Okay, so we're beginning, not beginning, but getting back into our study of Job. I was in a quandary about how to actually approach this because we don't really have enough time in 13 weeks to go through Job verse by verse. In fact, it would probably take two or three years to do that. I'm not sure that That's actually a benefit. What I'm trying to do is give you the tools so that you can go and study it and get the material out of it that God has for you on it. I've spent years studying Job because I struggled with the same question that Job and each of these men here struggled with since the mid-80s. And I wanted to know an answer. to it other than just a simple one-sentence answer. And I think that's really the problem in America, not just in America, but in Western culture per se, is that when somebody asks a question, it's almost impossible to give an answer, a coherent, succinct answer in a soundbite. The question here is about evil. Why does it happen? And it's impossible to give it in a paragraph or two. So he gives it in a dialogue. And that's what we've been doing is going through the dialogue. First Job and then Zobar. Job and then Zobar. Job and... I want to break away from that. And so you notice in your handout We're going to do all of Eliphaz, all of Bildad, and all of Zophar. Now, I don't know how far we'll get today. We might only concentrate on Eliphaz. And then, after we've gone through these three men and done a synopsis of their argument, Then we'll go back and we'll pick up Job's discussion, and we'll put those together. And I think by doing it that way, it'll make some things clearer to us, because in the Western mindset, we're used to taking things in order. A, B, C, D, E, F. While it basically is not, written for the Western mindset is written for the Oriental mindset. They do things conceptually, they look at things differently. And so what we need to do then is to change how we look, how we think of things. And so I think it would be easier doing it this way, just doing a synopsis of all the laws and a synopsis of all that. We can do a synopsis of Zophar. He only gets to speak one more time and he's out of the picture. And then we'll go back and do a synopsis of Joe and pick him up and see what we can pull out of what Joe says. We can understand more about Joe's franklin wine. And feel free. The handouts are on the chair there. So we're starting in chapter 15 in Eliphaz. Remember, Eliphaz in his first soliloquy did the logical fallacy of the appeal But notice, he's not doing that in this discussion. In this discussion, he's not appealing to any experience. In fact, he's going back and picking up Bildad's argument. And Bildad had the appeal. This is neat handwriting, so you can imagine my medical records when I'm in a hurry. I should let Jim do it. It is just absolutely disgusting. from our perspective, about the fear of the Lord. Beginning of knowledge. Or the beginning of wisdom. Exactly. I don't think it's fear, you know, it's like, you know, I'm afraid of the dark. I think it's more, it's a very healthy respect for the Lord. And where do we find that in the Bible? So, what logical fallacy has just been perpetuated here? See, we all fall into that trap. I think, I feel, I believe. And that's fine. But what's it based on? We say that we are nailed to the Bible. I don't call myself a Baptist. I don't call myself an evangelical. I don't call myself much of anything, but since about 1999 or so, I've only called myself a biblicist. in the Bible. That's what we nail ourselves to. Otherwise, we're in the slippery slope of, I have an experience, I have an appeal to tradition, or, like Zophar, I just got an opinion, and I'm going to express it. The Hebrew word is a very expressive word. It's one for fear. It does mean absolute utter terror. Depending on the context is where you have to get a full meaning of what this word is referring to, or the meaning of this word. So if you look up the meaning of the word that I have, and it's multiple pages of the New International Dictionary of Old on and on and on. The basic definition of the Hebrew word is fear, absolute, utter, stark terror. I've heard it said from the Pope many times that he doesn't want us to be afraid of him, it's just awe, it's just reverence. Where does this awe and reverence come from? Why is it there? How many here hold the law in high regard? We say that we are nailed to the law, right? I'm not talking about those who actually enforce the law because they have fallacies and whatever. We won't get into that discussion. That'll last forever. But yes, we say that we are bound by law. We always have. That's why our revolution did not get out of control, like the French revolution that occurred a few years later. They were not bound by law. They specifically were not bound by law, and thus they had no control over their reign of terror. We say that we were bound by law, and our revolution was a limited world revolution. You know, when you get pulled over by the police, what's your first reaction when you see those lights come on? It's like, you know, my stomach drops down, you know, I get a little nervous there. Oh my gosh, what did I do wrong? A little fear there. Fear is always at the core of everything else. If