Job

But life doesn't work that way, even for the faithful, even in the Bible.

Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll opens the Old Testament to the final chapter of Job.

In the past few weeks, we've walked a long road with Job through loss, suffering, through hard-won surrender.

And now we arrive finally at his restoration.

Please turn with me to the 42nd chapter of Job, and I'll be reading the last eight verses of the book.

Please hold your applause.

Somebody in the first service wanted to know, do we bury Job today? Job 42, verse 10.

The Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for his friends, and the Lord increased all that Job had twofold.

Thank you so much for joining us.

We are continuing our walk through the Book of Job, and we've got a doozy today for a number of reasons.

One, because we, I think, are walking through one of the largest sections of texts we've ever tried to kind of step through on this podcast in its history.

It's not a book overview in that sense, but we are going through the argument between Job and his friends, which is, what, 30 chapters plus?

I'm terrified.

Yeah.

And so that's one reason it's a doozy.

The other reason is 'cause we're both terrified because we've spent the last couple of days tracing the argument and seeing how it ends in Elihu, who we'll get to, but he ends with all of these lofty statements that he can speak for God and that he knows why these things are happening, and he's the young one who shows up with all the answers, and then God says, "Who is this that darkens my counsel?" [laughs] And we just don't wanna be Elihu today [laughs] I think is the, like, thing we're bringing into the room, into the podcast studio, so bear with us.

Usually he is sullenly silent, but sometimes he talks, and his talk is always of religion, for Gilbert is a great Bible-reader, and when in a communicative mood, goes deep into questions of theology.

What is the sin that can get no forgiveness, he asks, and again, why did Job bemoan himself? What become of the lost tribes of Israel, he demands, becoming very scornful and irate when I can give him no answer? I'm a great sinner, he assures me, the chief of sinners I be.

Will the Lord burn me for it? When I can find nothing to say, so uneasy does his wild air make me.

he wanders off muttering.

Thank you that we can come here today and find hope and light and sunshine as we listen to your Word, as we open ourselves up to the truth as it is in Jesus.

And we pray that as we once more look into this wonderful book, in your Word, the Book of Job, that we may go away uplifted and strengthened, encouraged, and with tools to help us when trouble comes, when pain and problems come.

We ask it for Christ's sake.

Amen.

Now, in the Book of James, there's a little verse that talks about Job, and it says that you know the patience of Job.

And I think we're beginning to know the patience of Job.

We're beginning to learn a little bit about him, and we've been figuring out that he was a man who met problems, who met suffering, who met trouble with great persistence.

And the title of today's talk is Persistence in Problems or Patience in Problems.

After the easy to read version, Hiob 7, actually the name is Hiob in English.

It is written like Job, but the original name is Hiob.

People have a hard struggle on earth.

Their life is like that of a hired worker.

So he's always blaming that life is nothing, just as clouds that come and go.

All these considerations of end of the life and about death are, of course, also part for people in the dark night of the soul.

So here it is really obviously that Job is in the dark night of the soul.

Maybe, of course, in that time this word didn't exist and nobody was declaring him as someone in the dark night of the soul.

Now one of the big ideas which dominated a lot of the discussion, a lot of the discussion going forward is the word freedom.

Freedom, okay? I gave you two concepts, I gave you two ideas, yeah? The first idea is the individual righteous person, presented by Avraham Avinu, or more cosmically by the prototypical Job, E-Oiv, and there's many, many Jobs, the Gemara says there have been multiple Jobs, many, many people who could have been potentially Avraham Avinus, but the sudden guarantee, the Eivish, that only one is going to see it through until the end, and then there's the birth of a nation.

But one of the details of the story, very important to the story, is the phenomenon of exodus, of being free.

And this is very serious, very deep, very real, and very relevant.