Offering Answers the Story Refuses (The Book of Job Pt. 6) | Ep. 85
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Jeremy: [00:00:00] How many of the ideas you have about God are actually true?
Which leads us to another question. How would you know the answer to that? How would you know which of your beliefs are true? And let's just say you conclude that whatever idea you have about God is in fact true. How would you talk about an idea about God that you had that you knew beyond the shadow of a doubt was true?
And how would that be different than the way that you would talk about an idea about God that you thought maybe wasn't true, or maybe you weren't as convinced that that was true? I'm reminded of something that Greg Boyd has written. He says, "The all-important center of the Christian faith is not anything we believe.
It's the person of Jesus Christ, with whom we are invited to have a [00:01:00] life-giving relationship." Today, we are continuing a series called Job in Exile. This is based on Dr. Gushee's book by that title. It's a deconstruction-focused look at the biblical book of Job, and we are now in part six of that series.
Today's episode is called Offering Answers the Story Refuses
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 [00:02:00] 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 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 a 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 [00:03:00] 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... But here we are.
Queer we are. Beer 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 guests drink wine.
It makes sense now. Yeah. I get it. A little bit of liquid courage here to really 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: As we kick off this episode, I wanna let you know what wine I'm drinking today. This is a 2023. This is a k- a wine [00:04:00] called San Andrea in Calais. It's a Chianti Classico from Italy. This is Italy's top wine, the Sangiovese grape. It's a red blend made primarily using this grape. And the tasting notes that I'm getting are really nice.
Some less traditional tasting notes. I, I don't get to drink Sangiovese a ton, but I'm always pleasantly surprised when I do, and, and I even thought, like, "Why don't I drink more of this?" And so maybe I need to work more of these bottles into the, the pod. But I'm getting plum, roasted almond, and a little bit of potpourri.
And so just really a fun mix of these different, uh, aromas and different tastes on the palate
And as I was researching into this winery, they are a really interesting blend of old and new. And so as we're gonna see in this [00:05:00] episode, that's often hard to mix together when you get the old and the new in there. But that's one of the things that the, these guys are focusing on. They describe their process as, quote, "A harmony between modernity and tradition."
So they're just going for it. The people making this wine, they're working in a cellar of ancient construction, aging it in French and Slavonian oak right next to modern steel and old cement vats. And so you do get this blending of the tradition with the very best of the technology and the things that we're learning modern day as well.
And so I wanna invite you as we get into this episode to pour a glass with me. The oldest thing that the church does together is to share a cup, and somewhere along the way, we turn that into a checkpoint. But this is a table with no fence around it, and so you [00:06:00] are welcome to bring your questions and your doubts, and you are welcome to join the conversation here.
Cheers.
We've been looking at the question throughout this series, what is the Book of Job attempting to teach us? And if you've been with me in the other parts, we've seen that this is a biblical book that refuses the easy interpretation. If you just wanna slap one explanation on this book and say, "This is what's going on," it's just not gonna go well.
This is not a book that lends itself very well to that approach. And we're gonna look at it, at each week is these different nuances, these different ways to understand what's going on. Now, at this point in the story, we would probably expect there to be a climax coming. Like, we've gone through all of the major elements in the story already.
We've looked at Job go [00:07:00] through all of the loss that he's gone through, and that was some of the early weeks of the series. Job's friends have all responded to Job at length about all of what they feel about what he's going through and the conclusions they have drawn from that. It's the majority of the book.
And then Job has had a chance to offer his response to his friends and everything that they've said, and we've looked at that in the previous parts of this series. But friends, we're not at the climax yet. That's going to have to wait six more chapters Today we're gonna explore Job chapters 32 through 37, and we're gonna look at this, like, in-between thing that happens in the Book of Job.
If you've read it before, you know what I'm talking about. It's not exactly what you'd anticipate if you were just trying to guess where this story goes. Now, our last part of the Job [00:08:00] series looked at Job's unwillingness to repent for something that he didn't do. His friends keep pressuring him over and over, "Job, this is you.
You did something. Own up to it." And Job triples, doubles down and he's not, he's not giving in. He is not going along with it, no matter how many times they keep saying this to him over and over again. And as we would expect, this doesn't go over well with the friends. They're not pleased that Job is not listening to them.
And so we get this great line at the beginning of chapter 32. Verse one says, "Job's three friends refused to reply further to him because he kept insisting on his innocence." I love this. "Oh, you're gonna hold to that? You're gonna keep doing that? You're not gonna listen to what we're saying? Then we're gonna take our ball and go home."
