August 22, 2018: Day 11 – Job 11

Another friend of Job’s responds.  He calls him a babbler and accuses Job of telling the others: “my conduct is pure and I am clean in God’s sight.”  To Zophar, the friend, that is not really the case.  He makes the general statement that we are all imperfect, but also makes a very direct accusation that God has required of him much less than he should or than he deserves.

The interesting thing is that I believe both Job and his friend are saying the same thing.  Job says no one is righteous, but he is also stating that there is no single sin which is creating the situation in which he finds himself.  I am repeating myself here again.  He recommends that Job straighten up his life and this will all go away.  Well, clean living really doesn’t provide favor in God’s sight and does not guarantee what vs.17 states: “your life will be brighter than the noonday.”  Good people don’t get all the sunshine, sorry.

There is a stylistic note that I wanted to put in here.  If you look in your Bibles, for example at vs.12 where it speaks about a wild ass being born as a person.  The Hebrew for this verse is uncertain, which means that there could have been a chunk of manuscript missing that we simply do not have.  I hope this does not create a problem for you.

Our  Bible has been put together through the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit, but with human hands.  We  do not have an original copy of any letter from the Bible.  We don’t have the documents on which Moses wrote, simply because he didn’t really write, we have his stories passed down orally.  We don’t have the Gospel of John as it was written by John.  What we have is a compilation of material mostly from the Middle Ages that have been passed down over time.  That is where our source for Scripture comes.  But I still believe it is the inspired Word of God.  But it also means that there will be words and even sections that we do not completely understand what is being said.

My take on Scripture is that it is an authority like no other and it contains God’s inerrant truths.