Job 25 – The Amalgamation

Then Job spoke out saying:

Dominion and awe belong to God,

   Who established order in the heights of heaven.

Is there any number to His forces?

   Upon whom does His light not shine?

How then can man be justified before God?

   How can one born of woman be cleared of guilty?

If even the moon itself does not give light,

   And the stars are not clean in His eyes?

How much less the maggot like man,

   Or the worm like son of man?

 

I read a book this past week or so that spoke of how to understand the Bible. Making Sense of the Bible by Adam Hamilton. It was one of those books I got when my mom passed. She was a Methodist, and this author is (or was) a Methodist minister. Since I grew up Methodist and now attend a Baptist church, I was interested in his take. It is also nine years old, so a lot has happened since then that involves the Methodists, the Baptists, and yet the Bible and God have not changed.

I have been challenged by three things that I wanted to share. One from a sermon I heard – Do not Judge others. The other two from this book – Jesus is the Word of God, and the Bible is not Jesus. I am overwhelmed with the power of pride and judgement within the human condition and how much of my struggle is with it.

The scholars are all aligned that the text of Job as it has come to us is replete with errors, and many are adamant that huge pieces are missing. One judgement that people make is that the Bible is without error or contradiction or any flaw etc. Since I read eight versions of each verse of Job pretty much each day, I can tell you many of those are full of things that are just wrong. This would make it seem that a Bible can have an error.

The next piece is that scholars can believe that the original version was without error, etc. Since everyone seems to believe that Job is not complete, the question is why would God write Job perfectly and then not give it all to us in that form (that we could all perfectly understand, to mentally quote from a Living Color song)?

If you had asked me in my past, I would have probably agreed that the Bible was without error, but I would not have understood the depth the question could be packaged with. Apparently, a group of scholars had a conference to agree the Bible was without error only to come away with 19 caveats that addressed the errors they could not wish away.

But I can say that my studies of Job and the Bible and reading this book have not diminished my belief in who God is, in who Jesus is, or that the Bible is the Word of God. God gave us the Bible in whatever form it is to use to learn about God, about the salvation provided by Him through His Son Jesus, and how we can love others and give Glory to God while we wait here on earth for our time to be with them in heaven. Judging others is a major stumbling block to loving them. If I believe any one thing about Jesus and someone else believes differently, it can be a source of alienation, or not.

The answer to the question of Job in chapter 25 is Jesus. Jesus paid the penalty for every sin ever committed by every human being who will ever live. Being God, the sacrifice Jesus made was more than sufficient for this. If we can believe in this, then we can put aside anything that hinders (to quote Paul).

Job 253