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Job 1: Purpose and Blamelessness of Job

09/08/2005 01:03 PM Filed in: Theology | Bible Study
The book of Job has impacted me greatly in the last year. In studying its text and studying the comments of those who have poured their lives into this book, I have gained a deeper appreciation of spiritual warfare and what it means to be loved by God. I’m excited about doing a month and a half study on it with you guys.

I want to begin by discussing purpose. My belief about Job is that the author’s primary purpose in writing his story is to refute the popular theology of his day as related to evil and suffering. This theology is best seen in the speeches and discourses of Job’s friends all throughout the book (i.e. Job 4:7-9) and can be summed up easily enough: when bad things happen to people it is because they deserved for them to happen. In other words, wicked things only happen to the wicked; the good always prosper while the unjust are always punished.

The first chapter of Job begins by introducing the man who we will be following throughout both good times and bad for the course of the book. Job is not established as a Jew, and his location (“the land of Uz&rdquoWinking is neither clearly Jewish nor Gentile. Job’s lineage is not the author’s focus because the only feature of Job that is to take center stage is his blamelessness. This is the key to understanding the book because if Job is blameless and yet still has terrible things happen to him, then the leading theology of the day is put to death by existential reasoning.

In verse five we are told that Job took the position as priest and offered sacrifices on behalf of his family. This fact places the date of the tale of Job to pre-Exodus because the father of the family functioned as the high priest for his wife and children until the law of Moses set aside the position of Levitical priest from the tribe of Levi. Again, we see that Job is faithful in performing his duties as the priest of his family, and there is no blame to be found in him.

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