Doesn't this remind you of the [00:09:00] playground? Like, you're, you're playing with those kids, and, you know, you offend the kid, and it's like, "Fine, taking my ball, I'm going. And the game is over when I leave." Like, "We're not doing this anymore." That's the vibe I get from his friends by the time we get to chapter 32.
This is a very conditional friendship. "Unless you agree with me and my ideas about God, we can't be friends." And because there's three of 'em, you have a community represented. "Unless you agree with our views about God, you can't be a part of us." Right? And that's what we're seeing by the time we get to chapter 32.
Now, if your life has been anything like mine, you probably think, "I know a lot of people like this." Yeah, that didn't just stop, like, in ancient times. That's how it works today. These people who need you to agree with them about their [00:10:00] views of God. And, and these people, in my experience, they're fundamentally bothered when I teach a counterpoint.
When I teach something that is contrary to what they believe, different than what they believe, it inherently riles them up. And what I often get, in my experience, is that they wanna come talk to me about this. They wanna meet with me. They wanna have a dialogue, have a conversation about it. And I, I used to do this.
I used to say, "Okay, let- let's go and do that." But what I realized pretty early on is that the only purpose of this meeting is to get us to agree with one another. And if we don't agree, there is no resolution for them. They will need to keep meeting. The... It will not stop until I, I give my, my final wave of the white flag, "Okay, okay, okay.
You're right. I'm wrong. I see it your way." And short of that, there [00:11:00] is no resolution for them to find. And so what they'll do is they'll try to wear you down. And we see this is what Job's friends do chapter after chapter after chapter. "We're just gonna wear you down." And this is what I've experienced in my life as well.
Which reminds me of something called Brandolini's law. I don't know if you've ever heard of this. Here's what Brandolini's law says: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it." I think that's such a, such a great law to, to apply today The, the other way of, uh, understanding this is that, look, it takes less effort for them to keep saying what they're saying than it does for you to try to refute all of it, to go point by point and say, "Here's why I don't agree with that."
And so usually the goal is just we're just gonna wear you down. [00:12:00] We're, we're gonna make you so tired that you stop, because it takes more energy on the other side of that argument. But unfortunately for Job's friends, Job outlasts them. He, he is not worn down by their repeated attempts chapter after chapter.
He's still going strong. But fear not, because a new player emerges in our discussion for this week. Today we're gonna look at a guy named Elihu. Yeah, got a new guy entering the scene. He's not one of Job's three friends that we have seen throughout the majority of the book. So you're like, "Who, who's this new guy?
What's going on here?" I want to ch- I want you to check out the introduction to Elihu in chapter 32. This tells us volumes about who we're going to meet in our chapters today. This is Job 32, beginning in [00:13:00] verse two. "Then Elihu son of Barachel the Buzite, and of the clan of Ram, became angry." He was angry because Job refused to admit that he had sinned and that God was right in punishing him.
Yep, that seems to be the issue. He was also angry with Job's three friends. Oh. For they made God appear to be wrong by their inability to answer Job's arguments. He's mad that they didn't convince Job. Elihu had waited for the others to speak to Job because they were older than he is. But when he saw that they had no further replied, he spoke out angrily.
There seems to be, I don't know, a defining quality about Elihu. He is an angry man. Did you [00:14:00] catch that? There are four mentions in four verses about his anger. And one of the ways that Elihu describes himself is perfect for this podcast. You would think that I wrote it myself, but I did not. This is in the text.
Job 32:19, Elihu says, "I am like a cask of wine without a vent, like a new wineskin ready to burst." I love a good biblical wine metaphor as we talk theology He also uses some very funny imagery as well. And there's a hilarious line he uses in chapter 32, verses 18 and 20. He says this, "For I am full of pent-up words.
I must speak to find relief If you're catching the metaphor [00:15:00] here, it's the implication of someone who is full of gas and they need to let it out. Which, let's be honest, we've all been there. We're adults here on this podcast, right? We've all been there and we know that feeling. That's, that's what he's describing here.
Like, I've got this buildup of gas. I need to let it out. I will not find peace until I do. And that's a good description for how these chapters sound when you hear his arguments and you hear the posture that Elihu takes with Job. Now, Elihu's also announcing that he's younger than everyone else when he comes onto the scene here.
