Lecture 24: The Whirlwind and the Wise King: Job Concluded, Proverbs Opened

The lecture, section by section

1. Where the book stands

   The frame is the final author's work: the prologue of chapters 1 and 2 and the epilogue from 42:7, which give the reader what no speaker inside the drama possesses. Job is tested because he is righteous: Satan's charge is that Job serves God only for what he gets, and that stripped of blessing he will curse God to his face, which Job never does. But the friends' syllogism, God protects the righteous and strikes the wicked, so the sufferer must be a sinner, is a syllogism Job himself had accepted, and when his own righteousness collides with it he flips the conclusion: I am righteous and suffering, therefore God is unjust; and to establish his righteousness before his friends he begins to speak unrighteously of God. Chapter 28, whether Job's own meditation or the author's placement, has already asked where wisdom can be found, not with the friends, but with the Lord and in fearing him, before chapters 29 to 31 close Job's protestation of innocence: the words of Job are ended.

2. What was Job's disease?

   Interpreters ancient and modern have tried to diagnose the sickness, smallpox, elephantiasis, one skin condition or another, and Essex sides with the majority: no exact diagnosis is possible. The text gives boils from head to foot and the symptoms of intense, loathsome affliction, an infliction nearly worse than death, which is why Job pleads to die; Satan brought it and God would heal it, and that is all the reader needs. The pastoral aside: nearly everyone will someday know pain that makes death look preferable, and Job's misery was compounded by seven silent days of visitors followed by their diagnoses, for few things worsen suffering like other people explaining what you did to deserve it.

3. Elihu the enigma

   Elihu, silent until chapter 32, erupts in four discourses, and the narrator introduces him as an angry young man: angry at Job for justifying himself before God, and at the three friends for condemning Job without an answer. Because 42:7 rebukes only Eliphaz and his two friends, some have made Elihu God's spokesman; but then why must God still speak?, and the epilogue's silences prove little, since Satan and Job's wife also go unmentioned. The remaining options: a preparer of the way for Yahweh's speeches (Hartley, Atkinson, Zuck); a further merely human counselor no more divine than the three; or, with Alden, no real contribution either way. Elihu has genuine insights: God is not silent but speaks through dreams and pain; God is just; God is sovereign; it is good to humble oneself; and, his freshest note, God may use suffering not to punish but to teach, keeping a man from pride and the pit. Yet he too finally roots Job's suffering in sin, if not in acts then in a root of pride, and Essex leans to the third reading: Elihu penetrates no further than the friends, for he lacks the one thing the reader has, the prologue, and the wisdom must come from God himself.

4. Out of the whirlwind

   Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Job had demanded to bypass his friends and have it out with God, to march into heaven and instruct him; now heaven has come to Job: gird up your loins like a man; I will ask you, and you instruct me. The questions begin at creation, where were you when I laid the earth's foundations, shut in the sea, appointed the stars?, and run through providence: who feeds the lion and the raven, waters the desert, leads out the constellations night by night, Essex's summary: taking care of the world 101. The first round closes, will the faultfinder contend with the Almighty?, and Job's first answer is the right one: behold, I am insignificant; I lay my hand on my mouth.

5. Power to match the plan

   The second speech pushes further: will you really annul my judgment? Will you condemn me that you may be justified? Do you have an arm like God, and can you thunder with a voice like his? It is one thing to have a wise plan; it is another to have the power to execute it, and the parade of Behemoth and Leviathan, beast like the hippopotamus, monster like the crocodile, creatures that pagan mythology used to represent the powers of the gods, whatever their precise zoological identity, which Essex cheerfully leaves to the scientists, presses one question: can you control them, Job? Job's answer opens the resolution: I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted; your power matches your wisdom.

6. Job 42:6: what did Job repent of?

   I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes: the verbs lack an object, and three readings compete. The first, allied to the Elihu-as-spokesman view, finds a previous hidden sin of pride that the suffering was sent to expose; Essex calls this reading far too much: 1:1 and 1:8 declare Job blameless and upright with no hint of hidden sin, and the prologue is explicit that Job suffers because he is righteous, not because he is a sinner. The third, newer reading, held with reservations by Andersen and Atkinson, hears no repentance at all: I am consoled upon dust and ashes, a deepened fear of the now-seen God without any sin confessed. Essex stands with the majority evangelical reading between them: Job did not suffer for sin, but in his suffering he sinned, going too far, defending his own integrity by attacking God's, saying in effect, if I am right, God is wrong, when chapters 1 and 2 show that both were right. Having heard by the ear and now seeing, Job genuinely repents of those words, and learns the lesson of the wise man: fear God and trust him even in suffering.

7. Who, not why

   God never tells Job why he suffered; the reader knows this instance, Satan's attack on a righteous man, but the book refuses to make that a template: Essex cannot blame Satan for the flu that hit him two straight finals weeks in seminary, and neither can anyone else read their own trials off Job's. What God reveals is not the why but the who: I am the God of wisdom and the God of power; can you trust me? Job does not explain why the righteous suffer; it shows how a wise man suffers: with complete confidence that God knows what he is doing, fearing and trusting the Lord who runs the world he questions. And that is why the book is in the canon: the righteous can learn Job's wisdom from Job's ordeal before their own arrives, which is far better than learning it in the hospital.

