March 13, 2011

Job 42
“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees You.
Therefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.
Who was Job? No one really knows. He lived another 140 years after God restored him. He had 9 grown children before Satan killed them. He was probably at least 60 when he lost everything. So he lived to be at least 200 years old. Moses lived longer than most in his generation, and he lived to be 120. That tells me that Job lived within 500 years after flood of Noah, perhaps in the days of Abraham or Jacob. So Job probably lived long before Moses. A strong Jewish tradition holds that Moses wrote the book of Job while waiting in Midian. The location of Uz is unknown while one of the likely locations is east of Edom. Which would indicate that Job lived in a time close to the flood before the area became the desert waste land it is today. The location would also be likely if Moses wrote the book of Job, for Moses would have had access the oral tradition.
So who was Job? If he was a man who lived before the time of Moses, he would have had no written Scripture to teach him anything about what God was like. All the he would have had would have been oral traditions passed on to him from the descendents of Noah. This man who had no written Scripture, no clear revelation of God, responded to the natural revelation given to him. He responded and clung to God with what little inaccurate information which he had. Now when he gets a fuller revelation of God, when he actually sees God, he repents of his whining about God not being fair. One look was all it took. After losing everything, after all the misery and pain he was in, after the rejection of his wife, after the abuse of his so called friends, all alone in the world, one look at the glory of God and he repented! What did he see? We don’t know, but it must have been absolutely awesome as it was absolutely life changing. Will I walk through the fire to see the glory of God? What a question! But the logical answer is that it is worth it all. Indeed we serve a glorious King! Speak His glory to someone today!
--Pastor john