Job 2: 1 – 13
Oh No, He’s Back Again
1 Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the LORD. 2 And the LORD said to Satan, “From where do you come?” Satan answered the LORD and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.” 3 Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil? And still he holds fast to his integrity, although you incited Me against him, to destroy him without cause.” 4 So Satan answered the LORD and said, “Skin for skin! Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. 5 But stretch out Your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will surely curse You to Your face!” 6 And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life.” 7 So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and struck Job with painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. 8 And he took for himself a potsherd with which to scrape himself while he sat in the midst of the ashes. 9 Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!” 10 But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips. 11 Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this adversity that had come upon him, each one came from his own place—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. For they had made an appointment together to come and mourn with him, and to comfort him. 12 And when they raised their eyes from afar, and did not recognize him, they lifted their voices and wept; and each one tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head toward heaven. 13 So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.
Have you ever come across someone that you do not like? There is a commercial that shows this relative to a college reunion. Apparently one of the former classmates is Peter Pan who does not age. He comes back to the 1966 college class reunion. Peter flies up to one of the guys and shouts his name. The guy responds ‘Oh, it’s you Peter’. Peter turns out to be an insulting and annoying addition to the class reunion. The commercial ends with Peter flying around with his foot in the face of his former classmate singing ‘You make me feel so young.’ I give a good credit to those who thought up this add. In fact it was so good I forgot what was being advertised.
Our God Is Amazingly Kind and Patient. If He wanted me to be in charge like we see in the funny movie Bruce Almighty, then this pain in the, you know what, would be history. I mean come on now, Satan is given permission to test Job so what does he do. He wipes out almost all his servants, his livestock and wealth, and then kills all of Jobs kids. You know the story. Job is being subjected to a very severe test. Satan has been permitted by God to take away all Job's possessions in an attempt to prove that if a man's possessions are taken away, he will curse God to his face. But Job has survived that first cycle of tests. Job is left crushed and broken, but, nevertheless, full of faith. In all this time of testing, Job does not sin but is such an amazing believer in the Goodness of El Shaddai that he worships our Blessed and Holy Maker.
So is this enough? Oh no, here he comes again.
Chapter 2 opens with another round in the test, and the first three verses tell us that God again initiates action against Job:
1 Again there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them to present himself before the LORD. 2 And the LORD said to Satan, “From where do you come?” Satan answered the LORD and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it.” 3 Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil? And still he holds fast to his integrity, although you incited Me against him, to destroy him without cause.”
In chapter 1, Satan (the devil) wanted Job to sin against our Holy God. Job refused to obey Satan. So Job was still a good man. Job had many troubles. He lost everything. His children were dead. But Job still respected God. And Job continued to praise God.
We left Job honorably upright upon a fair trial between God and Satan concerning him. Satan received permission to touch and take, all he had, and was confident that he would then curse God to his face; but, on the contrary, he blessed him, and so he was proved an honest man and Satan a false accuser. Now, one would have thought, this would be conclusive, and that Job would never have his reputation called in question again; but as you know the fullness of this story Job is going to be severely tested again.
It is very interesting to me how Satan wants to damage man’s relationship with Almighty God. We see how he asks permission to hurt Job. Satan pursues man with implacable enmity, and that he can do no man hurt, either in his person or property, but by the especial permission of God; and that God gives him permission only when he purposes to overrule it for the greater manifestation of his own glory, and the greater good of his tempted followers. Then after Satan does his evil plans he comes in the back door of our minds to get us to charge or blame our Holy God for what has happened to us. Amazing!
Can you just take in the throne room of heaven? I can just imagine how the good angels have been waiting to see Satan’s reaction. Will he finally admit defeat? Will he acknowledge that there is a human being on the earth that is totally sold out for the Holy Majestic Ruler of Heaven and earth?
We see no worship or respect from this created being toward his maker. Therefore our Great God speaks up and challenges Satan. He is asked the same question as before, Whence comest thou? and answers as before, From going to and fro in the earth; as if he had been doing no harm, though he had been abusing that good man.
The Supreme judge himself of counsel for the accused, and pleading for him asks : "Hast thou considered my servant Job better than thou didst, and art thou now at length convinced that he is a faithful servant of mine, a perfect and an upright man; for thou seest he still holds fast his integrity?’’ This is now added to his character, as a further achievement; instead of letting go his religion, and cursing God, he holds it faster than ever, as that which he has now more than ordinary occasion for. He is the same in adversity that he was in prosperity, and rather better, and more hearty and lively in blessing God than ever he was, and takes root the faster for being thus shaken.