we did not start out being afraid of standing before a holy, righteous God without Christ, what led us to salvation? What got you there? Because if there is not this knowledge of the fear of the Lord that he stands in judgment, then why did Daniel lie prostrate Why did John, the apostle, fall prostrate before Christ on the island of Patmos? Because of this. At the core of reverence, of awe, is this. He is holy, I am utterly sinful. Now, we do not operate simply from the knowledge of fear because we have access to something else. Mercy, because we are now covered with the righteousness of Christ, is what tempers us. So it changes from terror to awe, to reverence. But at the core of that is still that when I get out of line, I still have to face the judgment of God. If I willingly go off in sin, Should I not be afraid of encountering the judgment of God? Absolutely. In fact, when you read in Hebrews, that's the whole point that the right author is making there. He says, under the law in the Old Testament, there was offering for sin that was unintentional. But if you did intentional sin, You had to pay. You either had to steal it, you had to make restitution. If you murdered, you had to pay with your own life. If there was unintentional killing, you got to run to the altar in Jerusalem and then hold on to the horns of the altar and beg an audience with the priest. If it was determined that it was unintentional, you had to go live in one of the Levite cities and never leave it while that high priest was alive, and no one could come in and kill you. Once that high priest died, the sentence of death against you was gone, and you could then go back to wherever you came from and not be killed by the robbers. But if you murdered intentionally, guess what? pull you off the horns of the altar, take you outside the kingdom. There's always this element of fear. We're tempered with mercy. If we forget this, what happens? It's arrogance, I think. I was shaving, and Jesus Christ was standing beside me, and we were having a talk at an He was telling me I was doing a good job, and we shared more music, and I heard this time and time again. From people who call themselves pastors, from people who call themselves leaders, that we have this buddy relationship with Christ. We can throw our arms around him, and we just march hand in hand through life, and he's my buddy. And so the more, the longer he resisted, the more temptation that came against him, the more he resisted. We don't even resist that hard. We might think we're resisting that hard. We're not resisting that hard. And we stumble and fall. But when you lose this, you lose it all. You do become arrogant. You do become... above and beyond the scriptures. And plus, when you say you've had a word from God, that's blasphemy, right? Pure and simple. Because God, this is the only word from God that we're going to get. Everything that God is going to teach us, everything that God is going to move us to do, we will find correlation in here through the normative manner of interpreting the scriptures. We'll just call it the normal way of interpreting the scriptures. using historical, grammatical, societal, cultural information from the time period in which it was written, and the words defined by the time that the men used them. Not in English, but in the language in which they used them that we have to translate. So Oliphant is accusing Job, you don't have any fear of the Lord. Now, why would he say that? Because he accuses Job of just babbling, of just talking. And he says, your own lips, your own mouth condemns you. Any thoughts on the Spirit of the Lord? Maybe he was spoiled. Maybe Job was spoiled. In other words, he had a gazillion cattle and a gazillion goats and he was a very wealthy man and had a healthy family all before the tragedy struck. Maybe he didn't fear the Lord because things were too easy for him. That's one aspect. And you want to disagree with that? You want to agree with that? Well, I kind of disagree because I think that what he said was that he would always offer sacrifices for his children in case they did something wrong. And for himself, I assume, too. Yeah. So I see really a lot of fear in Joe. And notice that down later on in verse 15, Eliphaz now makes the appeal to tradition. And it begins to give us a little more understanding of these gentlemen. He says, do you limit wisdom to yourself? What do you know that we don't know? What do you understand that is not clear to us? Both the great-haired and the aged are among us older than your father. So these gentlemen were not even Job's age. They were older than Job. By a few years, they were older than Job. Job was kind of like the young guy on the block, but older than Elihu, which we'll get to later. So that's why they're coming down and talking to Job. And remember, Job had this tragedy that struck him. It struck his family. It struck his health. struck as well, struck everything. And they're trying to help him by saying, Job, if you just repent, God will return you to your former state. Is that even possible? Can you even return to your former state? History is not cyclic. History does not repeat itself because the experiences are different. The influences, yes, we'll see time