When Friends Become Accusers (The Book of Job Pt. 4) | Ep. 82
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Jeremy: [00:00:00] Well, I wasn't the biggest guy when I was growing up, and this really became a problem, I don't know, around middle school,
when I realized that a lot of other kids were a lot bigger than me. And that can become a problem when kids realize that they are bigger than you, stronger than you, seem to have an advantage over you.
And I had to figure out a solution, as every smaller kid does. And my solution was to have a best friend who was 6'4" in seventh grade, and he happened to be really tall and really strong, and that was a guy that I hit it off with, and we were close friends. And that helped me quite a bit as I tried to make it through middle school and, uh, a little bit in high school, but primarily in, in middle school.
It was helpful to have a very large friend. Now, it's interesting today, many years later, to be a dad of five kids and to walk with them through their own growing journeys, their own challenges that [00:01:00] they face, and theirs are different than mine. For example, I have produced a child who is 6'4", just something I, I can only wish, right?
But he is, and so he doesn't have the same challenges that I had, but he has his own, and each of them do. And I've had to explain that, you know, these challenges that you have when other kids are mean to you or they do these things that, that hurt you, those don't really go away, right? I mean, we know as adults, like, yeah, they change, they morph, but the people who want to be bullies are still gonna find ways to be bullies.
And people who wanna hurt you are still gonna find ways to hurt you. You can't really escape this once you graduate, and there's no age where you are now exempt from being treated in this way. Well, today we're continuing in our series called Job in Exile. This is based on, Dr. David Gushee's upcoming book, and it's a deconstruction-focused [00:02:00] look at the Book of Job.
Want to read a great quote that Dr. Gushee has that sets up today's subject well. He says, "For Job, God is like the playground bully, while the community is like the bully's gang, free to finish off what the bully started." If you've read the Book of Job, you understand where this is coming from. And yet, it does kind of sound shocking to talk about God and the people in this way.
But Job thinks that God has been attacking him unjustly. That's his stance throughout the book. But his friends think that God has been punishing him justly. Like, there is a cause and effect here. And so Job needed a big friend. He needed someone who would stand up to the bully for him, and instead, his friends joined the bully's side.
And you can imagine the [00:03:00] pain that that adds to this. So today's episode is called When Friends Become Accusers
I've never shared this with anybody publicly If this was SportsCenter, that would be like such a hot take. Skip Bayless would have no idea. Stephen A. Smith would have no idea what to say if you drop that down. That is so good. The joke I always say is like, "How'd you learn so much?" Gotta drink a lot.
Resistance to change is hurting the church. I'm not in the camp that God has a penis or a vagina or a body at all. I'm in the camp that God is a universe spirit. This is the strangest podcast that I have been on. I don't even know what to do. I'm kind of geeked up about this wine. So this is my second glass, and it delivers a little more of a punch than I expected.
So if I get a little loopy, it's your fault. You told me to drink on this show. I will also say as a confession, I am a lightweight. So I've had like three sips of this wine, and I'm already feeling it. So this is fun. You've uncovered the mystery. You've exposed the formula. You've just [00:04:00] duct-taped together a number of things that aren't normally hanging out together, and I'm here for it.
We're gonna sit down at table, we're gonna have a glass of wine and some food, and we're gonna talk about the beauty of Jesus. Thanks for what you're doing with this podcast and for the creative way you're doing it, and the beautiful, positive spirit in which you're doing it. I really appreciate this venue, what you're doing.
It is fun, and yet you dig into the deep stuff. I've heard about your podcast for a long time, and I love that you're a pastor and that you explore the world of faith through wine. That's very unique. I never thought of church history in terms of wine drinkers. I love this question. You had me with herbaceous notes, I want you to know.
I'm ready to just stay here and live in the wine tour. I will never forget the first time I bought a bottle of wine by myself, which was yesterday. If you're familiar with Drunk History, I thought it's like drunk theology. So I, oh. I got a little spicy there. It's the peach wine. Apparently the wine is... [00:05:00] But here we are.