Our Precious and Holy God proceeds to give two judgments;
1. How Satan is condemned for his allegations against Job: "Thou movedst me against him, as an accuser, to destroy him without cause.’’ Or, "Thou in vain movedst me to destroy him, for I will never do that.’’ Good men, when they are cast down, are not destroyed, 2 Corinthians 4:9 . How well is it for us that neither men nor devils are to be our judges, for perhaps they would destroy us, right or wrong; but our judgment proceeds from the Lord, whose judgment never errs nor is biased!
2. How Job is commended for his constancy notwithstanding the attacks made upon him: "Still he holds fast his integrity, as his weapon, and thou cannot disarm him—as his treasure, and thou cannot rob him of that; your endeavors to do it make him hold it the faster; instead of losing ground by the temptation, he gets ground.’’ God speaks of it with wonder, and pleasure, and something of triumph in the power of his own grace; Still he holds fast his integrity. Thus the trial of Job’s faith was found to his praise and honor, 1 Peter.1:7 .
What excuse can Satan make for the failure of his former attempt? What can he say to justify it, when he had been so very confident that he should defend his point?
4 So Satan answered the LORD and said, “Skin for skin! Yes, all that a man has he will give for his life. 5 But stretch out Your hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will surely curse You to Your face!” 6 And the LORD said to Satan, “Behold, he is in your hand, but spare his life.”
Look at the arrogance in how he speaks to Almighty God, ‘Skin for skin, and all that a man has, will he give for his life.
There is something of truth in this remark. You see Satan and his fallen angels have been around since the forming of the creation. They have had plenty of time to scrutinize the behaviors of man. Self-love and self-preservation are very powerful commanding principles in the hearts of men. Men love themselves better than their nearest relations, even their children, that are parts of themselves, will not only venture, but give, their estates to save their lives. All account life sweet and precious, and, while they are themselves in health and at ease, they can keep trouble from their hearts, whatever they lose. We ought to make a good use of this consideration, and, while God continues to us our life and health and the use of our limbs and senses, we should the more patiently bear the loss of other comforts. Matthew. 6:25 .
When Satan says "Skin for skin!" he is using basically the same argument that he used in the first chapter. His philosophy was (and is) that men are basically self-centered creatures. When you attack them directly, they will give way, and they will give up their faith, their religion, anything, to save their own possessions. That theory or argument has been fully answered. God has allowed Satan to test Job, and, though he lost his family and all his wealth, Job remains steadfast in his integrity, refusing to charge God with wrong.
It is really a very sobering thing to realize that the tests that come into our life are aimed at getting us to curse God to his face; to tell him that he is wrong; that he does not keep his promises; that he is not the kind of a God that we have been told He Is. If you take note of your own life you will recognize that, when under pressure, the thing you want more than anything else is to cry out in protest to God that He Is not keeping his promises. That is where Satan always aims. He has the same philosophy and the same objective today: he wants us to curse God, as he wanted Job to curse God.
Look through the Bible and you will never see Satan apologize or ask forgiveness. Have you ever dealt with someone close who also never admits wrong? We will see in the future that Satan will get on his knees and confess that our Precious Master Jesus Is Lord. However, until that time He and his crew are about causing all kinds of evil. So, instead of admitting or agreeing to our Holy God’s evaluation of Job, Satan asks for a change in the rules because, in effect, he says to God, "You didn't go far enough. You put a boundary about Job and said I couldn't touch his body. That's the problem. It's true that a man may give up his possessions, but one thing he will never give up is his health. You let me get at him, let me destroy his health, and he will give up his integrity and his faith."
Again think about how all the good angels are taking in this interaction between Satan and our Holy Master. Once again there is a divine limitation to the power of Satan, but this time God moves the boundaries closer. He says, "You can touch him." In fact, when Satan uses the phrase, "touch his bone and his flesh," he asks for access to the total humanity of Job. We still use that phrase today, flesh and bone, to speak of the totality of our humanity -- not only our physical body, but our emotional life as well, our conscious and subconscious thinking and reacting. And not only our soul, but our spirit as well. Satan is asking for access to this man Job, to touch him body, soul and spirit -- and he proceeds in that order. That constitutes the argument and basic assault recorded in the rest of the book of Job. Satan knows what he is after. He knows that if he can get at Job in every part of his being, he thinks that he can shake Job's faith and cause him to turn from his trust and confidence in God, and curse him to his face.