and time and time again. But the causes and the effects, the specific causes and effects are always different. And it leaves you changed, every experience. Every moment that you breathe, you're changing. You're not remaining positive. You may fight to remain positive, but we're not. In fact, the whole point of this Hagia Zola process is to affect change that would not otherwise occur, which leads us back to another issue. Is it love to put you through this process? Peter, that's always my favorite example, because Christ is there in bodily form, telling Peter to his face, Peter, Satan wants to sift you, grind you down, but I pray for you. Is that love? Because he didn't keep Peter from going through it. He didn't keep Peter from failing. He didn't keep Peter from being isolated, being miserable, being fearful, being all the things that we don't use to define love. When you hear the word love, when you use the word love, what kind of feelings and emotions are you actually communicating to us? I think that God gives us the experience as parents because we do feel love for our children. And how many times do we have to do things that they don't like, like starting as a toddler, bathing them, making them do their homework, making them do music lessons, that will grow them, will mold them. It's just tiny little examples. And when kids are adults, and you're standing back saying, I probably wouldn't be doing it that way, and they reject your advice, standing there and watching them fall, get hurt, they have to recover and deal with the consequences. Is that love? Or is it love to go in and rescue them, so that they never have to deal with the consequences? Would it be love if God had brought in, rescued Joe right from the beginning before anything ever happened. We say God is love. We sing, God is love. This is one aspect of God's love. As we say, God only operates from love. Look what happened to Joe. High school football. The whole point of the team is you want to win. The team wants to win. In the beginning of the year, they have two or three weeks of double sessions, it's called, and it's horrible. I mean, you feel like dying at the end. You're throwing up. But it's to get the team in shape so you can win football games. So, I mean, I wouldn't say the coach loves you, but he's not trying to kill you. Well, no. I think he is. Every once in a while somebody dies from it, but it's to make you stronger, and you know that going into it, but it's very painful. We do that as parents. This hurts me more than it does you. I think that's what you ought to know. I don't know, love is kind of like a diamond, and it's got a lot of different cut facets on it. It is, and we don't understand most of it. We think we do. It's bandied about today. It's one of the motivating factors of our culture. If you love the gay, you will accept them. If you love the immoral, you will accept them. Love requires that you do this. Love requires that you do that. Love, love, love, love, love. And we wave the banner. But that's a very, very narrow interpretation of love. when you look at God at work in the scriptures. Well, an example of love, you should warn him. Just like there's a bridge out of here, put up a sign saying, bridge out. That is to protect you. Not to punish you. It's to protect you. Sure. You tell the gate, this is wrong. That's to protect him from judgment. Don't warn Joe. about the tragedy coming to him? Well, that's why we evangelize. That's why we take out the Gospel message. And that's actually about the point in that perspective. And God warned Peter and prepared Peter for what was coming. He warned Job. Remember, Job didn't have the Scriptures. This is about Genesis 12 through 20, somewhere in that time frame. Almost nothing was written down. Everything was oral tradition. Now, they got it directly from Shem, so they had a very strong oral tradition. In fact, when we turn to chapter 22, Eliphaz is going to appeal back to experience, back to the flood. Going to draw a direct correlation back to the flood. And say, Job, you're bringing evil down upon us. Don't you remember of old where they got whooshed away in the flood because they hated God? They said, God is above the stars and the thick blackness covers Him and He doesn't see anything. God proved that wrong. You're in danger of doing that to everybody. I want us just to ponder this. How do we define love? Because it informs us. Your foundation, your worldview, it informs everything that you do, as well as everything that comes in. So this comes in, this comes in, this comes in, and then out comes the responses. actions, but it's all informed by what is occurring in here, and what informs your worldview. Well, for the Christian, there should be two things. There is the Bible, but we're growing in that knowledge, Galatians. I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, but Christ is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me. We are being conformed in the image of Christ. We are being changed so that the Bible becomes more and we, the natural man, becomes less. The new nature, the old nature. There are conflicts within us. Romans 8. The flesh never quits. Anybody ever see the movie Galaxy Quest? Never give up, never surrender. That's