Here we are. Here we are. No, it's wine, Jeremy. I'm an emotional guy. Paired with a half a glass of wine, I'm beet red, sweating, and about to cry here. By the way, drinking this Pinot Grigio at 3:00 in the afternoon is making me even more direct in my communication than I normally would be. I know why you had your guest drink wine.
It makes sense now. Yeah. I get it. A little bit of liquid courage here to unleash the beast. I think you've got a good podcast. Th- throwing the wine bit in there, that's nice. Cabernet and pray, yeah.
Jeremy: Well, like we do each week, I wanna let you know what I'm drinking in today's episode. I have got a 2022, this is a Unanime Gran Vino from Escota Vineyards. This is a red blend from Argentina,
This is primarily Cabernet Sauvignon. It's also got Malbec, Cab Franc, and Petit Verdot in it as well. Just a nice blend of all of these. And I often get people who are like, "I don't know what to say [00:06:00] when I'm drinking a wine. I don't know what I'm looking for, how to describe it." And some- sometimes our guests will say that on the episodes, like, "I don't know what to, to say about this."
I came across a quote this week that I thought might be helpful for some of you. This is just a fun, easy way to think about describing what you're getting in a glass of wine. This comes from Elizabeth Schneider. She says, "In my mind, there are four basic categories to think about when you're smelling wine."
Okay, four things: fruity stuff, herbs and spices, outdoor smells, and additions from the winemaker. Okay? It's totally different-- This is not the formal way that they train you to do this, but I think this is a fun way that might help some of you to figure out how do you wanna describe this. And so I'm gonna run today's glass, , through that filter.
So okay, fruity stuff, I would say I'm getting blackberry. That's the dominant fruit note that I get in this. Herbs and spices, I'm getting black pepper, and so that, that would be that category. [00:07:00] Outdoor smells, I would say tobacco and leather. And then additions from the winemaker, I would say vanilla, and this comes from aging in French oak.
And so maybe that's helpful for you, maybe it's not. If it's not, just enjoy the glass of wine you're having. But it's just another way to think about explaining what's in your glass. But in particular, today's bottle feels appropriate for what we're gonna talk about on today's episode. Unanime comes from the Latin word unanimis, which is a word that refers to a group of people who share the same opinion or have the same view collectively.
Now, we tend to think of that as a good thing, right? Of course, it would be good if everybody agreed. But today we're gonna see why it's not necessarily a good thing just because a group agrees with one another. Now, I wanna also invite you, as we get into this episode, to pour a glass with me. [00:08:00] The oldest thing that the church does is share a cup.
Somewhere along the way, we turn that into a checkpoint. But this is a table with no fence around it. So bring your questions and bring your doubts, 'cause you are welcome here. Cheers.
Well, today we're going to look at a big chunk of the Book of Job, essentially chapters 4 through 25. Now, if you've been following with me this lo- this far in the series, you're like, "Whoa, we've been doing little bits." Yes, I know, but the majority of the book is Job's friends going off on him, and so really we're gonna summarize that with a few examples throughout these different chapters today.
We're asking the question each of these weeks: what is the Book of Job attempting to teach us? And like we've seen, this is a book that refuses to [00:09:00] fit nicely into one single interpretation, and many have tried. And perhaps that's your goal as we work through this, but you're gonna realize continually it's not easy to do.
Job is, is so nuanced, so beautiful, so messy, so profound, and that's one of the reasons I love this book. And so I wanna begin in Job 4:1. "Then Eliphaz the Temanite replied to Job: 'Will you be patient and let me say a word? For who could keep from speaking out? In the past you have encouraged many people; you have strengthened those who were weak.
