00:00:00:39 – 00:00:22:12
Clint Loveall
Hey everybody, thanks for joining us. We continue through the book of Job find ourself today in the 20th chapter, the final speech of the second round of speeches. So this one is given by so far, interestingly enough, the last time that we know that we hear from so far, when we get to the next round of speeches, his name is absent.

00:00:22:12 – 00:00:55:53
Clint Loveall
There are some scholars that think perhaps he has a speech in there that didn’t get labeled. We can talk about that next week. But, in terms of identifying him, these are the last words we get from so far. And, you know, it’s sort of he starts off, you pay attention. My thoughts urged me to answer, because of the agitation within me, I hear censure that insults me, and the spirit beyond my understanding, answers me.

00:00:55:53 – 00:01:45:09
Clint Loveall
So here’s my wisdom job and then, really, this is not personal, but he just goes on to say, a variation of the same thing that that we know how things work. The wicked, though they may feel some joy, ultimately they’re burdened. They’re they’re punished. That God strikes them down, that their life, ultimately, though, it may have moments of success in it, is one of struggle and failure and punishment.

00:01:45:14 – 00:02:14:12
Clint Loveall
Maybe, you know, we’re jumping around here, but verse 23, God will send his fierce anger into them and reign it upon them as their food. So, so far is essentially just saying to job, job, we, we know how things are. And this is, it seems to me, Michael less personal. He he’s not he he’s not pointing this.

00:02:14:16 – 00:02:46:09
Clint Loveall
He he’s not mentioning job. He’s not mentioning his situation. We’ve seen the other friends kind of take some jabs at job that that doesn’t happen as much here as as much as he simply defends job. We you keep saying these things, but we know how it works. You know how it works that the wicked don’t prevail and by implication, the good aren’t punished.

00:02:46:13 – 00:03:02:51
Clint Loveall
And so, we we warned you going into these cycles that there is a lot of repetition. And I would say in many ways, this speech is kind of an, a new version of an old theme. And we’ve heard some of this before.

00:03:02:56 – 00:03:27:05
Michael Gewecke
I think that one of the ways that we can maybe see some of those themes in today’s text, verse 29, this is the portion of the wicked from God, the heritage decreed for them by God. And I just want to make sure that we can all see clearly how this is laid out. Right? Because ultimately, God is the one that is giving the heritage.

00:03:27:05 – 00:03:49:28
Michael Gewecke
God’s the one that’s metering out the Justin right consequence for action. And then the the portion of the wicked that the wicked are getting, what’s coming for them, that this is the argument. This is the same thing that’s being teased out in different words, right? That God is the one who is the right umpire. He’s the just judge in this circumstance.

00:03:49:28 – 00:04:11:07
Michael Gewecke
He meters out fairly to those. And so yes, even though we have to account for that, sometimes wicked people seem to have things going well at the end of the day, all of these things that we had right, this idea that, all of these things that are in their bellies, their greed won’t let them escape. There’s nothing left after they’ve eaten.

00:04:11:07 – 00:04:54:14
Michael Gewecke
Their prosperity won’t endure. So, yes, they have prosperity, but they’re not going to keep it. Yes, they’ve had good food in their bellies, but that’s just going to sour in the end. But when we see job’s response, it’s just going to highlight once again, job is not having the same argument as these friends. Ultimately, his complaint is not that God has misidentified or or that God has somehow, given an unjust punishment for the sins that Jobe knows he’s committed, that God job is making the claim here, that God is not the one doling out the the correct portion to those who are not wicked.

00:04:54:14 – 00:05:01:15
Michael Gewecke
Therefore, God is the adversary. And and that is a radically different way of understanding what’s happening here. And they’re talking past each other.

00:05:01:21 – 00:05:25:46
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think it does give Joel, an opportunity to introduce a new idea, one that I think we’ve not really seen as he responses so far. He he starts off, you know, listen carefully to my words. Let this be your consolation. Bear with me. I will speak then after I have spoken. Mark on as for me, is my complaint addressed to mortals?

00:05:25:51 – 00:05:58:52
Clint Loveall
Why should I not be impatient? Look at me. Be appalled. Lay your hand upon your mouth. When I think of it, I am dismayed and shudder seizes my flesh. Now, from this point, the interesting case that I think Joe will go on to make he is is new. It is a new wrinkle. Job has made the case that he has been unfairly suffering, that he is being punished without cause.

00:05:58:57 – 00:06:22:42
Clint Loveall
Now, in the aftermath of far argument that we know the wicked get punished, job is going to push back on that a little bit. So we begin to see this right away in verse seven. Why do the wicked live on, reach old age and grow mighty and power? Their children are established in their presence, their offspring before their eyes.