Verses six and seven in, in chapter 32, uh, he says, "I'm young and you are old, so I held back from telling you what I think. I thought those who are older should speak, for wisdom comes with age." This causes Dr. Gushee to [00:16:00] offer a humorous observation in his book about Elihu. He says, "Elihu strikes this seasoned professor as a very confident, cocky seminary student.
He thinks he knows a lot, but he knows less than he think he does." Yeah, that's, that's a good way to sum up this guy that we, we get here. Now, I'm an adjunct professor, not nearly as seasoned as Dr. Gushee, but I resonate with him on this. I have met many a seminary student that does indeed have the Elihu vibe about them.
In fact, it reminds me of someone that was in my church when I was a lead pastor. Coincidentally enough, this person had just started going to seminary and one day, a few months into that experience, he said that he wanted to meet with me to talk about some theological concerns that he had. And so I met with this guy, and I'll never [00:17:00] forget this.
He, he starts the meeting with, and he's very concerned and he's very kind of agitated. I'm like, "What's going on?" He's like, "I'm concerned about your her- hermeneutic of the Old Testament." Now, let me just say, that's not a phrase normal people make, right? And so I immediately realized this guy just learned a new word.
He's excited to use it, excited to practice it. Hermeneutic refers to the way in which you interpret something. So what he was saying to me was he was concerned about the way I make sense of the Old Testament. In particular, the way that I describe making sense of the Old Testament in light of Jesus, and I had just recently preached I think it was John 5:39 at that point that Jesus says that the point of all the scriptures is to point to him.
And so I said, "That's the way I make sense of the Old Testament. I read it through the lens of Jesus, 'cause this is what Jesus taught us to do." So here was [00:18:00] this guy, newly established in seminary, and he's got a issue with that. Like, "I got a problem with that. That's not a fair reading of the Old Testament."
So I thought, "Okay, here's, here's a way I can get us back on track. We can realize that we probably agree on more of this than, than we think." And so I brought up Numbers 31, which if you've heard me on the podcast before, I've said this is, in my opinion, probably the worst chapter in all of the Bible, and it's just a horrific portrayal of God and of God's people and of their sense of what God is asking them to do.
And so I referenced a few things in this chapter, and I said, "Hey, when you read that, does that look like Jesus to you?" Thinking he's obviously gonna say, "No, this is nothing like Jesus." And friends, he told me, "Yes. Yeah, that looks like Jesus And I remember thinking, if that looks like Jesus to you, if Numbers 31 and the [00:19:00] atrocities mentioned there look like Jesus, then Jesus can look like anything.
Jesus means nothing. And I encouraged him with that, and I tried to say, "I don't think that's at all the picture of Jesus we get in the Gospels, or the way that we have experienced Jesus today." He did not like my answer, and he m- went and met with the elders after meeting with me, and that's what seminary can do sometimes.
It can make you really convinced that I have heard this one explanation, never heard it before, but now I'm convinced that this is the right way. Now, most of Elihu's arguments are a repetition of what Job's other three friends have already said. He circles back around it because, again, he has the assumption that Job's friends couldn't persuade him, but he will.
He's gonna say it better than they said it. [00:20:00] He's gonna get that point home to Job and so he will not fail where Job's original three friends did. And so Elihu adds his own anger to it, his own perspective to many of the arguments that we've already seen in the book. Now, to be fair here, we're gonna, we're gonna throw our guy a bone.
Dr. Gushée notes that not all of what Elihu says is empty. There are some, some shreds of hope, some grains of truth, if you will. One of the things that Elihu argues is that God can use suffering as a teaching tool. This is Job 33:19-30. Listen to his argument. "God disciplines people with pain on their sickbeds, with ceaseless aching in their bones.
They lose their appetite for even the most delicious food. Their flesh wastes away, and their bones [00:21:00] stick out. They are at death's door. The angels of death wait for them. But if an angel from heaven appears, a special messenger to intercede for a person and declare that he is upright, he will be gracious and say, 'Rescue him from the grave, for I have found a ransom for his life.'
Then his body will become as healthy as a child's, firm and youthful again. When he prays to God, he will be accepted, and God will receive him with joy and restore him to good standing. He will declare to his friends, 'I sinned and twisted the truth, but it was not worth it. God rescued me from the grave, and now my life is filled with light.'"
