in a limited sense, and that could explain why Job did not sin with his lips.
Conclusion for Question 7
If you assume that God would have to be DIRECTLY responsible for Job’s afflictions for it to count, (7A) is the correct answer. Otherwise, (7C) is the correct answer. At times, it seems like we’re raising more questions that we’re answering, and this seems to be getting more and more uncomfortable! Nobody said that Job is an easy book to understand! Don’t worry, I WILL shut all the cans of worms I’ve opened before this discussion is over!
Question 8: Job had to repent of his words, so how could God say in Job 42:7 that Job had spoken what was RIGHT?
8A) Job was wrong, but he was LESS WRONG than his three friends.
God did not say that Job had spoken WRONG things that were LESS WRONG than things that other people said, so we can throw this one out.
8B) Job did say SOME things that were right along with all the false accusations against God.
Job did prophesy about a coming Redeemer, after all, and his assertions of his own innocence were right while his friends’ assertion of his guilt was wrong. So this explanation seems somewhat reasonable.
8C) Job was right that he needed to repent in dust and ashes, realizing that he had spoken things that were “above his pay grade.”
This also seems like a reasonable explanation. His friends needed to repent and they didn’t. Job needed to repent and he did.
This also solves the apparent contradiction issue. Here God said that Job had spoken what was right, but He had said before that Job had “darkened counsel by words without knowledge” (Job 38:2). Both statements could not be correct SIMULTANEOUSLY, yet both statements came from God, who can never be incorrect. This fact would seem to rule out (8B). This explanation takes care of the contradiction – Job had spoken without knowledge earlier, but he repented and changed his tune and he was “right” at that point.
Conclusion for Question 8
The clear winner here is (8C). God himself said that Job’s rants about His unfairness were wrong. Now we’ll take that into consideration when we tackle the final question, which is by far the most challenging question for those of us coming from a “faith” or “grace” angle.
Question 9: Why does Job 42:11 say that the Lord had brought all the evil upon Job?
This is a critical Scripture to understand. If we take it at face value, GOD did something to Job, so God could do the same thing to us because we don’t have authority over God. But if Satan was really responsible, we do have authority over him and we can run him off every time. But this verse surely seems to make God seem responsible! Let’s look at our options.
9A) It was a bad translation in the King James Version that was fixed by other translations.
We shudder at the idea that a good God was responsible, even if indirectly, for doing bad things to a good person. But Job 42:11 seems to come right out and say that the Lord had done the evil things to Job. This is so different from what we see in the first 2 chapters of Job that this verse is trotted out by skeptics on the internet as “proof” that the Bible contradicts itself. It is clear in the first 2 chapters that SATAN, not GOD, did the horrible things to Job.
I didn’t add an answer that says “The Bible contradicts itself” because if we assume that, we might as well throw out our Bibles and throw out this book while we’re at it. We are starting with the assumption that ALL Scripture, including Job 42:11, is God-breathed (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
So there must be some explanation for this mess. Our first shot at it is to see if this is some kind of King James quirk.
We find that it ISN’T. ALL translations, including Young’s Literal Translation, say that GOD or Jehovah (same meaning) brought all this evil upon Job. I’ve never seen a translation that says otherwise.
So that was a nice try, and it was something that we needed to check out. Now we know that (9A) is a bust.
9B) The Hebrew only indicates that the Lord ALLOWED it, but not that He actually BROUGHT IT.
So this is our next try. Can we prove that the Hebrew word is passive so that it doesn’t mean what it looks like it means? We look it up in the Hebrew and check the tense.
DRAT! It’s a Stem Hiphil – an ACTIVE verb. The Hebrew says clearly that the Lord BROUGHT all the evil upon Job.
Some people have claimed that Hebrew always should be interpreted as permissive when we see it relative to God’s actions in the Old Testament. But it seems unfair to take His GOOD actions as active but His BAD actions as permissive when the same kinds of verbs are being used. And one would think that the narrator would know better than to use an active verb to indicate passive participation.
On the other hand, it can’t be “active” in the sense that Satan’s actions were active, because then the Bible would contradict itself. We would have to establish that God ALLOWING Satan to do things would be equivalent to God DOING things.
