“What’s with Job and his friends?”

Steve Brown:
Hey, what’s with Job and his friends? The answer to that and other questions, on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life, dedicated to the message that the only people who get any better are those who know that if they don’t get any better, God will still love them anyway. That teaching raises a lot of questions, so here’s author and seminary professor Steve Brown, along with Pete Alwinson from ForgeTruth with answers from the Bible that will make you free.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. Hi Pete.

Pete Alwinson:
Hey, how are you doing? It’s Friday. I always ask you, but you know, you’re doing good.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, I really am. I, And you know why? Because I’m not a pastor anymore. Boy, Fridays were not wonderful days for me when I was a pastor.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, you know, and you know why?

Steve Brown:
The pressure was beginning to build.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, the pressure, but yes because you traveled all week and spoke all week.

Steve Brown:
Well, you did the same thing.

Pete Alwinson:
No, no.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, you did. You were gone.

Pete Alwinson:
I’d go out on Friday, but I’d get my sermon done before I came back.

Steve Brown:
Let me tell you guys, don’t believe a word Pete says. The truth is he’d go away for a week every year and plan his preaching for a year. I sometimes didn’t know what I was going to say until Saturday night.

Pete Alwinson:
Well, you know, you have the gift of gab, man. You could get away with that, I couldn’t.

Steve Brown:
That’s all. Keep talking until something comes to mind.

Pete Alwinson:
You have a great gift of preaching.

Steve Brown:
That’s, and you do too. That’s Pete Alwinson. And you ought to check out ForgeTruth.com you’ll be glad I sent it to you. Pete, as you know, comes in on Fridays and we answer questions together, and we love this time. You can send your question to, if you’re in the States, to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
Maitland, Florida 32794

if you’re in Canada, it’s

Key Life Canada
P.O. Box 28060
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8

or you can e-mail us your question to [email protected] or if you’ve got something that’s really bothering you, pick up the phone, dial 1-800-KEY-LIFE and follow instructions. And ask your question, and often we put your voice on the broadcast on our phone lines. And if you can help us financially, please do. If you don’t, you’ll probably get the hives. No, I’m not going to say, we try to stay away from manipulation. If you can’t give, we understand. Say a prayer for this ministry. If you can give, pray about it, be as generous as you can. And I promise we’ll be as faithful with your gift as you were in giving it. And you’ll touch a lot of lives. Pete, lead us in prayer, and we’ll get to these questions.

Pete Alwinson:
All right. Our Holy Father, we come to you at the end of this week, and we thank you today on this Friday where we can come into your presence and praise you and honor you and glorify you. We can be reminded that you are in charge, that you are good and gracious and sovereign and kind, that you are patient with us beyond almost belief sometimes. And Lord, we thank you for the forgiveness that we have in Jesus once for all and the forgiveness that we have every day. And Lord, we do at the end of this week, we confess our sins and we know that we need you to continue to work in our lives. We ask that you would allow grace to continue to fine tune and sharpen and strengthen our identity in you. And then Lord, you know the challenges that we have, the bills that have to be paid, the relationships that seem so broken and we can’t fix, the desires for change for new jobs. Lord, you know the needs that we have. We pray for our country, for your Spirit to flow in and around America to bring people to faith in Christ. Be with our leaders that they would seek to be in submission to you. And now, be with our church leaders, Lord, this week-end as they prepare, put the final touches on worship for this week-end. Use them in a big way, draw us all closer to you. And we give you praise and honor now in this Q&A time in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.

Steve Brown:
As I said, if you call Key Life with a question, you just follow instructions and you can record your question and then we put you on the air. We did it in this case.

Caller 1:
I know that Job is wisdom literature, since at the end of the book, God repudiates not only Job, but his friends as well. How then do we read the book? There seems to be truth throughout the book, from one end to the other. But since God repudiates both Job and his friends, when I come to a passage like chapter 33, where Elihu is telling Job that God speaks to us in many ways, including through dreams and affliction. How do I read that? Do I read that as truth, or do I read that as human speculation? And then what is the application for us today?

Steve Brown:
That’s a good and thoughtful and articulate question.

Pete Alwinson:
Absolutely.

Steve Brown:
It really is. And this is a good hermeneutical principle that we find in Scripture. And that is that the Scripture must speak to its own issues, must speak to itself. For instance, the New Testament to the Old, the Letters to the Gospels, the entirety of Scripture speaks to any specific part. And so, when you let the Bible speak for itself, if you’re reading the Gospel of Luke, that’s one thing. And God says, take all of this, it’s all for me and it’s all important. When you get to the Book of Job, it’s very clear, this is not all me. So, you’ve got to find and check the truths that you hear with the other Scriptures, so that they become the commentary on the truths that you say. And when you say it’s true, what about, that God sometimes speaks in dreams? Well, yeah, he does. So, the guy said something that was quite true. But the next phrase will be something that he didn’t know what he was talking about. And the Book of Job, in the genre in which it is written, becomes a book that tells us don’t take all of this as gospel. Some of it’s true, some of it’s not. All of it is beautiful. It’s the oldest book in terms of Biblical literature, probably in the Bible. Goes back years before even the Exodus. And it’s a great book. But it’s a book of questions. And it’s a book of God’s sovereignty. And it’s a book of God does as he pleases, and he does it right well. It’s not a book of answers.