You-- Your words have supported those who were falling. You encourage those with shaky knees. But now when trouble strikes, you lose heart; you are terrified when it touches you.'" So we learn that Job was a spiritual leader in his community. That's what his friend is playing on here. You used to be the [00:10:00] guy.
He was the one who helped others get back in line. But we know from the beginning of the story, he did that from a place of privilege, right? He had everything. Everything worked out for him. That is the posture in which he would offer that kind of advice. And now Eliphaz is doing the same thing to him.
He's expecting Job to get his act together, snap out of it, you know, get back in line to the way things used to be. He wants him to return to the certainty that Job used to have in what we're calling a just world theology. There's a certain way all this works, and you need to go back to believing it. But Eliphaz is speaking as a non-sufferer to someone who is suffering deeply.
And this is one of the challenges that often emerges with religion, is that you can have a non-sufferer trying to, to give advice to someone [00:11:00] deep in the midst of their own suffering. This is when the strong and the blessed offer comfort to the weak and the miserable. We can give them platitudes and ideas that are separated from real lived experiences, things we've read about, things we've heard, things we've grown up believing are true.
And Eliphaz embodies a religious worldview that relies on a just world theory. He's not experiencing the same world as Job, and so his words will fall flat on Job's ears and on Job's lived experience because it does not meet him where he actually is. But Eliphaz, like any good religious leader, has a secret weapon.
He's got that go-to verse, that go-to argument, right? That, "Oh, as soon as I use this one, I'll shut down any opposition. There is no coming back from this." In [00:12:00] Job four, seventeen, he says, "Can a mortal be innocent before God? Can anyone be pure before the Creator?" Oof, sounds so good. This is his question to break down any of Job's arguments here.
This is the natural result of a just-world theory. Bad things are happening to Job, therefore Job did bad things. It's as simple as that. Now, this logic may have been used on you if things in your life fell apart. "Well, you know, the reason you're going through this is, like, there's some connection there because this happened.
This is the natural way the world works." And for Christians reading this, we have some other examples that probably pop into my- our, our minds as we think about this. We tend to think of the Apostle Paul, right? In Romans 3:23, "For everyone has [00:13:00] sinned; we all fall short of God's glorious standard." Isn't that the same thing?
Isn't that what we're seeing, that this is a theme throughout the scriptures, that we're all like this? Uh, except it doesn't really fit to the story of Job. Because I wanna remind you, the premise of Job, we, we saw this in week one, this is how the book begins. Job 1:1, "There once was a man named Job who lived in the land of Uz.
He was blameless, a man of complete integrity. He feared God and stayed away from evil." See, for this story, the idea is that Job is, in fact, blameless. He is a person of complete integrity, and this view has both the narrator's authority and God's authority, as we're gonna see at the end of the book. So this argument doesn't actually fit on Job at all.[00:14:00]
Now, Job calls out his friends throughout this book for their failure to be there with him, to walk with him, to meet him where he actually is. Notice what he says in chapter six, verse 14. "One should be kind to a fainting friend, but you accuse me without any fear of the Almighty. My brothers, you have proved as unreliable as a seasonal brook that overflows its banks in the spring when it is swollen with ice and melting snow.
But when the hot weather arrives, the water disappears. The brook vanishes in the heat. The caravans turn aside to be refreshed, but there is nothing to drink, so they die. The caravans from Tema search for this water. The travelers from Sheba hope to find it. They count on it, but are disappointed. When they arrive, their hopes are dashed.
You too [00:15:00] have given no help. You have seen my calamity, and you are afraid." This is awesome 'cause this is Job giving it right back to his friends. They are leveling it all at him, and he's leveling it right back at them. And notice his argument, "You are afraid." You might think, "Afraid of what? What, what would his friends be afraid of?"
Well, there's a few things this might be. They might be afraid that God will punish them if they get out of line like Job, right? So they don't wanna join Job in that. They don't want God to treat them the same way. They might be afraid that they're gonna lose their own conventional theology. They have a way of believing that the world's gonna work out, and it works for them.
