Dr. Thomas Schreiner · The Master's Seminary · 24 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Thomas Schreiner, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Wisdom literature can seem hard to place in the Bible's storyline. Dr. Schreiner locates it under the kingship of God: the fear of the LORD is what living under his rule looks like. Then he walks through Job: the heavenly scene, the tests, the friends, Elihu, and the LORD's answer from the whirlwind. Listen for the difference between getting an explanation and meeting God.
Wisdom literature has always been a challenge for biblical theology: how does it fit a theme like covenant or kingdom? Schreiner argues it fits with God's kingship. The fear of the LORD, woven through Job, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs, is how we live under Yahweh's lordship; wisdom is what everyday life under God's rule looks like. Song of Songs and the Psalms will need their own treatment. Wisdom also knows that life is complex and refuses simplistic answers: monolithic answers that masquerade as wisdom are foolish, and we trust the Lord even without all the answers. Schreiner adds a lesson from his own student days: the more you study, the more questions you find, and the main things stay clear.
The prologue calls Job righteous and blameless, which does not mean perfect. A blameless man is a righteous man who dealt with his sin God's way, offering sacrifices when he sinned. Luke describes Zechariah and Elizabeth the same way, blameless and walking in the Lord's commandments, and Zechariah sins in that very chapter.
The opening chapters pull the curtain back on heaven, and we learn something Job never knew. Satan is present in the heavenly scene, and the narrator shows no interest in explaining why; we are simply not told. Satan's charge is that Job is, in effect, a health-and-wealth believer: he follows God because God has built him a comfortable life.
The affliction is not the Lord's idea in the first instance; it is Satan's. Yet nothing happens to Job apart from God's permission, and permission, Schreiner says, is a fine word here, for it is God's will. God is the ultimate cause and Satan the intermediate cause, and their motivations run opposite: Satan wants to destroy Job, God wants to strengthen him. Job passes the first test praising God, and when Satan returns in chapter 2 to strike his body, Job still does not sin. The book is explicit that his sufferings were not due to his sin, and just as explicit, speaking of all the evil the LORD had brought upon him, that God is finally sovereign over it.
Proverbs says the lot is cast into the lap and every decision is from the LORD, and Schreiner presses the point: there is finally no random event in the universe. The Hebrews thought of all of life this way; even the weather does not operate apart from God's will. At the end of the book Job is restored. That is no promise for every case in this life, but ultimately it will be well for the righteous.
The first lesson of the book is that the godly may suffer. Schreiner tells of a gifted young man dying of cancer whose church taught that healing depended on his faith, so that even saying goodbye to his wife and children was forbidden as unbelief, and he died without that farewell. At his death a godly doctor spoke Job's own confession, that the LORD gives and the LORD takes away and his name is blessed, and the man's pastors said they did not believe it. Job says what such shepherds will not: sometimes the righteous suffer, and God remains God.
Job wishes he had never lived, and the lecture insists this is not wrong to say. He is not proposing to end his life; he is saying that life has become that hard, and there are seasons when the godly feel it. God gives grace and strength, and he permits his people honest lament.
The friends' counsel is simple arithmetic: you have sinned, and if you repent you will be restored. Job knows he has done nothing to warrant this suffering, and he is right. So he asks for a court date with God, yet admits the problem: God so terrifies him that he could not speak in the courtroom. Schreiner reads Gerhard von Rad approvingly on this point, that Job claims no sin grievous enough to explain such severe suffering without claiming to be sinless at all, while warning that von Rad's larger critical program has to be sifted.
Job begins to see that the wicked often prosper. Meanwhile the dialogues escalate: the more Job defends himself, the angrier the friends grow, until they are inventing charges and simply trying to win the argument. But Job sins too. He crosses the line when he tells God that what has been done to him is unfair and unjust. He is a godly man, and he goes too far.
Job 28 teaches that true wisdom cannot be discovered or purchased by human beings: the fear of the Lord is wisdom. There is no neatly packaged answer to suffering. Sometimes people suffer because they have sinned; often we have no idea why something happened. Schreiner speaks of a severe accident in his own family and of resting, without a formula, in the God who is in charge, while granting that asking why is no sin.
Elihu is the hardest figure in the book to interpret. At times he sounds like the friends, calling Job a rebel; at times he anticipates what God himself will say. The narrator, who plainly evaluates the three friends, never tells us what to think of Elihu. Schreiner's own solution, a minority view, is that Elihu is partly right and partly wrong.
God answers Job with questions: have you commanded the dawn, do you comprehend the heights and depths, light and darkness, the weather, do you lead out the stars, feed the lions and the ravens, attend the mountain goats and the deer giving birth, the wild donkey's freedom, the wild ox's strength, the ostrich's speed and folly, the horse's majesty, the eagle's soaring? The point: God comprehends the mysteries of the whole creation, and Job does not. Job's sin was condemning God in order to defend himself, telling God how to run the world, the very sin suffering tempts us toward, and God forgives him. Behemoth, in the reading of Duane Garrett, Schreiner's Old Testament colleague, stands for the wildness and ferocity of the animal world; and Leviathan, Garrett and Robert Fyall argue, is no mere crocodile but a fire-breathing, supernatural dragon, a figure of Satan. God alone manages the chaotic powers, God will bring righteousness to its triumph, and the part of the righteous, even when that involves suffering, is to trust his wisdom and goodness rather than challenge his justice.
Job asked for a meeting, and he got one: the Lord himself came. Job confesses that he had heard of God with his ears, and now his eyes have seen him; he has seen the king in his beauty, the very phrase behind this course's book. That is the book's answer to sufferers: what they ultimately need is not an explanation but a personal encounter with God. Schreiner weighs the alternative answer, that God simply is not in control and only grieves alongside us, and finds it no final comfort; even unbelievers who cry out why sense intuitively that God could have stopped it. He is in control, and what strengthens his people in suffering is God himself: meeting him, knowing him, loving him.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twelve are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. How does wisdom literature fit into biblical theology, on Schreiner's argument?
2. What does it mean that Job was blameless?
3. What is Satan's charge against Job in the heavenly scene?
4. Whose idea is Job's affliction, and how is God involved?
5. When the book closes, what does Schreiner say sufferers ultimately need?
6. What does the lecture draw from the lot cast into the lap in Proverbs?
7. What does Job teach that the dying man's pastors refused to say?
8. How does the lecture treat Job's wish that he had never lived?
9. What is the friends' message to Job, in a sentence?
10. Where does Job himself cross the line?
11. What is Schreiner's view of Elihu?
12. In the reading of Garrett and Fyall, what does Leviathan stand for?
All twelve correct. Lecture 12 is complete.
The friends came with a formula and lost touch with the man in front of them. When suffering strikes someone near you, what would it look like to sit with them the way this book, and not the friends, teaches?
Job says life is so hard he wishes he had never lived, and the lecture calls that honest lament, not sin. Where have you treated honesty with God as forbidden, and what would praying that honestly look like this week?
God's answer to Job was himself, not an explanation. Think of your hardest season: how would it have changed things to seek the meeting more than the reason?
Job 42:5, the sufferer's arrival: he had heard of God with the hearing of the ear, and now his eyes have seen him.
The lecture's own recommendations: Robert Fyall's study of Job, Now My Eyes Have Seen You, and the fuller discussion, with the Garrett passages the lecture reads out, in The King in His Beauty.