BibleProject | One Story That Leads to Jesusਨਮੂਨਾ

After almost 30 chapters of poetic debate, the dialogue between Job and his friends starts to break down. Bildad’s final speech is only five verses—the book’s shortest chapter. Zophar doesn’t even give a third speech. Apparently, he has nothing left to say.

Job, however, waxes eloquent. He cuts through Bildad’s feeble philosophizing with sharp sarcasm. Then he launches into a beautiful poem about God’s power that puts Bildad’s puny platitudes to shame.

Look, Job says, God is the all-powerful creator and judge, the one who sets the skies in place and shakes out the wicked with a snarling east wind, but that doesn’t solve my suffering. God is sovereign. Check. God is omnipotent. Check. I’ve trusted and followed God, but still my family is dead, my home burned to ash, my body tormented with disease—all check. Please, God, make that make sense, somehow.

Chapter 28 functions as an interlude that gives this debate a reality check. Humans may be truly ingenious at exploring and understanding the world through observation and reason, but divine wisdom that understands how things work and why things happen—that wisdom comes from God alone. Humans find wisdom through knowing God. The conclusion offers a rebuke to both sides of the debate.

On one hand, Job’s friends have assumed that the world operates on a strict principle of justice, which means Job must require punishment. But that’s misguided; God’s justice co-operates with his infinite wisdom, which is a dynamic, personal activity, not a static, abstract code.

On the other hand, Job has assumed that God himself must be unjust, or at least indifferent to injustice, incompetent, or maybe just petty? Either way, the simple answer is God is to blame. That’s equally misguided, as God’s way of rooting out and ultimately destroying all evil may be taking longer and requiring more complexity than Job can see from his observing and reasoning.

Reflection Questions

• Compare Job 28 to Proverbs 8. What parallels do you notice? What do these two passages teach about the connection between wisdom and creation?
• Take some time to meditate on Psalm 37 and its poetic engagement with questions about what to do when the world doesn’t make sense, when evil seems to be winning. How would you paraphrase the poet’s guidance in your own words?