They like it. It's comfortable. It gives them certainty, and they might fear that they're going to lose that. Or maybe they're gonna lose their confidence that this will never happen to them [00:16:00] because they are smug in that confidence that this is only a Job thing. This would never happen to people like them.
The Christian theologian Samir Yadav says, "The problem with Job's abasement is that if it is truly unmerited and truly an experience of the sort that warrants the despair Job expresses, then it can strike anyone, anywhere. This would force Job's friends to recognize themselves as inhabiting the same uncontrollable and chaotic world that Job inhabits as one that makes them equally vulnerable to his fate, and this terrifies them."
Right? The closer they get, the more they realize Job's not exceptional in this regard, that this is something that could easily happen to them, and they are likely afraid. And Job is pointing that out, [00:17:00] that you are not with me because you're afraid this is gonna happen to you, and you cannot face that reality.
And so it's easier to blame the person and to move away and to tell ourselves a story, right? That's just them. That's not gonna be us. We would never go through that. Now, this complaint that we hear from Job here is one of the most common things that I hear from people today. I hear stories every week from people in the church who realize that the support they thought they had wasn't actually there when they needed it.
This is what Job's saying, like, "Hey, when I actually needed you, you weren't there for me." And I hear this statement over and over again. As soon as someone didn't believe the same things as their community, their friends weren't there anymore. As soon as someone didn't attend the same church anymore, their friends [00:18:00] were no longer there.
You know, it's ironic because one of the things you'll often hear preached in churches is we'll talk about the need for close relationships and the need to build that up before you need it, right? We'll say things like, "Who can you call at 3:00 AM in the morning?" And if you don't have that person, then you don't have that, that support built in.
And we often use this to support things like life groups. Uh, you need to invest in a life group before you need it. And, and I admit to you, I've, I've preached these sermons for many, many years. I practiced this. I was in life groups throughout all of my time in full-time ministry, and yet here's what I can tell you.
When I resigned as a lead pastor and I stepped away from that position, I had a life group, and there were members of our life group that would not return our phone calls This support network that I had built up before I needed it [00:19:00] was not there when I actually needed them. It's Job's illustration of the river.
It's overflowing when you don't need the water, but the moment you do, there's nothing there. In fact, I had close friends in the community, people who had been at my house to hang out with me, that when, when everything went down, th- they, they changed the way they reacted to me. So much so that, like, some of them, uh, had subscribed to my blog so that every time I would post a blog, they would be on the email list, and they would get that.
And you can unsubscribe from that, it's just a click. But I had close friends of mine didn't unsubscribe, they marked my blog posts as spam so that it would negatively affect my writing. And, and I looked at that and I thought, "These were the people that I had built up ahead of time? These were the relationships that I had built to support me when I needed it?"
Because they [00:20:00] weren't there. It is a profound sense of betrayal when you think you have deep relationships built, but then discover they are not there when you need them the most. And this is a pain that many people who are currently in the church don't understand. And if you're in the church and you haven't gone through this kind of a moment in your life, and you think, "Oh, this is great.
All these people are great. Everything is great," you may not be able to understand the pain of someone who has gone through this only to find that the friends they thought would be there, the support network they thought they had built, was not there for them when they needed it the most. Now, I want you to notice the way Job expresses his pain to his friends.
In Job 6:27 and 28, "You would even send an orphan int- into slavery. Sell... Send an orphan into slavery [00:21:00] or sell a friend." I mean, that's crazy talk. And then the next phrase is, "Look at me." Y- you would send an orphan into slavery or sell a friend? I mean, y- you talk about a relationship eroding, this is what Job is just saying, "This is the kind of people you are."
And then he says, "Look at me." Now, this relationship, this friendship has crumbled by this point, and this point, we're only in chapter six, but I mean, it has eroded. And it also implies, based on Job's word here, that, that they're looking away from him, that they're intentionally not even meeting his gaze in this moment.
