Day 14 – Job’s Friends #2

• Today we pick out two chapters from the conversation between Job and his friends. Chapter 16 sees Job responding to the accusations of his friends, including those of Elihaz that we read yesterday, and chapter 32 introduces a new younger companion, Elihu, who adds his own thoughts to the situation.
• Read chapter 16. How does Job describe his friends? How do you think Job would have acted if their positions had been swapped?
• Like Job, people around Jesus accused him too. Can you identify any similarities between Job’s sufferings and those of Jesus? The passage today in Matthew will help you.
• Elihu doesn’t speak until chapter 32. What reason does he give for not sharing his views until this point? Do you think he was right to be quiet because he was younger? In group situations, such as youth bible studies, do you sometimes wait for the older ones to speak? What do you think of his words in 32:9?
• What does Elihu think about the poor advice given by Job’s friends? And what does Elihu think about Job himself? We don’t read much of what he says, but his basic argument in the later chapters is that God is full of wisdom and majesty, contrasting that with Job’s place before God. Elihu considers that the righteous have many good things in this life, as do the wicked, but that in everything God is supreme. He says that we should therefore acknowledge and submit to that supremacy, because “the Creator wisely rules the world he made”.
• Think about why the passage in Matthew is included today. What’s happening here?
• We’ve jumped a long way through the book of Job today. There’s just too much conversation to go into detail with on this “key readings” course. For this reason you may find it a little tricky to understand everything Job and Elihu are talking about. You may find it more helpful to focus on the overall situation, the importance of coming to God in your suffering (rather than running away) and the connections you can make with Jesus’ suffering. You can read more of Elihu’s words, if you would like, but don’t burn yourself out – the year is long and there is plenty to dig into as we go.

If you have found the passages yesterday and today hard, don’t be discouraged. It’s normal that you will sometimes find things easy to understand and at other times it’ll seem a bit of a blur. There is a reason that we have skipped so much of Job! The aim of reading these bits of Job is to give you a good general picture of the book. There are some passages in the bible that you really need to understand well to build your future understanding upon, but I’d argue that the passages today are not such ones. If you forget the names of Job’s companions, that’s OK!

Tomorrow – day 15 – we’ll finish the book of Job, and the passages are super awesome. They’re some of my favourites in the Old Testament. The day after, we’ll be heading back into Genesis to hear all about the start of God’s people, the Israelites. Keep going!