Is there some other quirk in the Hebrew? No. The Hebrew basically says “comforted evil Lord had brought” and I don’t see any way around translating the phrase the way that the King James version does.
Let’s see what other options we have.
9C) By giving Satan permission to afflict Job, God actively DID cause Job’s woes, though indirectly.
Under this option, we assume that God DID give permission to Satan to afflict Job and that therefore God WAS responsible. Therefore, in that sense, the LORD did bring all the evil upon Job.
This finally appears to solve the contradiction problem.
It also leaves us with a “traditional” interpretation of Job! Could the traditional “obvious” reading of Job be right after all?
It doesn’t seem so when we consider some other things that the Bible says about Satan and sickness. The fact that God “allowed” Satan to make people sick in Jesus’ day does not mean that “the Lord” brought that evil on those people or that the evil things were His will – quite the contrary. Jesus was very clear that it was SATAN who bound people (Luke 13:16). Peter preached that Jesus healed those who were oppressed by the devil (Acts 10:38), not people who were oppressed “because God brought evil on them by allowing the devil to do those things.” So God being responsible for the devil’s actions doesn’t wash from a Bible perspective. He has to allow Satan access to the earth during this dispensation even though He hates what Satan is doing. Satan will be duly punished for everything he has done because it has all been the OPPOSITE of God’s will. Jesus did the will of the Father (John 5:19) when He UNDID Satan’s works (1 John 3:8).
So blaming God even indirectly doesn’t seem fair to God. But we’re running out of choices. Let’s check out one more option before we try to settle on a final conclusion.
9D) The narrator is simply expressing the view that Job’s friends had without agreeing with it.
Some Bible commentators have gone with this answer to explain the apparent contradiction in Job.
In effect, they’re saying that Job’s friends showed up and said, “We’re so sorry for you because of all the evil that the Lord brought upon you.” If that were the case, God is off the hook because the narrator is only (in effect) reporting the words of Job’s friends without assenting to their truthfulness.
Thus, the conclusion would be that the Lord did NOT actually do anything to Job for which He could be held responsible, but Job’s friends were of the opinion that “the Lord” had done all the evil to Job.
We can go back to our Narrator Rule. If the narrator says it, it’s truth. If the narrator says that someone else said it, it may or may not be truth but it is true that the person said it.
The problem is that the narrator isn’t quoting anyone. He doesn’t report any of the words that Job’s friends used. Based on our Narrator Rule, we have to ascribe the evil to God. Could the narrator be “quoting” an opinion that was wrong even though it wasn’t a direct quote, which would break our Narrator Rule? We’d be on REALLY thin ice to claim that the Narrator Rule applies everywhere in the Bible except to this one verse where we really, really don’t want to believe that it applies. We would need another biblical example of implying an opinion of someone who isn’t directly quoted. Can we find such a case anywhere else?
I asked myself this question until one day I stumbled upon John 5:18: “Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.” The narrator asserts that Jesus had “broken the Sabbath,” but he isn’t directly quoting the Jews. Had Jesus actually broken the Sabbath? If He actually had broken the Sabbath, He would have sinned and then He would be like the rest of us – unable to redeem us because He would need redemption Himself.
This gets very interesting. Jesus could NOT have broken the Sabbath from GOD’S perspective or He would no longer be sinless, but He could have broken the Sabbath as far as the Pharisees were concerned, because the Pharisees had invented all kinds of human additions to the Law of Moses that were not part of the Law as far as God was concerned. But if we insist that the narrator always speaks from GOD’S perspective, then he must be affirming what God says, which means that Jesus must have actually broken the Sabbath – and thus sinned! Or could He have somehow broken the Sabbath without sinning?
Wow, we’ve really waded into a swamp here, haven’t we? Let’s see if we can get ourselves back out.
It’s obvious that Jesus never sinned. So can we take “broken the Sabbath” to mean that He had broken the Sabbath from the Jews’ perspective only? Not according to the Narrator Rule – that just loops us around to exactly the same place in the swamp!
Thus, we reach a jarring conclusion. The real issue is that the strict Narrator Rule itself is invalid, as proved by John 5:18! This verse proves that in a rare case, the narrator can cite the perspective of the people involved rather than God’s perspective even though no one’s words are being directly quoted!