In week two, I talked about the silence of absence, and it seems that that's what he's getting from his friends here. It reminds me today of all the people who reach out in a moment of need to their friends and their family, only to [00:22:00] have them look away, only to have them turn and look somewhere else.
People who have changed their minds on something, and they reach out only to realize that their friends are not looking at them anymore. People who went through suffering and experienced this, and they reach out, and they realize their friends aren't looking at them anymore. Or I think about people in the LGBTQ+ community who come out to a friend or a loved one, only to have them look away, only to have them fail to meet their gaze any longer.
It's a profound sadness that Job is expressing here. Now, by the time we get to chapter 11, we just keep working this way through, we meet Job's friend Zophar. Now, this is not to be confused with Zoltar, who is the fortune-telling robot in those arcade games that you may remember
Zophar is a [00:23:00] friend of Job's, and he's perhaps the most insulting of Job's friends. I wanna show you the way Job-- uh, Zophar, uh, approaches Job. In Job 11:2 he says, "Shouldn't someone answer this torrent of words? Is a person proved innocent just by a lot of talking? Should I remain silent while you babble on?"
I mean, yeah, you just get the tone of this. Like, there's just open hostility from a friend, from someone that Job relied on, and yet Zophar is just giving it to Job. Now, Dr. GushƩe in the book lays out Zophar's logic in six steps, and this is a great summary of a lot of what Zophar says. But here's, uh, essentially the way it breaks down.
Step one, God is just. Right? So s- we're working on the j-just world theory here. Two, God punishes the wicked and vindicates the innocent here on Earth during their lifetimes. [00:24:00] Three, Job is being punished. Four, means Job must be wicked. Five, Job's self-defense, and especially his questioning of God, can only make him more wicked.
So six, thus God is now, uh, i-is for now going easy on Job, who deserves far worse. You catch that? That Zophar doesn't even think God's giving him adequate punishment for what he's doing. So now you see this, this friend has not... is no longer a friend. This is a full-on accuser now saying you deserve worse punishment than God is giving you, which is hard to wrap your mind around when we've looked at all of the things that Job has already lost.
But we see this same logic played out in our world today as well. Like, someone might have the observation, "Hey, it seems that queer people seem to be [00:25:00] struggling right now." And with that observation, you can have the response, "Well, that's their problem." Or perhaps, "If they would stop sinning, then they'd be fine."
It's the same logic played out today, that there's a reason why this is happening to you, and we feel like we know the reason why, and we can tell you why you're going through what you're going through. Now, eventually, his friends broaden their concern to not only Job, but to everyone that Job has influence with.
And this is, again, gonna be something very familiar to those of you who have walked through something similar. Job 15:4, "Have you no fear of God, no reverence for him? Your sins are telling your mouth what to say. Your words are based on clever deception. Your own mouth condemns you, not I. Your own lips testify against you."
So this is Job's [00:26:00] friends talking to him, and verse four is translated in different ways there. The NRSVUE says, "But you are doing away with the fear of God and hindering meditation before God." The NJPS says, "You subvert piety and you restrain prayer to God." So Job's friends, which I'm not sure if we can still call them that at this point, ex-friends is one of the phrases Dr.
Geshe uses in the book. They see him as an active threat now to the community. His words are damaging him, but his words are damaging other people's faith too. He has gone too far, and there's this sense that this is a collective public conversation happening. People are listening in. And because other people can see what Job is saying, these friends have a responsibility to publicly condemn him because they believe he's [00:27:00] having a negative influence on others.
The implication here is that there is an answer, there is a solution to Job that's available. He just needs to submit to it, right? He just needs to say yes to this solution. But because he's not accepting it, because he's not accepting that he sinned and he deserves this punishment, he's now causing other people to stumble.