Stop and think about the words of our Great God to Satan –‘But save his life - His body you shall have permission to afflict, but against his life thou shall have no power; therefore take care of his life. The original, ‘naphsho shemor’, may be translated, keep his soul; but the word also signifies life; yet in the hands of the destroyer the life of this holy man is placed! How astonishing is the economy of salvation! It is so managed, by the unlimited power and skill of God, that the grand adversary of souls becomes himself, by the order of God, the preserver of that which the evil of his nature incessantly prompts him to destroy!
7 So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD, and struck Job with painful boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. 8 And he took for himself a potsherd with which to scrape himself while he sat in the midst of the ashes. 9 Then his wife said to him, “Do you still hold fast to your integrity? Curse God and die!”
Here is the first attack on the body of Job. Some think it was leprosy; other scholars think it was a form of elephantiasis which not only covered the body with running, putrefying sores, but also caused the members to swell up and become bloated and distorted. His scraping himself with a potsherd indicates a disease accompanied with intolerable itching.
Whatever it was, it rendered Job a pitiful spectacle, a repulsive hulk of a man, swollen and disfigured, and hurting with these running sores.
Job sat on the ash heap. This was the tradition of Job’s people. A very sad person would sit on the ashes (Jonah 3:6; Luke 10:13). Then everyone would know that something terrible had happened.
The reason why his friends beheld him afar off, was because they knew that the disorder was infectious.
He was not only physically afflicted, but he was also painfully humiliated. He ends up sitting in the ashes, scraping the pus from his sores with a broken piece of pottery. To cap it all, the one to whom he ought to have been able to turn for emotional support turned against him. His wife said to him, "Do you still hold fast your integrity?" I can see that her faith has crumbled under this attack. She no longer believes that God is loving, thoughtful, and just. She sees this as proof, as many of us have done in times of trial, that God has forsaken his promises, that the Bible is not true.
How many times I have come to comfort people going through trials, and had them say to me, "I tried these promises, I tried believing God, but it doesn't work." Have you ever said that?
That is getting very close to what Satan was trying to get Job to say: "Curse God, and die." He used Job's wife as his instrument, and, just as Eve became the instrument to get at Adam in the Garden of Eden, the assault upon Job's emotional life comes through his wife. She advises him to do two things: "Give up your faith, apostatize. Curse God." (Actually, in the Hebrew, the word is "bless" God, but it is properly translated "curse" because the word "bless" is dripping with sarcasm.) "Bless God, and die." She is clearly suggesting suicide: "It would be better for you to take your life than to go on like this." So poor Job, bound by physical pain, sits in humility with a disfigured body, and suffers from a sense of emotional abandonment by his mate.
I do not know if women fully understand how much their husbands depend on them. I think husbands often draw emotional strength from their wives far more than either they or their wives realize. Here was a severe attack addressed to the very soul of Job, in which he felt his wife abandoning him, advocating that he turn from his faith and renounce his God. But now, in Verse 10, we get the results of this second round of tests:
10 But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.
Job's rebuke is a very gentle one. He did not say, "You foolish woman!" He said, "You speak as one of the foolish women." He is not attacking her, rather, he is suggesting that this is a temporary lapse of faith on her part, and that, for the moment, she has begun to repeat the words of stupid, foolish women who have no knowledge of the grace and glory of God. In that gentle rebuke you can see something of the sturdiness and tenderness of Job's faith. In this great sentence he again reasserts the sovereignty of God: "Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?" Job's wife had the philosophy that life ought to be pleasant and if it was not, there was no use living it.
That philosophy is widespread in our own day, and a mounting suicide rate testifies to the universal acceptance of it. But this book is given to show us that life is not to be lived on those terms. The reason we are here is not necessarily to have a good time. There are meaningful objectives to be attained in life, even when it all turns sour. When the pressure comes, when living is no longer fun, life is still worth living. A philosophy that wants to abandon everything as soon as things become unpleasant is a shallow, mistaken, distorted view of life.
The Bible instructs us that there is wisdom in many counsellors. However, we should not listen to evil advice. Sometimes our best friends speak terrible advice. We should not obey anyone whose advice is evil (Galatians 1:8).
