Job: Read it Slowly and Patiently
Job is a hard book
Job is not an easy book to read and understand. But with help of the Holy Spirit, the communion of the saints at New Hope and the companionship of sound commentaries, Job can be understood. Job teaches us wonderful things about God, ourselves, the world, and especially about Christ, the ultimate Sufferer.
Christopher Ash, in his commentary on Job, writes this: “The more I have bashed my head against the text of Job year after year, the more deeply convinced I have become that the book ultimately makes no sense without the obedience of Jesus Christ, his obedience to death on a cross. Job is not every man; he is not even every believer. There is something desperately extreme about Job. He foreshadows one man whose greatness exceeded even Job’s, whose suffering took him deeper than Job, and whose perfect obedience to his Father was only anticipated in faint outline by Job. The universe needed a man who would lovingly and perfectly obey his heavenly Father in the entirety of his life and death, by whose obedience the many would be made righteous (Romans 5:19).”
The book of Job does not make sense unless we read it in light of Christ, the ultimate Sufferer. Job points us to Christ and as we read Job, we are drawn to Christ more and more.
Job is a long book
Job is a long book. Forty-two chapters long. I used to skim through the middle section (chapters 3-37 where there are long exchanges between Job and his friends) which is rather confusing. After reading the first two chapters of Job, I would quickly pass by the long middle section, and then read the final section where God shows up and the story comes to a resolution.
Now this time around I have been “forced” to slow down and sit through the middle section, as we as a church are reading and praying with the Old Testament passages in the mornings. (And honestly, at first, I worried what it would be like to read through those long exchanges between Job and his friends—and then pray with the passage of the day! It’s not easy to come up with an “anchor verse” from those chapters in Job 3-37. It messes up our usual method and our normal way of doing things! And that’s what the book of Job does: undoing our safe and secure theological framework, humbling us, expanding our mind, and causing us to fall down in worship to our God whose judgements are unsearchable and whose ways are inscrutable).
Now I have come to appreciate this long and slow process of sitting through the exchanges between Job and his friends. Christopher Ash helpfully comments: “In his wisdom, God has given us a very long book and he has done it for a reason… Why? Well, maybe because when the suffering question and the ‘where is God?’ question and the ‘what kind of God…?’ question are asked from a wheelchair [as opposed to an armchair], they cannot be answered on a postcard. If we ask, ‘What kind of God allows this kind of world?’ God gives us a forty-two-chapter book. Far from saying, ‘The message of Job can be summarized on a postcard, in a Tweet, or on an SMS, and here it is,’ he says, ‘Come with me on a journey, a journey that will take time. There is no instant answer—take a spoonful of Job, just add boiling water, and you will know the answer.’ Job cannot be distilled. It is a narrative with a very slow pace (after the frenetic beginning) and long delays. Why? Because there is no instant working through grief, no quick fix to pain, and no message of Job in a nutshell. God has given us a forty-two-chapter journey with no satisfactory bypass.”
Job is a slow book
Long delays. No quick fix. That’s so counter-cultural—and so unsettling. But in order for us to receive wisdom from God, we must not hurry. We have to slow down. We need to sit and listen. We must wait and let God’s word and his Spirit do deep work in our souls.
Writing about therapy, one writer says, “Many will wonder why therapy can take so long. Why can’t pain, once understood and engaged with, allow for a speedy rewrite of a physical or mental template and thus bring quick relief? It’s frustrating." (Anyone with me here? It’s frustrating!) But then she goes on to say that it takes two to four years for a language to become personal and a part of oneself, and therapy is like absorbing a new language. “In therapy, the patient has to unlearn one way of being and develop another, more sustainable one.” Unlearn and then learn. So it is not surprising that it takes a long time. For a similar reason, the book of Job is long. We need to read it, read it all, and read it slowly.
And here are some suggestions for you as you delve into the book of Job:
Watch this video overview on Job by Bible Project: https://bibleproject.com/videos/job/
Read this article on how to read the book of Job, especially to make some sense out of the long exchanges between Job and his friends in chapters 3 to 37: https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/lost-in-the-land-of-uz
Reading through the book of Job each day alongside this online Short Commentary on Job: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/commentary/job/
I encourage you to come on a journey with Job alongside fellow sufferers of New Hope. Join us in the morning to read and pray together. And if you have any questions or prayer requests, please do not hesitate to reach out to me or any of our pastors and elders. We would love to connect with you, hear your story, pray and journey with you.