Now, I would say that there is indeed much that we can learn from suffering. I have learned volumes out of the suffering in my [00:22:00] own life. But to say that God inflicts all of the suffering we endure upon us in order to teach us something is a very different argument. And to say that God had inflicted all of the suffering that Job experienced in order to teach Job something doesn't quite land right.
I love the way that Dr. Gushee responds to that. He says, "Instructional divine discipline as an explanation is a nice try, but it is hard to imagine Job or anyone similarly situated feeling satisfied by such an explanation. And yet we have seen evidence that Job has indeed learned some things through his suffering."
Now, [00:23:00] another thing that Elihu talks about is the need to be patient with God. In Job thirty-five, verses thirteen to fourteen, he says this: "But it is wrong to say God doesn't listen, to say the Almighty isn't concerned. You say you can't see Him, but He will bring justice if you will only wait." So he's going after Job's impatience here, right?
Now, I feel like impatience is an easy target to, to shoot at. Most of us struggle to be more patient, and most of us will spend the rest of our lives trying to be more patient with God. So we have to ask, is this Job's real issue, is that he's just not giving God enough time, that he's just rushing God too much?
As Dr. Gushie says, it is true that humans are impatient, especially when we're [00:24:00] suffering. It is true that we can mistake a long wait as a no or as sheer indifference. But it is also true that when we suffer greatly, we need help now, not four hundred and thirty years from now. Now, Dr. Gushie, in that number there, you're like, "What's four hundred and thirty years?"
He's referencing how long the ancient Israelites in the Old Testament cried out to God. Four hundred and thirty years. That's a long time to wait. And his point being, if you're one of the people suffering, it's really hard to be patient. "Hey, four hundred and thirty years from now, you will get an answer to this."
That doesn't feel like a great answer when you are that person. And I have found, even in my own life, time tends to slow down when we're suffering. I mean, even think about something simple. [00:25:00] When I get the stomach flu, it is like time grinds to a halt. And I wonder, "How am I going to make it through this?
How long will this last? How on earth can I endure it?" But multiply that concept way out. Put that on steroids to real pain, to the kind of pain that Job is feeling. Or people who have chronic pain or a chronic illness. Think about the way they understand time. It keeps going even though it slows it down for them.
How do we be patient with that? One of the problems that we see with Elihu is that he takes his ideas and he applies them far too confidently So it's not necessarily just what the ideas are, although there is certainly issues with them, but it's also, and [00:26:00] I would say primarily, how he holds his views, how he shares his views, how he expects everyone else to make sense of what he believes.
Notice what he says in Job thirty-six, twenty-one. "Be on guard. Turn back from evil, for God sent this suffering to keep you from a life of evil." By the time we get to chapter thirty-six, we now have an answer to the book. What is going on? Well, Job, you just had to wait long enough for Elihu to show up and give you the answer.
I mean, did you catch what he just said? Elihu is offering an answer when the entire story itself refuses an answer. He confidently shows up with an explanation. How many Christians today fall [00:27:00] into the same trap? "Oh, you're going through something? Let me explain it for you." Yeah. How many churches today offer answers that cannot be answered?
And yet, if you come here, if you sign up for this group, if you participate in this thing, we will give you the answers you're looking for that. Now, not only that, but we know that, that Elihu's answer that he's offering very confidently, we know it's wrong . Job hasn't fallen into evil, nor is there any mention in the book that he was in danger of it.
Elihu is extrapolating a confident theology based on his limited understanding. And friends, this is alive and well in Christianity today[00:28:00]
So what's the cautionary tale that you and I can take away from Elihu, from a guy like this? Dr. Gashi says this: "Elihu's speech is a reminder that the friends and the community around them are wrong about Job, but probably not wrong about everything they have said about God and the world." That's such a nuanced way to make sense of the Book of Job.
I, I think this is so fascinating. His main problem, this is Elihu, is not what he believed. There, there is problems there. It's just that's not his main problem. His main problem is how he believed what he believed. And studies have shown that how our posture is around what we believe matters immensely, right?
There's one e- example. Bob Altemeyer and Bruce Hunsberger were two [00:29:00] Canadian psychologists. They spent decades studying the psychology of religion and authoritarianism. Altemeyer built the standard scale that psychologists use to measure authoritarianism, and Hunsberger spent his career studying how people hold and lose faith.
They teamed up on this project together, and here's what they found. They found that holding orthodox religious beliefs did not predict prejudice So just let that sink in. That was the indicator they probably thought they were gonna find. That is not what they found. It wasn't that you hold orthodox beliefs, that that's what's gonna correlate with prejudice.
