Job Teaching Activities

Hello, fellow teachers.

This is Ben Wilcox, and welcome to this supplemental teaching activities video for the book of Job.

Now, this week is structured a little differently than most Teaching with Power weeks.

Job is one sustained story.

It's one extended examination of suffering, and faith, and trust in God.

So trying to divide it into three unrelated lessons, I think would either create a lot of repetition or would leave important parts of the story out.

So instead, I'm gonna begin with suggesting, uh, one shared introduction to Job, and then give you three different lesson emphases to choose from.

Now, the first one examines whether our faith depends on immediate blessings.

The second one considers why good people suffer and how to trust God when a complete explanation doesn't come for, for why we're suffering.

And the third focuses on what Job does to endure his burdens well.

And then near the end, I'm also gonna give you one brief shared section that completes Job's story before you return to the application a- and takeaway for, for the emphasis that you decide to use.

So each lesson is designed to stand on its own, since I know that most teachers are probably not gonna have an opportunity to teach all three.

So whichever of the three lesson experiences that you choose this week, I suggest beginning with this shared introduction to the Book of Job, and its purpose is just to help students understand who Job was, what happened to him, and why his story raises such important questions about suffering and about our faith.

And for the introduction, I'd also like to give you two options.

If your students are unfamiliar with Job or you want them to spend some more time discovering the story in the scriptures, you could use the fuller search option.

If they already know the story or you wanna preserve more time for the lesson's central principle, I suggest you use the shorter, uh, summary version.

Both approaches establish basically the same essential foundation.

So to begin, you could show your students a few light-hearted pictures of people having a bad day.

I give you a few, a few examples here, but, but feel free to add some of your own if you like.

But after a few examples, you could explain that we use the phrase bad day to describe all kinds of experiences.

Uh, some bad days involve inconveniences that may even become funny later, but other experiences are not funny at all.

Some losses are so painful that they divide life into a before and an after.

And then to transition to the story of Job, you could say, "Today we're going to study a man who experienced the second kind of suffering.

In a very short period of time, nearly everything that had made his life feel safe, joyful, secure were taken from him.

His name was Job, and his story asks some of the deepest questions found anywhere in scripture.

Why do good people suffer? What happens to faith when life does not go as expected? And can we continue to trust God when we don't understand what He is allowing to happen in our lives?" Now just a brief introduction to the Book of Job.

The Book of Job is part of the wisdom literature in the Old Testament.

Rather than simply recording historical events, the wisdom books use poetry, dialogue, stories to explore some of life's most difficult questions.

Now, Latter-day scripture speaks of Job as a real person who experienced profound suffering, but his book i- is also clearly written in a poetic and highly literary form.

So the purpose of the Book o- of Job isn't primarily to tell us a story about what happened to one man.

I believe that it's an invitation to every reader to wrestle with the relationship between suffering, righteousness, and faith.

That's what I believe the author's intent is here.

The opening scene of Job presents Satan in his role as the adversary and accuser.

Now, maybe some disagree, but I feel it shouldn't be understood as a literal description o- of God making an actual wager with Satan.

[laughs] No, no, I think it's a literary technique, and it, it introduces the central challenge of the book.

Is Job faithful because he genuinely loves and trusts God, or only because God has blessed him? Before considering that question, students are gonna need to understand two things: what kind of a man Job was and what happened to him.