Are there any other disproofs of the Narrator Rule? After I found John 5:18, I came across another apparent disproof in Acts 21:4, which happens to be one of the most difficult verses in the New Testament if one makes no allowance that the Narrator Rule can be broken when someone else’s perspective is implied. Here it says that people told Paul through the Spirit not to go to Jerusalem. The difficulty of this lies in the fact that Paul was sure that the Spirit had told him TO go to Jerusalem!
Acts 19:21:
After these things were ended, Paul purposed in the spirit, when he had passed through Macedonia and Achaia, to go to Jerusalem, saying, After I have been there, I must also see Rome.
Acts 20:22:
And now, behold, I go bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that shall befall me there:
And when Paul had left Jerusalem, the Lord did not correct Paul but rather affirmed his choice:
Acts 23:11:
And the night following the Lord stood by him, and said, Be of good cheer, Paul: for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome.
Were they really telling Paul “through the Spirit” not to leave for seven days but then to leave afterward? That seems like a dubious attempt to keep the Narrator Rule intact. If we can use that explanation, the Narrator Rule is still intact, but given that they didn’t tell Paul not to go to Jerusalem YET, but simply not to go to Jerusalem, I don’t think that’s the real explanation. It seems instead that we have another Implied Perspective Exception to the Narrator Rule. (These are my terms, but I think they fit and you can feel free to use them.) The disciples THOUGHT that they were telling Paul through the Spirit not to go to Jerusalem, but the Spirit was not really saying that to Paul. They almost surely “prophesied” to Paul to not go, but they missed God on the matter even though they were attempting to speak through the gifts of the Spirit.
It turns out that yet another similar exception to the Narrator Rule is found in Joshua 2:7: “And the men pursued after them the way to Jordan unto the fords: and as soon as they which pursued after them were gone out, they shut the gate.” The pursuers only THOUGHT they were pursuing the spies down to the river. The truth was that the spies were hidden under bundles of flax on Rahab’s roof! The Narrator stated the spies’ location from the perspective of the pursuers, not from their actual location.
Then consider that the straight Narrator Rule (without the Implied Perspective Exception) would force us to accept that the Antichrist is God! There is no quotation of a person in 2 Thessalonians 2:4: “Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.” His “showing himself that he is God” is obviously only from the Antichrist’s perspective, not God’s perspective, even though Paul (the narrator) said it.
Now that we have four other witnesses that we can have an Implied Perspective Exception to the Narrator Rule, we can also allow that Job 42:11 means, “Then came there unto him all his brethren, and all his sisters, and all they that had been of his acquaintance before, and did eat bread with him in his house: and they bemoaned him, and comforted him over all the evil that they thought that the LORD had brought upon him: every man also gave him a piece of money, and every one an earring of gold.”
Now we have resolved the ALLEGED “Bible contradiction!” It WAS Satan who afflicted Job. Given the rendering above, nothing in Scripture says otherwise. We can’t blame God for what happened any more than we can blame God for what He “allows” Satan to do in this day and age in this fallen earth. If God cannot be held as the responsible party for what Satan does today, He cannot be held as the responsible party for what Satan did in the book of Job either.
Question 9 Conclusion
The only answer without a fatal flaw is (9D).
Job 42:11 no longer has to be the verse that we’re afraid someone will bring up when we preach faith and grace!
Now that we’ve resolved this major issue, we need to revisit some previous answers in light of this!
Extra Innings
Now we can loop back to some of the previous questions and award some clear winners, which we could not do until we straightened out Job 42:11.
Going back to Question 1 in the light of what we just learned, we realize that there is a sixth option that was not presented before, and this sixth option is the correct one:
Question 1: Which parts of the book of Job contain authoritative DOCTRINE?
1F) The narrator’s parts (except when echoing someone’s perspective), God’s words, Elihu’s words and only CERTAIN parts of what everyone else said when they are confirmed elsewhere in Scripture.
Now that we have settled Question 9, we can settle on the following answer to Question 2, which most closely matches the original Hebrew:
Question 2: What does the phrase “Hast thou considered my servant Job” mean?