What they found correlated with prejudice was fundamentalism. Not orthodox beliefs, fundamentalism. Now, in their work, fundamentalism is a posture [00:30:00] toward what we believe. It is treating one's teachings as fundamental or the inerrant truth, not a specific set of doctrines. Now, the same pattern, this is fascinating, showed up inside Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish samples as well, not just Christian ones.
It was the fundamentalists in each group that trended toward authoritarianism and tended to be more hostile. And in the later study they did, they found that non-believers scored among the least authoritarian and least prejudiced groups because they were less likely to be fundamentalist in their thinking.
So it isn't what these groups believe as much as how the people in these groups believe it. [00:31:00] Your posture around your faith is more important than the beliefs that you hold within it. Now, some of you, you're like, "Wow, that is straight-up heresy. Cannot believe you just said that. There's no way that can be a true statement."
Let me say it again. Your posture around your faith is more important than the beliefs you hold within it. And this isn't just my argument, friends
I wanna show you where the Apostle Paul makes this argument. Galatians 5:6. "For when we place our faith in Christ Jesus, there is no benefit in being circumcised or being uncircumcised. What is important is faith expressing itself in love." That [00:32:00] is a bombshell argument. Now we read this today like big deal.
Nobody cares about circumcision anymore, Paul. But Paul is referencing one of the most hotly debated theological issues of his day. He says that where you land on that doesn't matter as long as you have a faith that expresses itself in love. I mean, that's a wild conclusion for the Apostle Paul to make, and that's his argument in Galatians 5.
That, hey, if you land here, if you land over there, doesn't matter. Do you have faith that is expressing itself in love? And this is why I would much rather talk to an open-minded atheist than a closed-minded Christian. Every day, hands down, that's a no-brainer choice for me. I would have more [00:33:00] to talk about with the atheist even though my values would align more with the Christian.
The difference being the posture in which they are holding them because posture matters immensely. Fundamentalism craves certainty, and this is a hot item in the church right now, that certainty is the thing so many people are craving. And it's understandable because the world feels like it's falling apart.
Our country feels like it's falling apart. I understand why you crave certainty in your beliefs, but certainty is an illusion. It is not real. In fact, I love the way that Robert Burton has described it. He describes certainty as an emotion that feels like a conclusion. That's so good. It's an [00:34:00] emotion that feels like a conclusion.
I have arrived at something. No, no, no, all you've done is you have figured out how to feel an emotion that makes you feel good. But that feeling, that good feeling that you crave, will cause you to have massive blind spots, massive areas that you can no longer see anymore because you exchanged reality for a sense of certainty.
Now here's the funniest part to me. We're gonna see God respond to everybody in our, our episode next week. We're gonna see God finally give everybody the answer. God doesn't even acknowledge Elihu I just find that so humorous. Specifically, God is going to fault Job's three friends that the majority of [00:35:00] the book is focused on, but he never even mentions Elihu at all.
So draw your own conclusion from that. Now, I wanna close this episode today with a quote from Brian McLaren that I think is such a profound idea. Here's what he says: "What if the deeper question is not whether you are a Christian, Buddhist, or atheist, but rather what kind of Christian, Buddhist, or atheist are you?
Are you a believer who puts your distinct beliefs first, or are you a person of faith who puts love first? Are you a believer whose beliefs put you in competition and conflict with people on different beliefs, or are you a person of faith [00:36:00] whose faith moves you toward the other with love?" Our posture around what we believe matters immensely.
So that concludes part six of our Job in Exile series. We'll have a total of eight weeks. We're getting close to wrapping this up. Next week, we're gonna see God's response, and then after that, we're gonna have our conversation with Dr. Gushee about the book itself. If you wanna talk through these ideas and you're like, "Look, this is stirring stuff up in me.
This is making me realize some things about my own experience," we have an online community that we would love for you to be a part of as we wrestle with these ideas together. This is where this work happens in real time. This is where I spend each day interacting in real time with people, not only on these kinds of ideas, but things that are going on in the world.
It's how we [00:37:00] make sense of it together. And so if you are looking for a safe space to process these kind of ideas, to ask your big questions, to share your doubts openly and honestly, I want you to check that out. You can find the link for that in the show notes. We would love to have you there. I'll see you next Wednesday on Cabernet and Pray.