what the flesh does. It never gives up. You will never stop sinning. You will never stop desiring to sin. If that is your goal in life, you will be frustrated every day because that will not happen. Paul was writing and saying, I hope that I do not find myself disqualified at the end. Why? Because he understood he will never stop wanting this end. However, it becomes less of you and more of Christ as this changes. But how does this change? What causes this change? It's not an intellectual exercise. How many people have sat around And said, all I have to, you go in and you read a book. Bible, philosophy, Buddhism, whatever. And you say, I like that. I'm willing to make that part of my life. And it's a sterile exercise. How many of you have done that and actually affected your kidneys? How many of you, if I gave you a textbook, I'd have to give you a bunch of textbooks. One on nursing, one on medicine, one on anesthesia. Then I say, you've read all these books, you passed the test, that's great. There's your patient, have a good day. How successful do you think you're going to be? How successful are you going to be? Because you can't get it out of a book. If he gave me all his books on aircraft mechanics and stuff and said, OK, go fix a plane, I would not be flying that plane tomorrow. Just so you know, when you buy tickets to fly on that plane, I will not be there. I got more sense than that. We are not informed intellectually. We are informed experientially. I do not know of any profession that you can read a book and do it. I've read several books on music. So what? It doesn't mean I can hit the note. I've read several books on guitar. It doesn't mean I can pick one up and strum like an expert. It's the experience. Even in those professions I report for. is experience. We are informed experientially. In fact, so much so, that in Hebrews 5 at the end, God said, we are required to know the difference between good and evil and to shun the evil. How do we do that? You don't do it by reading a book. I've read the Bible through several times. In fact, after I got saved, I put an armchair upstairs in a room. Oh, that's a long time I had to do that. And a lot. And after I ate, I would spend three or four hours a night reading through the Bible. And I did, well, and I did, and I did, and read through the Bible, and did it again, and read through the Bible, and I know so much. A year. But an anathema's different. I would just say, oh, afterwards, I should have done that. I knew better. The Bible said, we are informed experientially. That is what the audiovisual process is all about. You don't learn love because you read a poem, because you read it out of a book. How do you learn love? You learn it experientially. You learn it first in the family. By the time a child is able to speak and deal with these quote unquote abstract concepts, you have lost the battle or you have won the battle. You have taught them everything they're going to use in life by the time they're five and six years old. Because they watch, they listen, they experience. You have experientially taught them everything by how you lived. Then they're going to take that and modify it and build and develop it based on their own experiences. So if you wait until your child is 12, 13, 14 years old to teach them ethics, you've lost that battle. That battle's gone. Because they've already learned ethics before they could even spell the word. And this is what's happening in the higher self process. God is changing us. God is working on us. Because we are in an embryonic state. In this life, I call it an embryonic state because We are still prevailing and coming to be produced into what we shall be when we receive our new bodies and we no longer have the old nature. That is our goal. We're not there. Joe is not there. Friends are not there. Now, we still think like this, though. That's why Job is relevant today. We still appeal to experience. We still appeal to tradition. We still appeal to opinion. I think, I believe. I don't believe in the dispensational theory of eschatology because the followers of the Reformation didn't believe in tradition. So what? They didn't believe in And not baptizing babies either, and then people who fought against baby baptism, they take in drudgery. You can flood it, you bring us in. Of course, no one ever flooded, so. I mean, Calvin and Zwingli were right out there in the boat with everyone else. It's experiential. Now when we turn to chapter 22, we see that Eliphaz is making another blunder. I like these guys. And they think so much like they do. Eliphaz here, he has an effect. He's looking at an effect. And that effect is, of course, Job and his problems. Now, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, what are they trying to argue back to? They're trying to argue back to a cause. Because the human mind is programmed by God in such a way that we think in cause and effect. Cause and effect. If something happens, we look for a cause. In fact, isn't that what you do when you examine a crime scene? You look at all, you try to find all the evidence, all the facts. You can determine how it happened. You try to reason from effect to cause. Isn't that one of the hardest things to do when you're having a