And so his friends kick into this other gear of, "We have to hold him accountable to this. We have to keep him in line." Can you relate to that feeling? Yeah, I'm, I'm told this on social media at least weekly by strangers, you know, who, who threaten me of, uh, how I'm gonna be judged, you know, harshly, and God's gonna be mad at things I'm, I'm saying 'cause I'm leading people astray.
But I've also had friends tell me this from time to time. I've had family members tell me this from time to time. [00:28:00] What do you do when the people begin to r- rise up against you in this way? You see, we see the posture in which his friends are offering their advice, and I think it's pretty telling as to what is going on here.
In Job fifteen nine, notice what they say. "What do you know that we don't? What do you understand that we do not? On our side are aged, gray-haired men much older than your father." Which, curveball alert, is his dad still alive? Like, this thing comes out of nowhere. Like, they're referencing his dad as if he's still alive.
Where has he been, right? I mean, it's a little concerning that he's mentioned here but doesn't show up anywhere in the story. He's never in support of Job, right? I mean, you wonder, like, what is going on with [00:29:00] Job's family that this is a casual reference here
Now their argument is that there's something wrong with you. It's not us, Job, it's you. And we represent an entire system, and the system works, right? Our system works falsely and it works for a lot of people. You don't seem to get the me- the memo. And so Job, it's one guy going up an entire system, and the system knows better than Job.
But we must remember that this is Job's friends' attempt to defend the system. This is what they're trying to do. Because they want the system to keep working. They want the system to be valid because it works for them, and so they feel the need to defend it. As Dr. Gushee writes, "The unreflective defense of tradition can become a [00:30:00] betrayal of the tradition in the name of protecting it."
Now, sometimes when we are so focused on protecting a system, we can lose the very point of what the system was about, and that is what is happening in the Book of Job. We find a competing tension happening in the story. You have this traditionalist side that is worried about what will happen if our core beliefs are questioned, right?
What will happen if, if we make space for people to ask questions like Job is asking? So this posture often kicks into defense mode of God. Like, "God needs to be defended, and I'll be the one to do it, and I'm not gonna let you get away with the way you are blaspheming or badmouthing God. I will come to God's defense."
Which also means that this person must neutralize [00:31:00] any threat to God. Any threat to the system must be neutralized, which is why they go after Job. Now, Job's friend Bildad, great names for all these friends, makes an argument that's gonna sound also familiar to many of you and your journeys. In Job 25:5-6, Bildad says, "God is more glorious than the moon.
He shines brighter than the stars. In comparison, people are maggots. We mortals are mere worms." Have you ever sat through a church service where you were told how broken and flawed and sinful and messed up we are, and yet God is good? All right, this is a popular way, normal way that Christians talk about people.
And it [00:32:00] makes sense when we are protecting God and our system around God from people who we view as a threat. I had someone ask me about this online this week
I posted about a verse in Jeremiah, and the verse is Jeremiah 17:9. "The human heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?" And so I was talking about this verse, and someone responded to me that I don't know, someone on social media, and they wrote this.
"My question is, are people good? This idea," this verse, "is used against me as a gay man to say that what my heart wants is bad and shouldn't be trusted." See, we, we see now how these ideas are used against people. Now, these ideas [00:33:00] that by themselves can sound very moral, very noble. We're, we're just defending the honor of God and the system, and yet when you have to resort to some of these arguments to make that defense, you realize it is other people who suffer as a result of it.
Now, for anyone who loves Jeremiah 17:9, yeah, that is absolutely the way people are. We, we, we cannot be trusted. I mean, our hearts are evil. I would just like to suggest there are other passages in the Bible that seem to offer a very different perspective than that. Jeremiah 17 isn't the one definitive statement about our identity, about who we are.
In fact, just to give you one other one, Psalm 8:4-6, "What are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?" Right? What, what are we? We're nothing. Yet, here's the, the answer. "Yet you made them [00:34:00] only a little lower than God and crowned them with glory and honor. You gave them charge of everything you made, putting all things under their authority."
