Author: mogget

The thing to understand about Job is that he, like his three friends, assumes that God ought to react to human actions, to reward the righteous and punish the wicked. The three friends used this approach to God to argue that Job’s pitiful condition demonstrated his guilt. Job, on the other hand, knows his own innocence and so concludes that God is a criminal. And since God is a criminal, what is needed is a trial.

Aye yi yi. Most heroic stories display a hero with the moral fiber who stands up to evil and defeats it. Job is a hero whose moral fiber brings him into confrontation with God.

Continue reading “The God of Job: Job IV”

Things change dramatically at the conclusion of the prologue. God, the Satan, and Job’s wife all disappear and the latter two never re-appear. Their places are taken by three friends who have come to comfort Job: Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. The action then, is built around two conflicts: one between Job and the absent God, the other between Job and his three nearby friends.

But the effects of the prologue remain, for the prologue has created a near-omniscient reader. This reader knows that Job did not sin (1:22; 2:10b) and knows that everything that happened to Job and his family happened because the Satan incited God. The reader is in a position to judge the responses of the four friends, none of whom share the reader’s insight. The cruelty and irony displayed throughout are exquisite, although time prevents an adequate demonstration.

And yet, the reader doesn’t really understand God, either…

Continue reading “The God of the Friends: Job III”

The first two chapters of Job, called the prologue, are quite shocking for modern Christian readers because of the picture they paint of God. Without a doubt, this is a god that you are not inclined to either worship or even know. It’s a long, long way from Job’s prologue to the Sermon on the Mount.

Continue reading “The God of the Prologue: Job II”

Job’s got some real problems. The book I mean, not the guy. He has problems, too, but that’s another story – the story, in fact.

You know that list of things you’d like to know about biblical literature before you actually try to read it? Things like author(s), date, and place? Well, we don’t know any of that.

Continue reading “The Gods of Job”

After reading Don Clifton’s short post on forgiveness over at Nine Moons, I spent the rest of the day feeling somewhat sad. It sounds like the gentleman in question was well-taught on the subject of sin, but less conversant with respect to forgiveness. That sort of imbalance strikes me as unhealthy.

Forgiveness of sin through Christ is not found explicitly in the uncontested letters of Paul unless perhaps paresis in Rom 3:25 is translated as “remission” rather than “passing over.” Instead, forgiveness appears in Colossians and Ephesians as an extension of Paul’s thoughts on redemption.

Continue reading “The Effects of the Christ-Event: Redemption and Forgiveness”

The traditional reading of 1 Kings 19 makes it the story of Elijah’s trip to Mt. Horeb to renew his commission as a prophet. There are, however, significant indications that rather than renewing his commitment, Elijah goes to resign it. Interestingly enough, the GD lesson manual also takes the later approach, at least insofar as it admits that Elijah is “discouraged” and in need of comfort (p. 137).

Continue reading “The Sound of Sheer Silence”

The gentleman from the high council rested his right arm on the podium and leaned forward into the microphone. Looking into the congregation, he lowered his voice and took us into his confidence. “The Old Testament,” he said, “concerns itself with carnal commandments intended to cleanse the body, with outward performances and all that sort of thing.”

Fortunately, there’s a lot more to the OT than the polemics of Heb 9:10, or there would be no reason to spend a year studying it in GD. For example, there’s a bit of Good News called the Shema, a passage that takes its name from the Hebrew imperative of the verb “to hear:”

Hear, O Israel, The Lord our God is one Lord. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and will all your soul, and with all your might.

Then there’s another nice morsel of Good News, this time from Lev 19:18b, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” In fact, Rabbi Yeshua ben Yosef seems to have been particularly fond of precisely these passages. And as commandments go, they don’t sound all that carnal to me.

It will not surprise you to learn that I have another piece of Good News, this time drawn from a narrative context in the Elijah cycle.

Continue reading “The Gospel According to the OT: God’s Memory”

Poor guy. His name means “servant of the Lord” and now he’s about to find out just what that service requires.

Continue reading “Obadiah: Man Between a Rock and Elijah”