00:06:22:42 – 00:06:44:22
Clint Loveall
Their houses are safe from fear, and no rod of God is upon them. And and we will continue some of this throughout the rest of job’s response. Here, Joel was pointing out that if you consider what so far has said, it doesn’t always hold up when you look at the world, wicked people are doing just fine. In many cases.

00:06:44:27 – 00:07:09:33
Clint Loveall
Wicked people have nice houses. They have families, they live to old age, they retire with money. Even a cursory look around our old, our own world would tell us there are immoral people that do really well in the world, and the hammer of God has not found them. They have not, at least to our eyes, been punished for their actions.

00:07:09:37 – 00:07:40:30
Clint Loveall
Sometimes they do really, really well. Verse 12, they sing to the tambourine and the lyre and rejoice at the sound of the harp. They spend their days in prosperity, and they go down to share all the dead in peace. So interesting here that that Jobe now leaves his own condition to some extent and argues back directly against what Jafar has tried to say.

00:07:40:30 – 00:08:12:32
Clint Loveall
And this is not unknown in Scripture, Michael, as you know. Why did the wicked prosper this? There are voices of this question in the Psalms, in Lamentations, in the prophets. While there is certainly a general trust in Scripture that the wicked are punished, there is also a question that rises again and again in Scripture of why is it the case that sometimes that’s not what happens?

00:08:12:32 – 00:08:15:01
Clint Loveall
And Jobe Joel was giving that voice here.

00:08:15:05 – 00:08:32:46
Michael Gewecke
This is not different in substance, but it’s another theme that we see worked back in verse 19. God stores up. You say God stores up their iniquity for their children. Let it be paid back to them. So that they may know it, that their own eyes see their destruction. Let them drink of the wrath of the Almighty. The 21 is important here.

00:08:32:51 – 00:09:00:38
Michael Gewecke
For what do they care for their household after them? When the number of their months is cut off? Will any teach guard knowledge, seeing that he judges those that are on high? One dies in full prosperity, being wholly at ease and secure. So job, who loses his family first and then loses the health of his own body, and he sees God as the vengeful one in this equation.

00:09:00:43 – 00:09:22:40
Michael Gewecke
He responds and says, what good is it if you’re going to lose your family after you’re gone? What good is it the punishment that comes to you after you’re in the grave? What does it matter? Yeah. Big whoop. So? So calamity eventually gets meted out to the family. But you don’t know it because you’ve already reached the end of everything.

00:09:22:51 – 00:09:50:11
Michael Gewecke
You got a free pass? That’s an argument that I think does start creaking. Open the door of the friends. Right? I mean, ultimately it’s a gap because it’s true. There are people who don’t get what it appears they have coming to them. And when that is the case, is that a lapse of God’s judgment? Is it some that you’ve not seen far, far enough down the road?

00:09:50:22 – 00:10:02:26
Michael Gewecke
And job’s point here is I even if you want to look to the future generations, what good is that for the person who’s lived their entire life in wickedness and has never seen the fruit of it?

00:10:02:31 – 00:10:34:19
Clint Loveall
If you if you, read some of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament, particularly if you were to go to Ecclesiastes and work your way through that book, you would find that the author, who’s called, quote, health or the teacher struggles with this idea that what what does it say about the meaning of life when good or bad, you get to the end and you’re equally dead.

00:10:34:24 – 00:11:00:06
Clint Loveall
And Jobe has some of that here. If we read these last, 23 on one dies in full prosperity, wholly at ease and secure, his loins full of milk and the marrow of his bones moist. Another dies in bitterness of soul. Never having tasted of good alike. They lay down in the dust, and the worms cover both of them.

00:11:00:10 – 00:11:34:27
Clint Loveall
It is possible that that last verse can be job’s way of saying, what’s the difference? Good, bad, the bad. Get some good things in life. The good get some bad things in life. And then at the end, they’re all dead. So what does it mean? What does any of it mean? You’re just saying things that don’t help, that don’t matter, that don’t, hold up and, you know, I know your thoughts and your schemes to wrong me and Jobe here is,

00:11:34:31 – 00:11:58:48
Clint Loveall
I mean, certainly he’s been having a personal crisis. There maybe isn’t, in a sense, Michael, in which he now is also having an existential crisis as he, for the first time, is really kind of able to look beyond his own circle and realize that you. So okay, so far you’re telling me that only the only the wicked suffer.

00:11:59:00 – 00:12:23:06
Clint Loveall
I’m telling you that I’m not wicked and I’m suffering, but I’m also going to tell you that sometimes the wicked don’t suffer at all. You make no sense. You keep saying these things. You want them to be true, and they’re not true. They don’t fit with our experience. They don’t fit with our observation of the world. And, again, we are we are deep into philosophy here.

