Job 10 Summary - 5 Minute Bible Study

Job 10 Short Summary:

Job vents his emotions in chapter 10. He was confused as to why God created him if He was just going to condemn him to such a terrible fate. From Job’s small perspective, he suggested it would have been better if he had died before his mother gave birth to him.

Job 10 Bible Study

SHORT OUTLINE OF THE BOOK OF JOB

• Job 1-2 – Job is Persecuted by Satan

• Job 3-37 – Job and His Friends Discuss the Reason He is Experiencing Persecution

• Job 38-41 – God Speaks with Job and Reveals His Greatness to Him.

• Job 42 – God Restores What Job Lost

WHEN:

• The date of the writing of Job is unknown and still debated. Some believe it was written during the time of the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob) or even earlier, while others suspect it was written during the time of Judah’s Babylonian captivity (607-537 B.C.).

• I take the earlier date. The description of Job as the “greatest of all the people of the east” (1:3) and an absence of references to Israel, Jerusalem, and the Temple suggests to me that this book was written early.

KEY CHARACTERS:

• Job – A blameless and upright man who Satan persecuted in an attempt to turn his heart away from God.

WHERE:

• Job lived in the land of Uz. Most scholars surmise the land of Uz was in northern Saudi Arabia, either immediately south of the Dead Sea, I the land that would become known as Edom, or immediately east of the Dead Sea, which is today the country of Jordan.

OUTLINE:

• “WHY MAKE ME IF YOU INTEND TO DESTROY ME?” (10:1-22):

  • Job wasn’t going to hold back his words. He wanted to know why God made him only to condemn him to his current fate.

  • Job said, “Does it seem good to You to oppress, to despise the work of Your hands and favor the designs of the wicked?... Your hands fashioned and made me, and now you have destroyed me altogether” (10:3; 8).

  • Job compared God’s creation of him to a potter making a clay vessel, a cheesemaker making cheese, and a tailor making clothes.

  • Job couldn’t deny that God had taken great care in creating him and had given him many blessed days, which made it all the more confusing as to why God was allowing all these bad things to happen to him.

  • “Why did you bring me out of the womb? Would that I had died before any eye had seen me and were as though I had not been, carried from the womb to the grave” (10:18-19).

APPLICATION

• Just because your life hasn’t turned out exactly as you planned doesn’t mean it would be better if you had never been born.

• Job was acting like, sense his life was hard, the world would have been better off if he had died in the womb. As if his suffering meant that God had no good reasons to create him.

• But this was self-centered thinking. There was more to the value of Job’s life than his personal comfort. God had created Job to help other people He created. Job was an integral and important part of God’s world.

• Job had offered wisdom, counsel, strength, and comfort to those who needed it in the past (Eliphaz confirmed this in Job 4:3-4).

• Job’s contributions to God’s world were important, so it was somewhat foolish of him to suggest God should have let him die in the womb.

• You don’t know all the ways God will use your life to contribute to His creation. Don’t ever let yourself believe that you have no reason to be alive. If you exist, God has a reason for you existing, even if you can’t see it in the immediate moment.