2C) Have you set your heart on targeting Job with calamities?
Next, Question 3 did not really have ANY right answer in the original multiple choices, but it appears that we can alter (3E) slightly to come up with a satisfactory one we’ll label 3G:
Question 3: Why did God tell Satan that he could afflict Job?
3G) Job had no healing covenant, and God allowed Satan limited access to Job for a limited time.
This is similar to (3E) but better, because it clarifies that God limited what Satan could do to Job in two steps, and also clarifies that Satan did NOT have the right to do whatever he wanted just because there was no Old Covenant or New Covenant in effect at the time. If Satan had had his way, he would have afflicted Job continuously until Job either cursed God or died (or both). The point came where God said, “Enough is enough!” and from that point on, Job was a healthy, wealthy man again and Satan was once again unable to afflict him.
If God allowed Satan to afflict Job in a limited way but He would not allow that today, does that mean that God has changed?
No. God Himself doesn’t change, but He has definitely changed the way that He relates to man over the years. Once the Law of Moses came, anyone could take God up on His statement that He is the Lord Your Physician (Exodus 15:26). People before the Law, including Job, did not have that right. People today have personal authority over Satan and his works (Luke 10:19), but no one had that under the Law, not even Moses. Our covenant is better (Hebrews 7:22), established upon better promises than the Old Covenant (Hebrews 8:6).
You could argue all day that God should have given people a better deal in the older days, but it’s not how God has chosen to deal with mankind. I don’t think you’ll win any more arguments with God than Satan has.
Let’s at least deal with the contradiction issue. Can an INDIRECT party be considered responsible? Can both GOD and SATAN be considered “responsible” (in any sense) for the SAME actions when one was directly responsible and the other was indirectly responsible?
We actually find a parallel case in some Scriptures mentioned in this book. In 1 Chronicles 21:1, we read that Satan incited David to do a census (“And Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number Israel”). But in 2 Samuel 24:1, we read that the LORD incited David to do a census (“And again the anger of the LORD was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah”). So we have just established that God and Satan can share responsibility for the same action when Satan does something in certain cases. Another case is the one of the “evil spirit from God” that God sent to Saul in 1 Samuel 16:14-23. However, you may have noticed in these cases that the passages referred to judgment against people at whom God was mad. God wasn’t mad at Job. Can we prove this principle in a case where God’s judgment wasn’t involved?
We can. In Matthew 8:5-13, the narrator asserts that a centurion beseeched Jesus. In Luke’s account of the same incident in Luke 7:2-10, we see that some elders, and later some of the centurion’s friends, were intermediaries through whom the centurion actually delivered his messages. This makes it clear that from a biblical mindset, if you send someone to do something, you did it yourself.
There is still a difference, though. The centurion actively sent the intermediaries to Jesus, while God did not actively send Satan to Job. God did allow Satan to go to Job and do awful things to him, though.
So do these examples show that Job 42:11 fingers God after all? No. We’ve established our exception to the Narrator Rule, and if we take everything above to implicate God, God would be just as implicated today for what He “allows” Satan to do on the earth. There are reasons that things are as they are today, but none of them is God’s fault. It was Adam’s choice to sin, not God’s choice for him to do that, even though God allowed Adam to sin. Adam gave Satan access to the earth, and Satan still has it. Fortunately, WE today have access to the keys to the kingdom of God, so we can overturn Satan’s actions when we see them. That is still up to us, not up to God. The question now is not what God “allows” but what WE “allow” given that WE have the authority to undo Satan’s works.
While some Job commentators bring up David’s census as a parallel to Job 42:11, it doesn’t work in this case because Job was not under divine judgment for his sins.
The following explanation for Question 4 now seems slightly “off”:
Question 4: Did Satan actually win an argument with God?
4B) No, because Satan told GOD to afflict him and God wouldn’t do it, though he allowed Satan to do it.
This makes it seem too much like God was using Satan to do His dirty work just to keep His own name clear. In light of what we’ve seen, that isn’t really a fair statement of the situation, so we’ll stick with only one answer to question 4:
4C) No, because Satan’s argument was that Job would curse God, but he never did.
