It's Job Week on the podcast. Welcome to Job Week. The Book of Job is a source of a lot of

abj questions for us and the source of a lot of answers too on all sorts of topics over the

years. We have 80 episodes now in the archive mentioning Job on every topic you can imagine. I'm just surprised how often

we return to this very important book, which is not easy to interpret. As we're finding out,

we're reading the book together in our Bible reading plan. And today we read Job 16 together.

The whole book is challenging to interpret because it's littered with errors, Pastor John.

Errors about suffering, errors about providence, and even false statements about God himself,

which is a distortion on full display for us here in our reading today in the early verses of chapter 16.

There we find a mix of things that are true and things that are

certainly false and most starkly in Job 16, verses 7 to 9. Verse 7 is sovereignly true. God brought

the suffering into Job's life by his plan and his permission. But then verse 9 seems devilishly

false. God did not bring the suffering because he hates Job.

So how do we, Pastor John, how do we parse facts from fiction as we read Job's words, his wife's words, and all of his friends trying to interpret Providence?

Well, that is the right question to ask, I think, because perhaps the most striking thing

about the structure of the book of Job is that from chapter 3 to chapter 31, you have

29 chapters of back and forth between Job and his three

so-called comforters or friends, both of them speaking a mixture of truth and falsehood.

It's simply stunning to me that the author would devote 29 out of 42 chapters to a

jumble of good and bad statements about human suffering and God's sovereignty. So the author

seems to be especially exercised that there is so much bad theology about the sovereignty of God and human suffering.

That, it seems, is why he gives 20-9 chapters to it.

Now, we can summarize the simplistic theology of the suffering and sovereignty in the mouth of the three friends with Job 4.7, they say,

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