Job reaffirms that. "Shall we not take both good and evil from the hand of God?" We take his joy and his pleasure, the pleasant things of life with gladness and gratitude. If he chooses to send something that is difficult, shall we then abandon that gratitude and begin to curse him in protest, because life is suddenly different than we thought it would be? The reason we are here is not merely that we might have a good time, and this is taught everywhere in the Scriptures. God, in his grace and glory, does give us many, many hours of joy and gladness and pleasure and delight, and it is right for us to give thanks. But do not abandon that when the time of pressure comes for that is what Satan wants us to do. He wants us to begin to complain and to protest to God; to get upset and angry and resentful; to stop going to church, or to stop reading the Bible. That is what Satan's whole attack in our lives is aimed at doing.
Amazingly when all this has taken place we see that Job has won. The score is now 2 - 0, in favor of Job. But Satan is not through. Remember that he obtained permission from God to assault this man in every area of his being: He not only has taken Job's children and all his possessions, but he has also taken away his health, and all the pleasure of his physical life. And Satan has also assaulted Job's soul, and made him feel abandoned by his wife. Satan now proceeds to assault the final stronghold of all: the spirit of Job, the ultimate reality of his life.
Perhaps Satan has seen an opening in Job by the reaction of Job’s wife. So now he brings in the big guns to assault the foundation of Job's faith
11 Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this adversity that had come upon him, each one came from his own place—Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. For they had made an appointment together to come and mourn with him, and to comfort him. 12 And when they raised their eyes from afar, and did not recognize him, they lifted their voices and wept; and each one tore his robe and sprinkled dust on his head toward heaven. 13 So they sat down with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his grief was very great.
Now we are set for the major argument of this book, and the major attack on the faith of Job comes not through his physical trials, but through an attack on his spiritual relationship with God himself. And it comes through the hands of so called friends. I do not know about you but I have personally experienced all that Job has gone through but not to the extent or intensity that Job went through.
We will learn more about these men as we go through the arguments that they bring forth. It is obvious that they had to come from distant places, and that a good deal of time has elapsed while Job has been suffering physically. Word had to come to his friends about Job's disaster and they had to agree together by sending messengers to one another to come together at an appointed time and visit Job. So weeks, if not months, have probably gone by while Job is subjected to this severe pressure upon his faith. And when the friends arrive, they are utterly shocked at what they see.
They can hardly believe their eyes! This monstrous, repulsive hulk of a man -- could he really be their dear old friend Job? Was this Job, sitting huddled in a heap of ashes, scraping himself with a broken piece of pottery, swollen and disfigured, utterly repulsive to look at? Could this be the man they had known and loved? They are so shocked by this that their actions strongly suggest that they think Job is on his deathbed. They held, in effect, a funeral service for him. They did what was customarily done at funerals -- they raised their voices, they mourned and wept. They tore their coats, sprinkled dust on their heads, and finally ended up sitting on the ground around Job, observing him in silence for seven days.
We will learn in our upcoming studies that while they were waiting in silence around Job, they came to the conclusion that he was suffering under the hand of God for some terrible sin he must have committed, and that it was right for God to make him suffer this way. Their hearts, therefore, were hardening against Job. They had come to comfort him, but they are confronted with the feeling that many of us have had, that there is not much they can say because in their heart of hearts, they believe that Job deserves what he is getting. So the silence probably means that they are wondering how to say this, how to begin, how to put it in terms that Job will listen to.
We all need to stop and think. Let us never forget what we have been shown at the beginning of this book: it is God who is doing this, ultimately, and he has an aim in view. And because he does not tell us at this point what it is, we, too, must suffer through this with Job. We must feel to some degree with him what he is feeling, and sense the protest, the anguish, the emptiness of his life. Nevertheless, we must remember that there is an answer, God does have a reason, and it will be made clear as the book unfolds.
I do not know whether this catches you where Job is or not. Sooner or later we all come to these times of trial and testing, for in some degree God visits them upon us. If you are going through such a time, I think this book will be of great help. But if you are not, just be thankful that God has given us this book, and be thankful that, for the moment at least, he has chosen to maintain his protection, his loving care over us.
If we can take away something personally for us today it is this. For, as we have seen, if Satan had his way, we would all perish. But God has guarded us and kept us. If he temporarily lifts his hand, we have assurances everywhere in the Word of God that it will never be more than we can handle. Job proved that. It never was more than he could stand, although he thought it was. Sometimes this is the way we feel. We think God is going too far, that he is pushing us too hard, but he never does. He is teaching us our limits. This is what the book of Job will do for us as we go through it.