We left Question 5 hanging until we could answer Question 9. Now that we know that God did NOT literally bring the evil on Job even though his friends and relatives thought so, we know that answer (5A), which blames God for Job’s calamities, is wrong. The statements in the first two chapters of Job that SATAN attacked Job are correct, and there is no contradiction later. Thus, it would seem that the explanation with the fewest issues, and the one that offers the most reasonable explanation, would be this one:
5E) I took down part of the hedge around Job in response to your challenge because Job has no covenant to be exempt from your actions, but he still wouldn’t give up his integrity by cursing Me. Therefore, your challenge to Me was in vain.
Now what about Question 6, which didn’t really seem to have any satisfying answers?
Question 6: What happened to Job’s hedge of protection that God had put around him?
6C) God took it down Himself, which allowed Satan to attack Job.
It is quite obvious at face value that Satan was only able to access Job’s life because God made an exception allowing limited access for a limited time. The alternatives such as the Fear Theory, the Satan’s Epiphany Theory, the Liar Theory and many of the other failed tries offered as alternate answers to some of these questions, all just have a “ring” to them that we are just trying to “force” something into the text that isn’t really there. The meaning that we’re trying to “force” is what we WANT the text to say to make our preaching easier, but that isn’t how you study and interpret Scripture!
Even in the New Testament, we see that Satan does have the right to attack people; the only difference after the cross and resurrection is that we have the right to resist Satan personally and make him flee. Even Jesus acknowledged Satan’s right to attack in the following verses:
Luke 22:31-32:
And the Lord said, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat:
But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.
Jesus didn’t say that He forbade Satan from tempting Peter.
An even clearer illustration is the fact that when Satan tempted Jesus, Jesus did not say, “I bind you, Satan, from attacking Me with any more temptations.” God does not forbid Satan from attacking anyone, but He has legally delivered New Covenant believers from Satan’s power (Colossians 1:13), a fact that is up to believers, not God, to enforce (James 4:7, 1 Peter 5:8-9).
The Cringe Factor
I know full well that many “faith” and “grace” readers will cringe at some of this and not want to accept it, even though I consider myself to be both a “faith preacher” and a “grace preacher.” The biggest cringeworthy element would be, “You are painting God as unfair and unjust because you’re saying that He conspired to put something on Job that he didn’t deserve because he was the most upright man around.” But “conspired” is not the right word. Would you be willing to say that God has conspired with Satan in all the cases of illness on the earth today just because God didn’t stop Satan from putting them on people? I wouldn’t. God and Satan are not partners and they never will be partners.
We have to come back to the point that Satan had the RIGHT to complain to God about having no access into Job’s life. Job had it easier than many who followed him, with no covenant to boot! God is fair, even when it means having to be fair to Satan in this fallen world that he became the little-g “god” of.
I appreciate that modern preaching tries to make the things of God as simple as possible, but some of it has made the things of God SIMPLER than possible. It seems hard to understand that God would take down that hedge even for a short while and allow the devil to afflict Job. However, God is not the responsible party any more than He is the responsible party today when God “allows” Satan to roam the earth seeking to steal, kill and destroy. Actually, MAN is the one who “allowed” Satan the right to roam to and fro on the earth and attempt to rob, kill and destroy everyone he can. There are some “mysterious” things other than the account of Job that defy much of our modern simplified teaching about God when we try to view the story through the lens of a covenant that didn’t exist back then.
God did many other things in the Old Testament where a New Testament believer looking back might think that God was unfair. For example, God singled out the Jews for blessings. The Gentiles were not entitled to Israel’s blessings under the Old Covenant, even under Jesus’ ministry, as the story of the Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:25-30) proves. Ishmael was not entitled to share in Isaac’s blessings. Is that “fair” either? In GOD’S eyes, obviously it was. Was it “fair” to make Israel be in bondage in Egypt for centuries? Whole generations lived and died in servitude with no hope of seeing the promised land. Is it fair today that blindness has not yet been removed from Israel?
Paul never claimed that He could simplify God for the modern masses. WE are the ones who are prone to trying to do that. Paul preached just the opposite, actually:
Romans 11:33:
O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!