Pete Alwinson:
You know, what you said is all good. That’s a hundred percent. And, I know our listener will take that in. That’s so good. It really isn’t a book of answers. It is a book about sovereignty of God. Some people have said. Well, it’s a book about suffering? Not really.

Steve Brown:
No, it’s really not.

Pete Alwinson:
It’s not, it doesn’t answer the problem of suffering. It’s about the sovereignty of God. But this question still stands and it really has to be a hermeneutical thing. All Scripture interprets Scripture. Scripture is its best interpreter. And so, one thing I find fascinating about listening to some of those dudes of Job’s friends is that they’re, they spout half truths, some whole truths and some modern day heresies. It’s, you know, like for instance, Steve, the reason why this suffering is in your life is because there’s a sin in your life, you know, and if you had more faith,

Steve Brown:
They did say that, didn’t they?

Pete Alwinson:
They do, they do that. And these are modern day heresies you hear all the time by preachers and stuff. And so, I think what you said is lays the foundation, and then, and read the New Testament carefully, then you can read back in all that.

Steve Brown:
You know, I was just thinking, I heard a preacher one time, each one of Job’s, and by the way, I’m not so hard on Job’s friends, they were there. Nobody else was, you know, if somebody’s, they hung out with him, you know, you’ve got to get points for that, but I heard a preacher one time take one of the friends comments as his text for a Sunday morning sermon and taught on it. And I remember thinking when I was sitting there, I don’t believe I’d have done that. I mean, you could, what you said was good. It was a good sermon, just the wrong text.

Pete Alwinson:
Unless you could take all, every point and back it up with Scripture other places, where it was clearly pedantically taught as accurate.

Steve Brown:
This is a question and the way I’m moving from that on the air question on our phone line to this one is amazing and my professionalism. This is the question. How can we determine which of the Bible’s promises are meant for us?

Pete Alwinson:
Yeah, that’s right.

Steve Brown:
Kind of goes together doesn’t it?

Pete Alwinson:
It does.

Steve Brown:
Are you impressed?

Pete Alwinson:
I am impressed. And your professionalism is par excellence. It really is, the context of Scripture, what they used to teach us when we were taking Greek. How do you understand this context, used to drive me crazy, but what is the larger context teaching about the promise and who is it directed to?

Steve Brown:
That’s right. And sometimes promises are meant for a particular people at a particular time.

Pete Alwinson:
Right.

Steve Brown:
But you know, all of Scripture can give you an idea of the “MO” of God.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right.

Steve Brown:
And so, you might say this particular Scripture was for Israel, and I can’t claim it as my personal promise, but it lets me know the way God operates. And so, I can apply that and other Scriptures to myself.

Pete Alwinson:
Right, right, right. There are general principles. Maybe the promise was to a particular group of people, the Israelites, but we can see the principle by and large being applied other places and other times.

Steve Brown:
That’s really true. You know, when you study Scripture, you can’t throw your mind out. And God, we’re so afraid that if we ask questions or express doubts or wonder about this or the other, that that’ll make God angry. God will be pleased.

Pete Alwinson:
That’s right. That’s right.

Steve Brown:
Do you know what Ruth Graham told me one time? She and Mr. Graham would sometimes

Pete Alwinson:
She said, Steve, stop that.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, she did that a lot. But she said, but one time she was in the backseat of our car, and we were going to lunch with Mr. Graham and some other people. And somebody asked a really difficult question. And Mrs. Graham had this big black Bible, and she was digging into it. She says, I love those kinds of questions, cause I can search out what God says.

Pete Alwinson:
Oh, man. And II Timothy 2:15.

Study to show yourself approved to God, a workman that does not need to be ashamed, rightly interpreting the word of truth.

We’ve got to work hard at it.

Steve Brown:
Yeah, we really do. You know, we don’t have any, we don’t have time to look at another question, but we got too much time to just sit here in the silence. Do you want to sing?

Pete Alwinson:
I do not want to sing.

Steve Brown:
Good.

Pete Alwinson:
I do not want to sing. I never do want to sing. Do you sing in church?

Steve Brown:
Not loud.

Pete Alwinson:
You have a good voice. You have a deep voice.

Steve Brown:
I’ve had choir directors say you can’t sing, but if I can teach you the part you’ll make up for four bases. Well, we finally used the time and used it adequately so we need to leave. But before we go I need to say, Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.