Doesn't sound like someone who can't be trusted to me. And, and again, that's what we have to wrestle with, is we have these sometimes competing sounding ideas that we have to learn to make sense of. See, spiritual exiles aren't worried about what's gonna happen if we challenge our core beliefs. They worry about the harm that religious tradition often has on vulnerable people.
It's a very different worry. Job has become vulnerable, and he now sees for the first time in his life how other people are made vulnerable by his way of thinking.
Now, it's worth asking [00:35:00] today whether our own leaning is to protect a system or to protect people within the system, right? Is our goal to, to defend God, or is our goal to defend people who would be harmed by this way of thinking? Because you know who loves verses like Jeremiah 17:9 out of context?
Our abusers, people who want to take advantage of other people. "Your heart is so wicked, and so are you, which means you need to rely on people like me to tell you what to do." Yeah, I'll interpret God for you. I'll tell you what the system says for you. And you can trust us, but you cannot trust yourself.
This is a system that Job is battling against. He is going up against and saying, "It is not the way God works. This is not [00:36:00] just." Now, perhaps even through all of this, you still think, "I think his, his friends are just giving him tough love, you know? I think they're, they're, they're really being there for him, and even though he doesn't wanna hear it, Jeremy, this is, this is tough love.
This is what friends do." I wanna land it with this, because this isn't just some opposition that Job is having to endure. It's not just, "Yeah, these are tough conversations, and I wish my friends were more supportive, but they're not." In fact, there's a, a verse in chapter 16 that makes a parallel to the story of Cain and Abel.
After Cain kills his brother Abel, this is found in Genesis, the text says that Abel's blood cries out to the ground. Here's the way it's worded. Genesis 4:10. "But the Lord said: 'What have you done?'" This is said to Cain. "'Listen! Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground.'" Okay? Now listen to [00:37:00] Job 16:18.
"O earth, do not conceal my blood. Let it cry out on my behalf." It's almost a direct callback to Genesis 4:10, right? That the earth has... is absorbing the blood of Job, and the earth is going to cry out on behalf. And so scholars have suggested that this implies that Job fears his community will actually kill him over his stance.
They will actually kill him over the way he is handling what has happened to him. The French philosopher Rene Girard said it like this: "Some would say that Job's life is not really threatened, and that there is no question of killing him. He's protected by his friends. This is absolutely false. [00:38:00] Job thinks they are after his life.
He expects to die soon and not from the illness. He thinks he is going to die a violent death. He imagines the shedding of his own blood." It's a powerful way to realize your friends can go to accusers to the point where they can be the death of you. I mean, they can fully accuse you to that end. Or as Dr.
Gushee says it, "In the ancient world, to be accused of subverting worship of God or the gods could get you killed. Just ask Socrates." Oh, I love that. Yeah, we, we've heard that story. And when you challenge the, the way God works, the way the system works, the system doesn't tend to put up with that for very long.[00:39:00]
And so sometimes the community itself becomes the bully. And in the process, they are the ones that then tell you that God is the ultimate one against you. And that is the majority of what we find in the chapters of the Book of Job. And so that concludes part four of our series. This one ends on a bit of a cliffhanger where you're not gonna feel resolved, you're not gonna feel like, "What do we do with that?"
We're just gonna sit in that tension for this episode. We, we have a total of eight weeks of this series, with the last week being an interview with Dr. David Gushee, the author of the book Job in Exile. And I wanna invite you, if you want to talk through these ideas with other people, there is an online community.
There's a link in the show notes. You can engage with other people in a safe space who are on the same journey. If you wanna be a part of that, that is [00:40:00] something I love giving my time to every week. It's an online community where we navigate the experiences that many of us have had with friends like these, friends who became accusers, and we had to figure out what do we do with that.
I'll see you next Wednesday on Cabernet and Pray.