discussion, usually hopefully quietly with your wife, about things you disagree on? You're trying to point out closets, and how it leads to certain effects, and they don't see that. So you substitute logic with volume? Anybody here guilty of that? Anybody here guilty of substituting logic with volume? OK, I'm guilty. Or how about substituting logic with, let's see, I don't have the right words. So, I'm going to use other words to get my point across for effect, so it would be cussing. Cussing is used. Anybody guilty of that? If he has that, I want to hear it. That's how nature works, cause and effect. The wind blows, the tree fell down. Doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, you see it. Car breaks down, the carburetor or whatever, your transmission broke. I mean, there's cause and effect. Well, see, we know that cause and effect is the right way because, well, how does the Bible start out? We know what the effects are. The Bible tells us the cause. Now, we're in chapter 22 and Eliphaz is running amok here. He says, in verse five, is not your evil abundant. There's no end to your iniquities. You have exacted pledges of your brothers for nothing and stripped the naked of their clothing. You've given no water to the weary to drink. You've withheld bread from the hungry. You've just been an despicable, nasty person, Job, and that's how you got rich. Is there any proof for that? Huh? Was there any proof given? from the effects to lead him to that conclusion. It is always, always, always a problem to reason from effect to cause. Because inevitably you will end up at the cause you wanted. It's easy to build a bridge backwards to arrive at the destination you want. It's very dangerous to reason from effect to cause. Politicians tend to do that. We all tend to do that. It's human nature. I want to believe. There we go. I believe. I think. This is the effect. How did we get here? Turn into CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, all the talking heads. They're hired because they don't think they're good. They're hired because they're cute or handsome. They're hired because they have a good voice. But if you listen to what they're saying, the Indians, you battle. I got 24 hours. Oh my gosh, I got to talk for 30 minutes. What am I going to say? Then they start reasoning backwards and making it up. And if you sit here and think on it, by God, if you're an American and you're thinking, you're in big trouble these days. Usually you're not going to arrive at the cause, because the cause is already predefined. If you're listening to CNN, what's the cause? If you're listening to Fox, what's the cause? Allegedly, because they got people on them that aren't conservative. No, that's their mantra, but that's not their actions. Here we go. We're on the roller coaster. This is leading toward socialism, and this is leading toward, what's the other word? Fascism. You cannot reason from effect to cause, except very, very, very carefully. And not only in my description. My wife asked me a question last night. How do I know, I've prayed for something, how do I know that my prayer is being answered? And like Christ, if you ask me a question, I will always ask you another question. I said, how do you know who's answering your prayer? Do you think God is the only one who can answer prayer? Well, if you pray silently, is he the only one that can hear your prayer? Oh, you think he's an idiot? No, I'm saying, who else would answer if you just pray silently? Who else can hear it? Do you think he cannot understand from your desires and your actions and your words and put the picture together a lot faster than you tend to know. You're talking about a prayer. We don't really say a prayer. We're really building up to it, and getting to it, and we're praying lots of times, sometimes internally, sometimes externally. Who's answering the prayer? How do you know? I think what he's saying is, pray to yourself, you don't pray to God. Just say it with him. He can't hear you, no. But that doesn't mean that he doesn't know. through other means, by watching you. He's got one of the best intel services in the world. Funneling information back. He has the best organization in the world. The best, top notch. They just don't always draw the right conclusions. Yes, I have to let you out, no. So Eliphaz is reasoning backwards and he's accusing Job of being evil. He thinks, he knows, he understands, but what does he think? And really, one of the thrusts of this class is to get you to understand how you think. You can go back and set a joke on your own. But how do you think? How do you reach the conclusions you reach? What makes them valid? This is important. In fact, it's so important, it was the first book actually put on paper that God wanted everyone to read for about 400 years, 500 years, thereabouts, before Moses actually than it is what you believe, because how you think will lead you to what you believe. The whole point of God's love is to change our thinking, to clarify it, and change our nature. We don't know what that will be, we don't have an inkling, but when we see Christ, we will be like Him. That's Paul in 1 Corinthians. The chapter is all about not love, spiritual maturity. And that is our goal here.