Some things just need to be ACCEPTED and BELIEVED because God says them. We can only serve the real God who revealed Himself in the Bible. We cannot create our own designer God who fits what we think He should be like.
The answers to the remaining questions (7 through 9) still seem good as they stand in the light of what we have seen.
Job Explained
Job lived before the Law of Moses, but he was the most “upright” person around at the time. He walked in God’s blessings. Satan set his heart on ruining Job. One day there was a conversation in heaven in which God asked Satan if he had set his heart against Job. The obvious answer was YES, Satan wanted to destroy Job. Satan complained that God had put a hedge around Job. His argument was, “Of course Job is God-fearing because all You’ve ever done is bless him. But now afflict him and he’ll change his tune and curse you.” Thus, Satan tempted God to act like Satan and afflict Job, but it isn’t God’s nature to afflict a righteous person, so God wouldn’t do it. God did, however, let down part of the hedge He had put around Job, and He told Satan that Job, except for his body, was in Satan’s power. Satan proceeded to kill and destroy almost everything around Job, including his children. Job incorrectly attributed all these acts to God, but he did not curse God. Job had no way of knowing that there was a personal Adversary who was actually doing the afflicting. Even if had known that, he did not live under the New Covenant, so he had no legal right to stop Satan’s actions himself. God did not charge Job with sin because Job had no way of knowing that there was an Adversary whose nature it was to steal, kill and destroy. Job could not be held accountable for things he had no way of knowing.
There was another conversation between God and Satan. God asked Satan again (rhetorically) if he had set his heart on Job. Again, the obvious answer was YES, Satan wanted to destroy him, but he had been unsuccessful so far. Satan had already asserted that if calamity came to Job, Job would curse God, but Job didn’t curse God when calamity came. So Satan told God that if things could get even worse so that Job’s body was affected, THEN Job would curse God. Satan tried again to tempt God to afflict Job, but it is not God’s nature to afflict a righteous person, so God wouldn’t do it. However, God did let down another part of the hedge so that Satan was able to afflict Job’s body, though God restricted Satan from killing Job. Satan then smote Job with all kinds of bodily problems, which Job continued to ascribe to God in his understandable ignorance.
Job and his three “comforters” had long arguments where the “comforters” assumed that Job had done bad things and that God was punishing him. Job maintained his innocence (correctly), but continued to attribute all of his suffering to God. Job was unaware that Satan even existed. However, Job started accusing God more and more of not being good to him. He didn’t know what was really going on. God Himself later bore witness that Job spoke without knowledge and that his friends didn’t know what they were talking about either.
Then a fourth person, Elihu, entered the picture and asserted that Job AND his friends were all wrong, and he spent some chapters trying to straighten them out. God never declared that anything Elihu said was wrong, and God even said some of the same kinds of things that Elihu said.
Finally, God spoke out of a whirlwind and basically asked Job who he thought he was to criticize God the way he did. Job realized that he had spoken about things that were “over his head.” God continued to speak to Job along the same line. At the end of it, Job realized that his words actually WERE wrong and he repented. God healed Job when he prayed for his friends. Then Job’s siblings and acquaintances comforted Job about the evil that they ascribed to the Lord, but which the reader knows from the first two chapters was actually the work of Satan, because God Himself refused to act like Satan despite Satan tempting God twice to do so.
God gave Job twice the sizable fortune that he possessed before his trials, and Job lived a very blessed 140 years after his trial without ever being afflicted again by Satan as far as we know. It is obvious that God must have put the hedge back up to prevent a recurrence of the earlier events.
Along the way, we learned that Satan is the sickener and God is the Healer. We learned that a Messiah was coming, and that when He came, He would redeem us all from hell and sickness so that in that day (ours), the Messiah’s followers could be free from the sicknesses that Job endured. We learned that if there were only a Mediator, Job’s situation could never happen again. We have that Mediator today – the Man Jesus Christ. Job knew that Jesus was already alive but He would literally stand on the earth later. While Job got only a glimpse of Jesus in the future, we now know the Mediator – the Messiah – the Lord Jesus Christ – and we have power over Satan. Because of Jesus, no one today ever has to be “another Job.”