00:12:23:06 – 00:12:48:43
Clint Loveall
Or at least philosophy as the Bible might, might frame it. But these words just. Yeah, this argument of what it all means. And it’s interesting that he chooses to push back here. And so for against so far in a new in a new voice which we’ve not really heard from Jobe to this point.

00:12:48:54 – 00:13:17:09
Michael Gewecke
As Jobe represents the larger wisdom literature as a genre. I think we still have this in our culture, though we don’t know it in these terms. I think it may be more simplified is like a kind of basic common sense or something of this sort, but in wisdom literature, you have this idea that the person who knows the way that God made things to work and then does it that way will have things go well for them.

00:13:17:09 – 00:13:42:25
Michael Gewecke
It’s a very instrumentalist kind of approach that if one has the instruction manual, then a smart person takes that manual, a smart person uses the thing, uses lives in life the way that the thing was intended to be done, and then therefore it will go well for that person. And so wisdom creates this pathway in which person can can live a full, meaningful life.

00:13:42:30 – 00:14:11:58
Michael Gewecke
And the indirect or the side consequence of that way of thinking is if one gets off the well-traveled path, if one fails to live life in the well-ordered, structured way that God intended it, then calamity is to be expected. The vengeance of God would be natural. Yet the idea that the suffering that we know so well, it’s not well understood and justified as because we’ve not gone with the way that the thing was intended from the beginning.

00:14:11:58 – 00:14:32:34
Michael Gewecke
Maybe we misunderstood it. Maybe we rebelled against it. Maybe we never knew it. Whatever the case is that this is the reality. What Jobe is doing here is, in a way, undermining that entire way of thinking. In other words, there are people who are doing the exact thing they’re not supposed to do, enjoying the best fruits of life.

00:14:32:49 – 00:15:00:14
Michael Gewecke
And there are other people who are doing the exact thing that they were supposed to do. They both die, they’re both buried, and both experience the same outcome. Except his exact opposite of what it’s supposed to be. That for someone in that culture in that time is not just an affront to the idea of how things work, that this is an affront to the contract that people have with God.

00:15:00:28 – 00:15:29:45
Michael Gewecke
The idea that if I live my life in such a way, God will live by God’s end of the bargain and it’s going to come back towards me. Jobe is attacking that very idea. It’s a theological complaint that if God’s in control, which is the fundamental assumption that both parties are making jobs account, is that God is the vengeful adversary, and the friends are saying, no, Jobe, you’re a fool because God’s giving you exactly what you deserve.

00:15:29:54 – 00:15:37:07
Michael Gewecke
And I just think this is a way of unwinding that, saying that everybody would have accepted as being true.

00:15:37:12 – 00:16:12:36
Clint Loveall
And once again, I’m going to suggest that that in seeing that progression, we see the absolute, mastery of this book and the incredible insight of it, because how does that often work, Michael? We begin with personal suffering. Right? And we say this isn’t fair. And where does that usually take us next? The world is not right that my situation is wrong.

00:16:12:46 – 00:16:46:05
Clint Loveall
Right? But then we go from there to say, there are children who are hungry and there are people breaking the rules that are that are winning the game and others are getting so what has where has Jobe taken us? He’s taken us exactly on the path that suffering often leads us. We begin with our own experience, and this the sense of being wronged or the sense of unfairness in it, connects us to the deeper story of the broken world.

00:16:46:10 – 00:17:19:54
Clint Loveall
And now all of a sudden, everything looks flawed, everything looks suspect, and we are suspicious of the entire the entire narrative that says, oh no, it’s it’s all working the way it’s supposed to. And notice how Jobe ends his comment. How will you comfort me with empty? Nothing’s. There is nothing left of your answer but falsehood. Your case is hollow.

00:17:19:58 – 00:17:48:38
Clint Loveall
It has no core. It has no substance. It’s vapor. You say these words, but I know them to be wrong. And I look at the world and they don’t hold up. And you keep saying them and all I hear is blah, blah, blah, because there’s nothing to them. And I think, you know, again, I like when you have the luxury of reading job not being in a place of struggle.

00:17:48:43 – 00:17:58:36
Clint Loveall
I think you can see the journey that this author’s taking us on, and I think this particular part of it is masterful. I think, I think is incredibly well done.

00:17:58:40 – 00:18:19:39
Michael Gewecke
As we’ve said, many layers keeps on going. I’ve certainly want to point out the ways in which this argument is progressed, even if it is in some way, like waves coming back on the shore. Glad that you were with us here today. Certainly grateful to get to spend the time. Note we’ll be off tomorrow and Monday if you’re joining us live, so have a great long weekend and we look forward to seeing you all.

00:18:19:44 – 00:18:21:16
Michael Gewecke
Like subscribe. See you next.

00:18:21:16 – 00:18:22:01
Clint Loveall
Week. Thanks, everybody.