8. Preaching Job

   Because the wisdom is the whole book, extracting pieces risks doing exactly what the three friends did: presenting a fragment as the whole counsel. Essex's own practice is to preach the entire book in a single message; a fuller series of five or six works too: the prologue, Job and the friends, chapter 28, Elihu, the speeches of Yahweh, and the lessons, and it is wise to show the congregation 42:7 early so they read the friends knowing God will call them wrong. Verse-by-verse through all forty-two chapters is a task for the rare preacher, and it demands real theological acumen: even a beloved line like, when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold, is at root confidence in Yahweh, true against the wider canon, yet nested among Job's overreaching words, so context governs what may simply be quoted. The pastoral charge is unqualified: in thirty years of ministry Essex has used Job in counseling more than any other book, sufferers bring it up themselves, and one longtime member told him he was the first pastor she had ever heard preach it, freeing her at last to talk about it, though she added the humbling question, have you ever suffered as long as I or Job? Preach Job within your first three years, because the counseling will not wait.

9. Proverbs: whose proverbs, and when

   The Hebrew title comes from 1:1, the Proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, and the book itself shows the label covers a Solomonic core rather than every word: fresh headings at 10:1 and 25:1, the words of the wise from 22:17, and the closing words of Agur and Lemuel, debated to this day as other names for Solomon or other wise men. The note at 25:1 is the anchor for dating the book: these also are proverbs of Solomon which the men of Hezekiah king of Judah transcribed, placing that collection late in Hezekiah's reign, plausibly around 690 BC, after the Assyrian crisis of 701 left leisure for scribes. So the materials date from Solomon while the finished book, with its long introductory exhortation and two-chapter conclusion supplied by a later God-raised wise man, cannot be earlier than Hezekiah, the same distinction between the date of events and the date of composition met in Job.

10. Court, farm, and the liberal source hunt

    Some proverbs breathe the court, take away the wicked from before the king, do not claim honor in the presence of the king, and others the farm, I passed by the field of the sluggard, and liberal form critics parlay the mixture into competing sources. The biblical answer is simpler: the source is Solomon, a king who, like his shepherd-king father, spoke from more than one world; the text never records what he was watching when a proverb formed, only that God gave him the mind to see these slices of reality. Essex's phrase for each proverb: a God-directed slice of reality.

11. Not a secular book

    Against the charge that Proverbs is secular wisdom lightly sprinkled with Yahweh, the facts run the other way: roughly ten percent of the sentence proverbs in chapters 10 to 29 invoke Yahweh or God by name, the book's own maxim opens it, the fear of Yahweh is the beginning of knowledge, and the God of Proverbs is sovereign, Creator of world and man, the blesser and curser of men, and the judge before whom all conduct comes. Set in a chart beside Deuteronomy and Isaiah, the revelation of God in Proverbs matches the Torah and the Prophets point for point: the framework is covenantal Yahwism, not Egyptian or Mesopotamian wisdom with a religious veneer. The liberal reconstruction, Israel borrowing the ancient Near East's wisdom tradition and infusing it, founders on 1 Kings 3 and 4: God gave Solomon wisdom surpassing all the sons of the east and all Egypt; the pagan sages, working from natural revelation, could reflect fragments of the design without penetrating its God-given nature. And the modern parallel cuts uncomfortably close: the Christianized self-help book, the world's latest program with verses attached, is precisely what Proverbs is not, and what its preachers must not produce.

12. The portrait of the wise man

    Five emphases characterize the wise: diligence, over against the sluggard, for laziness is a species of folly; controlled speech, the tongue watched so that words help rather than wound, even a fool who keeps silent is counted wise, but the fool cannot stay silent long; humility; a governed temper; and joy. And the wise man knows he lives not only before God but among others, righteous and wicked alike, which is why the speech, the humility, and the temper matter: they are the difference between neighbors at peace and neighbors made enemies, and the wise man does nothing to make his neighbor an enemy.

13. Wife, children, king, neighbor, money

    Proverbs addresses the whole household of life. The wife is both given by God and chosen by the man, and she will be either a blessing or a burden, a help or a hindrance; the young man's first great decision is here, and Essex adds the sober seminary observation that a wife can be the reason a man leaves ministry or the reason he finishes at all, so know what you need and trust God for exactly that. Children require both the rod and the counsel: Proverbs is not merely the book of discipline but of encouragement, teaching and, when needed, a lesser pain now to prevent a greater pain later. The king is to be honored, and chapter 31 charges the king himself not to spend his strength on wine or women but to seek the good of those he rules. Neighbors are to be kept at peace; money is to be earned by work, invested wisely, given generously, never hoarded.

14. A book for young leaders

    The structure ahead will show that Proverbs is written to the young, naive son, and since the proverbs come from Solomon the king, the son is assumed to be headed for leadership: a young man whom God has called to lead, needing his heart set on acquiring wisdom before the proverbs themselves will do him any good, which is why the first nine chapters are exhortation rather than proverb. The application to a room of seminarians writes itself. Bibliography: Murphy's Word Biblical Commentary, the lifetime fruit of a moderately liberal Catholic scholar, is nonetheless the best introduction to the exegetical issues; Garrett and Kidner are the excellent evangelical exegetical works; and two brand-new expositional volumes, Dr. Mayhue's Practicing Proverbs and Koptak's NIVAC, round out tools now fully sufficient for preaching the book.

1. Job defended his own integrity by attacking God's, and Essex names that the sin committed in suffering. When pain presses you, which do you find easier to surrender: your comfort or your claim to be in the right against God?

2. God answered Job with who he is rather than why it happened, and it was enough. Is it enough for you? What would change if the aim of your prayers in suffering shifted from explanation to trust?

3. Elihu had true insights wrapped in a wrong conclusion. How do you weigh counsel from people who are partly right, and what protects you from either swallowing or dismissing them whole?

4. Essex urges preaching and studying Job before the hospital, because the counseling will not wait. Whose suffering are you presently walking alongside, and what from Job could you actually bring them without becoming a fourth friend?

5. Proverbs' wisdom is God-given, not baptized self-help, and Essex warns against the Christianized program with verses attached. Where do you see that trade happening around you, and how would you tell the difference in your own reading?