Job Questions and Consistent Answers Summary
The following are the questions and the final answers that were consistent with one another.
Question 1: Which parts of the book of Job contain authoritative DOCTRINE?
1F) The narrator’s parts (except when echoing someone’s perspective), God’s words, Elihu’s words and only CERTAIN parts of what everyone else said when they are confirmed elsewhere in Scripture.
Question 2: What does the phrase “Hast thou considered my servant Job” mean?
2C) Have you set your heart on targeting Job with calamities?
Question 3: Why did God tell Satan that he could afflict Job?
3G) Job had no healing covenant, and God allowed Satan limited access to Job for a limited time.
Question 4: Did Satan actually win an argument with God?
4C) No, because Satan’s argument was that Job would curse God, but he never did.
Question 5: What do the words “although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause” mean?
5E) I took down part of the hedge around Job in response to your challenge because Job has no covenant to be exempt from your actions, but he still wouldn’t give up his integrity by cursing Me. Therefore, your challenge to Me was in vain.
Question 6: What happened to Job’s hedge of protection that God had put around him?
6C) God took it down Himself, which allowed Satan to attack Job.
Question 7: Why does the Bible say that Job was not sinning when Job said that God had done the bad things to him?
7A) Job had no way of knowing that there was a personal devil, so God gave him a pass on that matter even though Job was wrong.
Question 8: Job had to repent of his words, so how could God say in Job 42:7 that Job had spoken what was RIGHT?
8C) Job was right that he needed to repent in dust and ashes, realizing that he had spoken things that were “above his pay grade.”
Question 9: Why does Job 42:11 say that the Lord had brought all the evil upon Job?
9D) The narrator is simply expressing the view that Job’s friends had without agreeing with it.
A Good Use for the Book of Job
Knowing that Satan afflicted Job, you can list Job’s ailments and know that they are the works of the devil, over whom New Testament believers have authority. Satan does not have the right to afflict you with any of these things: Sore boils from head to toe (Job 2:7), tossing to and fro at night (Job 7:4), broken skin (Job 7:5, Job 30:18), wearisome nights (Job 7:3), nightmares (Job 7:14), breaking in general (Job 9:17), multiplied wounds (Job 9:17), difficulty breathing (Job 9:18), emaciation (Job 10:10-11, Job 16:8, Job 19:20), biting yourself (Job 13:14), weariness (Job 7:3, Job 16:7), unnatural wrinkles (Job 16:8), dim eyesight from sorrow (Job 17:7), bad breath from your illness (Job 17:1, Job 19:17), skin worms (Job 7:5, Job 19:26), shaking from fear (Job 21:6), faintheartedness (Job 23:16), pain in the bones at night (Job 30:17), bowels boiling [probably diarrhea or something similar] (Job 30:27), blackened skin (Job 30:30), and overheating (Job 30:30). If you experience these things, you know that Satan is their source, and you can take authority over his works!
A Final Reminder
NONE of the answers to the questions above changes the fact that you cannot be another Job today. Satan has no right to have a field day with you under the New Covenant. Jesus NEVER “allowed” Satan to continue his works in the lives of anyone who came to Him to be set free from them! And today, the issue is what WE allow, not what GOD allows, given that WE have authority over Satan.
Even if you take an “old school” position on Job, you have to agree that there can never be another case like Job’s case today because of the covenant under which we live. In other words, even if you think that God was bragging to Satan about Job and deliberately had Satan afflict Job to prove his character and show him off as a trophy, you must realize that there is ZERO chance of that ever happening under our New Covenant under which you are redeemed from Satan’s power (Colossians 1:13). Satan only had leverage because God had never made a healing or protection covenant with Job or anyone else at the time. If Job had even been under the Law of Moses, he could have claimed exemption successfully by taking God at His Word about being our Healer.
Thus, while the book of Job makes for some interesting conversations, the issues covered in this discussion don’t change your redemption from Satan and His kingdom no matter which answers you might have given to any of the questions above. ANY Bible teacher who knows what he’s talking about will tell you that under the New Covenant, you CANNOT be “another Job!”
See also:
Objection: Job Was a Godly Man, Yet God Let Him Get Sick
Objection: God Gives and Takes Away